About Karel Klic.
Background to the Project
This subject is the starting point for a programme of innovative arts and heritage because, surprising though it may seem, Lancaster in the1890s, together with Vienna some years earlier, was a key site in a crucial moment in the evolution of art-work reproduction which bridged the gulf between Rembrandt and the selfie.
The ingenious Czech (Bohemia as it was at the time) artist and inventor linked Vienna and Lancaster and from a Lancaster printing works first made fine art copies available to the masses through a photo-mechanical process of his own invention was Karel Klic.
His Lancashire-invented intaglio rotagravure - a photo-mechanical process for accurate copying and multi-copying -revolutionised printing. Working with the industrialists, Storey Bros & Co of Lancaster, his invention highlights how creativity, business and commerce can make remarkable things happen!
Karel Klic, also by experimenting with the use of pin-hole perforations in tissue as a stage in the reproduction of paintings, represents a forerunner, in a sense, of today's pixels.
1892 saw the Storey Bros set up and put in motion their first rotary photogravure machine proper for printing images on baize, oil-or leather cloth, thus opening the way for a media significant venture, the rapid and eventually cheap mechanical reproduction of works of art on paper. This first setting up of a rotagravure machine at Lancaster's White Cross Mill and, a few years later, of the Rembrandt presses in Queens Mill, Aldcliffe Road, which set in train the phenomenon proper of the modern mass reproducibility of the work of art.
The first turning of the Rembrandt rotary press at Storey's Queens Mill in Lancaster marked a moment in media history. This was the beginning of the broadcast paper picture, in perfect facsimile, rolling off a press in whatever numbers were needed at a relatively cheap price. The copying machine had come into being. Art, reproduced art, in multi-copies, was at last finally available.
The process spread to the USA by early 1900 as a former Storey photographer, Ernest Bradshaw, introduced rotagravure there.
In the first decade of the 20 th century average production at Rembrandt was some 5,000 prints a day, though after 1910, the introduction of three sheet-fed Foster presses allowed for 1,000 impressions an hour.
The picture postcard, which became universal in the Edwardian era, owed its very existence to rotary photogravure.
By 1910, the ordinary man and woman could now buy, keep and look at a full-clour copied masterpiece, reproduced in the finest detail in their own home.
2026 marks 100 years since Karel Klic died and this online gallery, along with an exhibition in The Storey Gallery in Lancaster and Blackburn Museum, will celebrate his remarkable life and inventiveness.
