Immediately following the Industrial Revolution, the marketing of products and entertainment was fueled by a new and exciting medium: the perfection of the color lithographic process. At the same time, large adverstising posters were being printed in a smaller, more manageable format using the same techniques. From the moment miniature posters were first created in 1886, they were an extremely public and highly collected art form.

Why invest in antique lithographs?

Although today the word lithograph is used- perhaps incorrectly- for a number of contemporary applications, historically a lithograph was a highly prized and collectable piece of art created by means of a hands-on process that required a great many steps:

1. A full color “maquette”, or mock up, of an
artwork is created.
2. The image is hand-drawn backwards in grease crayon, one color at a time, each on a separate limestone surface.
3. Each stone is washed with acid; the grease resists the acid, and leaves an impressible area.

4. The stones are pressed to paper in succession, making a multicolored image.
This labor-intensive but rewarding process was effectively replaced by the mechanical process of offset printing in the 1930s. A true antique lithograph is instantly recognizable by its use of rich, dense lead inks creating continuous areas of color, unlike contemporary offset printing, which uses a series of colored dots to make up an image.

With every year, public awareness of the quality of these antique prints increases, resulting in a steady decrease of available artworks. There are many excellent values still available in antique lithography today.