In the "three-colour-zinco" process of reproduction only three printings are required, each colour with all its delicate gradations of shade being fully provided for by a single engraved block. When machines of great precision have been finally perfected for admitting of the successive blocks being printed from on paper run from the reel without any handling, a revolution will be brought about not only in artistic printing, but even in the conditions of studio work upon which the artist depends for success.
First, the pictorial notes of the year will be brought out in colour; and as competition for the right of reproduction increases, the artists who have painted the most suitable and most popular pictures will find that they can get more remuneration for copyright than they can for the pictures themselves. This has already been the case in regard to a very limited number of pictures; but the exception of the past will be the rule of the future, at least as regards those pictures which possess any special merits at all.
More thought will therefore be required as the motive or basis of each subject; and historical pictures will come more into favour, the affected simplicity and mental emptiness of the _plein air_ school being discarded in favour of a style which shall speak more directly to the people, and stir more deeply both their mental and their emotional natures.
The artist and the printer must then confer. They can no longer afford to work in the future with such disregard of each other's ideas and methods as they have done in the past. It was at one time the custom among painters almost to despise the "black-and-white man" who drew for the Press in any shape or form; but that piece of affectation has nearly been destroyed by the general ridicule with which it is now received, and by the knowledge that there are already, at the end of the nineteenth century, just as many men of talent working by methods suitable for reproduction, as there are painters who confine their attention to palette, canvas and brush.
The printer will now advance a step further, and will invoke the services of the painter himself, even prescribing certain methods by which the Press may be enabled to reproduce the work of the artist more faithfully than would otherwise be possible.