Like many successful artists, JMW Turner was alive to the importance of commercial reproductions in promoting his work. Only a few people would visit exhibitions, or see private collections in which original paintings and watercolours could be seen: many more benefited from published images in books, magazines or sets of prints. In the late 18th century and throughout his lifetime, London was full of shops selling images, and was home to many printmakers and print publishers, as well as a large potential market in the crowds that thronged the streets of the capital. Turner, born in London in 1775, already at the age of 16 perceived all this and took steps to take advantage of the opportunities outside his door.

His chosen subject was topography: views of places having historical or antiquarian interest, scenes or buildings that people wanted images of. He quickly embarked on a regular schedule of tours that took him to such places, and devoted much time to making drawings in his sketchbooks that he could take home and work up into saleable or exhibitable pictures. This was a habit that he maintained all his life. In a sketchbook he was using on a tour to Bristol and Bath in 1798, he began to select views that might become a series of subjects he could reproduce as etchings under the title ‘Twelve Views on the River Avon’. He wrote the titles on his first sketches in neat copper-plate, and elsewhere made notes about the process of etching. Nothing came of these plans, though equally interestingly one of the selected subjects ended up as his first exhibited oil painting, which shows him thinking about topography in a far from conventional way. All these schemes show his brain as a ferment of ideas about exploiting his talent.

And his long career was as much a story of printmaking as of painting and watercolour. He collaborated with experienced engravers to ensure that many of the works he exhibited at the Royal Academy were seen more widely. As a result, the majority of prints after his work are highly professional commercial engravings. But he cast his net widely over the spectrum of reproductive media then available. He lived in an age of technological advance that affected the visual arts like so much else: already in the mid-eighteenth century, the technique of etching, involving the action of acid on lines drawn onto the wax coating of a metal plate, had been enlarged by the application of granulated resin to render tone as well as outline. This was aquatint, developed in the 1760s, and particularly apt for the replication of wash drawings and watercolours, which became a popular medium in the decades of the Romantic movement. A quite different technique, lithography, a process of drawing on stone, was invented by an obscure German playwright, Alois Senefelder (1771-1834) in 1798 and emerged as a dominant medium in the ensuing century. At first it was particularly popular in France, and was employed by Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-28; from Nottingham, but based for his short life in Paris) to reproduce his virtuoso topographical drawings. Turner used lithography rarely, but the animal painter James Ward (1769-1859) issued an impressive series of 14 Celebrated Horses as lithographs for the king, George IV, in the 1820s.

Mezzotint, a medium known, like etching, since the 17th century, and especially suited to reproducing the tonal density of oil painting, took on a new lease of life in the early 19th century, and Turner used it extensively to reproduce watercolour views, occasionally as large plates but more usually for modest-sized subjects. The best known of these are the Liber Studiorum, a series of mezzotints that form a survey of his output, and which became a universally relied-on source of landscape ideas for the rest of the century.  These prints after his work in different media were made by a number of artists, but in the 1820s he paid his own personal tribute to mezzotint by engraving a series of highly atmospheric plates in the medium himself: the so-called ‘Little Liber’, which were never published and are little known although they are among the outstanding achievements of Romantic printmaking. More famous are the equally personal and more extraordinary images of the apocalyptic artist John Martin (1789-1854), who produced teeming images of catastrophe and judgement in mezzotint during the first half of the century.

As the decades of Romanticism advanced in the first half of the 19th century, engraving, etching and mezzotint developed together to express highly sophisticated ideas on a large scale, but also in small formats. Turner’s output ranged over both extremes: he was a prolific illustrator of books, and his prolific output as a painter in oils and watercolour was equalled by his designs for compositions on a very small scale accompanying texts by Milton, Scott, Byron and others, but nearly always expressing the most expansive landscape ideas.

A prime example of his achievement in this format is William Miller’s small plate, 13.5 x 9 cm. (5 3/8 x 3 ½ inches), after Turner’s view of ‘Melrose’ for Scott’s Poetical Works, the technically intricate translation into engraving of a luminous 1834 watercolour view over the Tweed valley with the ruined abbey and the town itself, in which Turner includes, with his topographer’s fidelity to truth, in the far distance the recently-erected iron suspension footbridge over a narrow tributary of the Tweed at Gattonside. In the foreground Turner, Scott and their publisher are picnicking congenially in front of the spectacular panorama, while the carter and his horses wait patiently for the gentlemen to finish enjoying themselves.

At the other end of the scale we might cite a very large mixed-media engraving, done for the Art Union of Glasgow in 1857 by W.H. Simmons after a theatrical scene of The Sacrifice of Noah after the Deluge by the Irish artist Daniel Maclise (1806-70). The original is a large oil-painting now in Leeds City Art Gallery which Maclise had exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1847. It exemplified his very modern, crisp and defined way of painting, which was inspired by the self-consciously medievalising style of the German Nazarenes, precursors of the Pre-raphaelites who were to burst on the London scene at the very end of the 1840s. Simmons’s engraving measures 66 x 84.5 cm. (26 x 33 1/4 in.) and was intended, like its original, to be framed and hung on the wall.

Noah’s Sacrifice is itself a virtuoso performance. Maclise unashamedly deploys his masterly draughtsmanship and many sophisticated pictorial tricks to impress viewers. There is a heroic group of muscular young men, Noah’s sons Shem, Ham and Japhet, on one side of the patriarch’s altar, to which their wives make a pious counter-balance on the other side of a beautifully painted still-life of dead animals, with a fine silver dish and expensive-looking vase or ewer (just what one would include among the emergency kit required to survive a forty-day deluge). The ladies are staring up in wonder at the animals as they stream out of the ark, and at a rainbow that arches over them. It’s on record that a portion of the rainbow was painted by Turner, who was known for offering advice and practical assistance during Varnishing Day (when works were finished for the Summer Exhibition) and made alterations that the artist was grateful for. He faux-diffidently gave Maclise advice on the colouring of one of the sacrificial sheep, too. The encounter symbolised in two representative personalities the shift from the eighteenth-century grandeur of the natural ‘sublime’ to the more ‘bourgeois’ realism of Victoria’s reign.

At the very end of Turner’s life there occurred a last, wonderful — if labour-intensive — innovation: chromolithography, which proved the culminating sophistication of reproductive printmaking. Some among the earliest examples were published by Joseph Hogarth, a prominent printmaker and dealer who owned Turner’s first exhibited oil painting, The Rising Squall – Hot Wells, from St Vincent’s Rock, Bristol (which has reappeared this winter for sale at Sotheby’s). Hogarth issued Turner’s Woodcock Shooting and Grouse Shooting as chromolithographs in 1852, the year after the artist’s death. In 1852 as well, another leading firm, William Day and Son, reproduced a sumptuous plate of one of the last of Turner’s grand reflections on modern technology: Rockets and Blue Lights, a painting of 1840 (the original now alas ruined by over-enthusiastic restoration, so we can be especially grateful for this high-quality record of it). His large watercolour of Whiting Fishing off Margate appeared as a chromolithograph in 1858, and several others followed it then or shortly after.

A number of different printmaking techniques, but primarily chromolithography, were used in a typically high-minded project of the mid-century. The Arundel Society was promoted by Turner’s great champion John Ruskin, among others: named after the great seventeenth-century connoisseur and collector of paintings and Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel, it was a scheme to make high-quality reproductions of the Renaissance Masters of Italy, Germany and the Low Countries available to everybody at modest cost. The Society was instituted in 1849, publishing uncoloured engraved outlines, but soon progressed to chromolithographs, which facilitated very beautiful coloured reproductions of the Old Masters. These appeared regularly during the 1860s and ’70s, and into the ’80s.

The ambition of the Arundel Society knew no bounds. Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s huge Ghent Altarpiece was issued as a series of plates that could be purchased individually, or altogether in an elegant ebonised and gilt frame, the wings foldable so that either the front or the back panels could be looked at. The two top outer panels, which depicted Adam and Eve before the Fall, were optional, bearing in mind where the images might be seen, and could be replaced by chaste decorative designs. Another subject of this date, the early 1880s, is a perspective view of the Piccolomini Library in Siena, ingeniously drawn to make visible every panel of the elaborate sequence of Pinturicchio’s murals.

These plates were produced by an incredibly elaborate process: watercolour replicas of the subjects were first of all made by artists based in many different places; their drawings were sent to France to be lithographed using several colour blocks, which were assembled and distributed in England. Large-scale subjects could be bought complete or as individual panels, and were acquired by schools and church halls, and can still sometimes be seen in their original settings, testament to the praiseworthy aims of the Victorians, and to the technical skill of the printmakers. Because they were issued regularly over Victoria’s reign, Arundel Society prints reflect the steadily advancing technology of the time, and the latest to be issued appeared as photographs. These, though, are not as beautiful, or as effective, as the chromolithographs, which are accurate as copies of the images and vivid in colour.

Although very versatile and patently accurate, photography could not compete with the more traditional method when it came to the beauty of the result. But the new technology changed the parameters of the subject, and the age of the engraved illustration came abruptly to an end.