Head of a Woman Looking Up

A number of printmakers, beginning in the 1760s, developed the "chalk manner" (also called "crayon manner") technique for rendering imitations of pastel or chalk lines, most often used to create facsimiles of drawings. Chalk-manner prints were made in as many as three colors-black, red, and white-from one or more copper plates worked either in etching or engraving, or in a combination of the two. Special toothed tools such as roulettes were used to create dotted patterns on the plate that suggest the grainy appearance of chalk lines on paper. Demarteau was a master of the chalk-manner technique. Le Maraudeur, after a drawing by Boucher is nearly an exact replica, although the image appears in reverse. Head of a Woman Looking Up also reproduces a Boucher drawing (the location of the drawing is now unknown)-a study of the head of Aurora for the painting The Rising Sun. Demarteau often executed his prints on the same scale as the drawings he was copying, and also mixed printer's inks to closely match the colored chalks of the original.