The Victorian era was the period of Queen Victorias reign from 20 June 1837 until her death, 22 January 1901. It was a l period of peace, prosperity, refned sensibilities and national self-conf- dence for Britain. The era was preceded by the Georgian period and followed by the Edwardian period. The later half of the Victorian age roughly coincided with the frst portion of the Belle poque era of continental Europe and the Gilded Age of the United States. The Industrial Revolution (1700-1900) The Victorian period was also the period of the Industrial revolution. This revolution included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production pro- cesses, the increasing use of steam power, and the development of machine tools. It also included the change from wood and other bio-fuels to coal. Energy was a major impetus for this conversion from an agricultural society to an industrial one. James Watt perfected the steam engine in 1775. The introduction of steam powered machinery opened the door to dramatic increases in production, and in the manufacture of more machines. Advances in agricultural techniques and practices resulting in an increased supply of food and raw materials. The building of roads, canals, and eventually railways enabled expanded trade. Many of these conditions were so closely interrelated that increased activity in one spurred an in- crease in activity in another. Along with technological breakthroughs, the Industrial Revolution brought crime, urban poverty, and the rise of a self-indulgent nouveau riche (newly rich) class. Wealth became a motivating cultural force. As the desire for unlimited comfort spread from the wealthy to the new middle class, a taste for ornamentation and ostentation became the dominant style. Extravagant embellishment was applied to architecture, furniture, clothing, and appeared as elab- orate borders and lettering in graphic design. Sentimentality, nostalgia, and idealized beauty were expressed through printed images of young women, fowers, children, and puppies and kittens. The invention of Lithography Lithographic printing was developed in Germany in 1796 by Alois Senefelder, who searched for a faster/better way to duplicate sheet music. Lithography is a printing technique that allows multiple reproductions of an image drawn with greasy crayon on a certain type of limestone. When the nat- urally absorbant stone is wetted before printing, the printing ink will be retained in areas containing grease and repelled in all other areas. The characteristic of this printing technique lies in the fact that the image area and the non-image area react diferently to the presence of ink. Lithography joined the older techniques of relief and intaglio printing and greatly expanded the range of what could be printed. The frst World Expo In 1851 the best-known frst World Expo was held in The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, under the title Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. The Great Exhibition, as it is often called, was an idea of Prince Albert, Queen Victorias husband, and is usually considered as the frst international exhibition of manufactured products. It infuenced the development of several aspects of society, including art-and-design education, international trade and relations, and tourism. Chromolithography One of the technologies exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851 was the new method of color printing: chromolithography. Although lithography had become widespread, it was initially a single-color printing method. Early experiments with color lithography were perfected in 1837 when a French printer patented a process named chromolithography. After analyzing the colors contained within the original subject, the printer separated them into a series of printing plates and printed these component colors one by one. Many images required fve, ten, twenty, or even more colors. Colored inks applied to these stones came together in perfect registration, recreating hundreds or thousands of glowing duplicates of the original. The lithography frm, rather than the individual artists or craftsmen was credited on chro- molithographs, and the names of many of those artists are lost to history. The arrival of color printing had vast social and economic ramifcations. Lithography set type and layout free. Fist steam powerd press In 1812 Koenig invents, the frst high-speed printing press, which he built together with watchmaker Andreas Friedrich Bauer. Still today Koenig & Bauer AG (KBA) (FWB: SKB) makes printing presses based in Wrzburg. It was founded by Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer in Wrzburg in 1817, making it the oldest printing press manufacturer in the world. 95% of the banknotes used in the world are printed on printers made by a division of KBA. This lead to advertising graphics and Magazines Admirers of fne typography were appalled that the design was done on the artists drawing board without training in printing and type traditions, designers could invent any letterform that suited their fancy. Closely bound to the growth of magazines was the development of advertising agencies. The frst true ad agency opened in 1841 in Philadelphia. The surpluses of goods created by the Industri- al Revolution led to increased competition in the marketplace, as sellers sought to educate buyers to the virtues of products and services. To this end, advancements in the simultaneous printing of text and image fostered the new medium called advertising. The New Monthly Magazine Punch opened the era of the magazine when they began publication It was a British weekly magazine of humour and satire Established in 1841 by Henry Mayhew and engraver Ebenezer Landells Historically, it was most infuential cause it helped to coin the term cartoon in its modern sense as a humorous illustration. The rising tide of literacy, plunging production costs, and the growth of advertising revenues pushed the number of newspapers and magazines published in the US from 800 to 5,000 between 1830 and 1860. Victorian Typography Victorian commercial printed matter was characterized by the eras pervasive ornamentation and careless craftsmanship. If a compositor lacked a lower-case g, for example, he would not hesitate to use an upside-down b in its place. Sometimes however, a merchants demand for distinctive announcements did result in truly original display faces, composed of odd, and even ingenious woodblock letters. Designers of new display faces distorted the Bodoni and Dido types, making them larger and black- er. These type designs, called Fat Face, are now recognized as quintessentially Victorian. Wood engravers followed the taste for ornate elaboration and applied shadows, outlines, and embellishments to letterforms. The Egyptian faces joined the Fat Faces as one of the most original typographic forms of the century. The distinctive Victorian style of layout extreme variations of type size and weight crammed within the page format was an invention of expedience, allowing the printer to utilize every inch of precious space. Chromolithography with its hand-drawn lettering, was a major source of inspiration and competition for type foundries and letterpress printers. Mergenthaler invents the Linotype machine Setting type by hand and then redistributing it into the job case remained a slow and costly pro- cess. By the middle of the nineteenth century, presses could produce twenty- fve thousand copies per hour, but each letter in every word in every book, newspaper, and magazine had to be set by hand. Dozens of experimenters worked to perfect a machine to compose type, and the frst patent for a composing machine was registered in 1825. By the time Ottmar Mergenthaler perfected his Linotype machine in 1886, about three hundred automatic typesetting machines had been invented that tried various methods. Mergenthalers breakthrough involved the use of small brass matrixes. Each time the operator pressed a key on a keyboard, a matrix for that character was released from a tube, it slid down a chute and was auto- matically lined up with the other characters in that line. Molten lead was poured into the line of matrixes to cast a line of type. This technology facilitated the explosion in the amount of printed material. Photography, a new tool for communication Photography and graphic communications have been closely linked beginning with the frst exper- iments to capture an image of nature with a camera. The Frenchman who frst produced a photo- graphic image (1826 Joseph Niepce) was a lithographic printer. He began his research into photography by seeking an automatic means of transferring drawings onto printing plates. In partnership, with Nipce, Louis Daguerre refned the early photographic process. In 1839 Daguerre announced that he had invented a process called the Daguerreotype. The Daguerreotype was very popular during the Victorian age and created a demand that added to the push for the development of photography. Throughout the 1800s, experiments in photographic technology continued to improve until towards the end of the century it fnally became possible to merge photographic processes with printing. In 1880, the New York Daily Graphic printed the frst reproduction of a photograph ( building of Steinway Hall on East 14th Street in Manhattan ) with a full tonal range in a newspaper. The screen broke the image into a series of minute dots whose varying sizes created tonal values from pure white paper to solid black ink. Victorian Style and Architecture The Victorian years, which lasted for most of the 19th century, divides into several periods. The period is actually a revival of medieval styles, neo classism, neo renaissance, neo gothic and arts and crafts or in all aspects of architecture and design. Maiking it rich in ornamentation and illustration. Infuences of Victorian style today Brands like Desigual and Flow magazine get their inspiration from the Victorian era Victorian Period - Algemeen, afbeeldingen en uitleg uit de les / James Whistler? / Charles Barry? / Walter Sickert? / Frank Holl? / Charles Eastlake? / Augustus Pugin?