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| Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione Creation of Adam ca. 1642 monotype Art Institute of Chicago |
"Considered one of the most original and innovative Italian artists of the Baroque period, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione literally separated light from darkness, creating form out of chaos in this work, his earliest known monotype. In a perfect match of medium and message, Castiglione, the Genoese artist credited with inventing the technique, used this new method to portray the central act of Genesis: the creation of man. He produced this electrifying image by subtracting the design from the inked surface of a copperplate with a blunt instrument, such as a stick or paintbrush handle, and then printing directly on a sheet of paper. Broad, angular strokes of white depict God emerging from a cloud, while thin, fluid lines extract the languid body of Adam from velvety blackness. Castiglione's monotypes employ both this dark-ground technique, which naturally lends itself to dramatic and mysterious imagery, and the light-ground manner, in which the design is drawn in ink directly on a clean plate. Both processes yield only one fine impression. It was not until the nineteenth century that such versatile artists as Edgar Degas explored the monotype's full potential."
– curator's notes from the Art Institute of Chicago
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| Edgar Degas Girl putting on Stockings ca. 1876-77 monotype Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Edgar Degas Ballet at the Paris Opéra 1877 pastel over monotype Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Edgar Degas Café Concert at Les Ambassadeurs 1876 pastel over monotype Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon |
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| Edgar Degas Music Hall Singer 1875-77 pastel and gouache over monotype private collection |
"Equally inventive was Degas's attitude to printmaking in the mid-1870s when he began to put particular emphasis on monotypes. The monotype, which is created in two ways, was for him a form of drawing. The 'light-field' manner was produced by making a free-hand design in printer's ink directly onto a blank plate. The 'dark-field' type was produced by inking the whole plate first and then wiping parts of it clean or partially clean in accordance with the selected design. The point about monotypes, however, is that the number of impressions was severely limited and in most cases to a single impression, but occasionally two, with the second impression being much fainter. Degas decided to heighten the impressions with pastel or gouache after he pulled them so that the monotype itself served as a dark background or priming for the final image."
– Christopher Lloyd, Edgar Degas: Drawings and Pastels (Getty Museum, 2014)
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| Edgar Degas L'étoile ca. 1876-78 pastel over monotype Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Edgar Degas Singers on the Stage ca. 1877-79 pastel over monotype Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Edgar Degas Heads of a Woman and a Man ca. 1877-80 monotype British Museum |
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| Edgar Degas Le Sommeil ca. 1883-85 monotype British Museum |
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| Edgar Degas Landscape with House, Figures and Fountain ca. 1878 monotype British Museum |
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| Edgar Degas Landscape with Smokestacks ca. 1890 pastel over monotype Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Edgar Degas Landscape with Path ca. 1890 pastel over monotype Morgan Library, New York |
"Degas was in higher spirits when he travelled with the sculptor Paul-Albert Bartholomé in 1890 to visit their friend the artist Georges Jeanniot in Burgundy. The journey was undertaken in a tilbury (a two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage) and involved journeying south-eastwards from Paris following the river Seine to the village of Diénay, twenty miles north of Dijon. Letters written by Degas to friends show that he treated the trip as a 'progress' through the French countryside with the gastronomic delights at first perhaps of a greater significance than the visual experiences. The result was not only an unexpected breakthrough in Degas's printmaking techniques but also a whole new development in his art. Over thirty colour monotypes, some heightened with pastel, record the artist's impressions of this journey into the hinterland of France."
– Christopher Lloyd, Edgar Degas: Drawings and Pastels (Getty Museum, 2014)
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| Edgar Degas Le Cap Hornu près Saint Valéry-sur-Somme ca. 1890-93 color monotype British Museum |
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| Edgar Degas Lake in the Pyrenees ca. 1890-93 color monotype British Museum |