Concerning Tobias Lang and the Art of the Englischer-blaudruck
Written by my father
An Aspiring Apprentice Printmaker
The old master enjoyed having the boy in the workshop every day for an hour or two after school. During the past year that this boy had been coming in the late afternoons to help out, another older boy had been working for a salary at the tiering box, a boy the master liked well enough, but one who spoke little German, and to the master’s disappointment, one who showed little interest in learning any of the calico printer’s skills other than that for which he was being paid—hardly a promising candidate for an apprenticeship. But to dismiss the Slovakian boy and in his stead employ the younger Tobias Lang, simply on the grounds that he liked the German boy better than the Slovakian, would be an injustice that neither the master’s conscience nor the dyer’s guild would tolerate.
The present tiering boy did his work satisfactorily, and certainly his family had good use for the small wages he earned every month. The Lang family was well to do, and besides, Tobias still had his schoolwork to attend to. With no hesitation, the master would have taken Tobias on as an apprentice had the boy only been a few years older. As things stood, he would have to bide the time and be content to just cultivate this boy’s friendship. From time to time, the boy would bring to the shop drawings that he had done of various flowers from the surrounding countryside. Could not the block maker in Késmárk use these designs when he cut new wood blocks for the Blaudruck?
“Unfortunately,” the master explained, “the block maker is a very choleric man, one who has no use at all for either presumptuous boys or untraditional patterns.” Yet he himself thought that the drawings were good; considering that they were done by the hand of a ten-year-old, they were good indeed. The old man smiled when he recognised the watermark of school paper. The schoolmaster would probably be angered if he found that some of the expensive paper he entrusted to his pupils for exercises in penmanship or in the conjugation of German verbs had been instead used for what he would have considered idle doodling.
Indigo Printing with the Master
At the weekends, when he had the chance of spending an entire day at the printworks, Tobias never tired of waiting while the old man prepared for the initial dip of the printed linen into the deep vat of indigo dye. The long lengths of linen had to be wound on a wooden rack that was suspended from a pulley in the ceiling in such a manner that no parts of the long length of cloth would come into contact with any other parts when it was lowered into the vat. (This was a task the master entrusted to no one but himself. Any misjudgement would result in lighter spots in the dyed cloth that could not be corrected.) Tobias waited with the same anticipation for the moment when the garish green colour of the freshly dyed linen changed to a magnificent indigo blue only minutes after the cloth had been raised out of the vat. With each subsequent dip in the vat, the linen became all the more saturated in colour. Tobias thought that the deep blue which the master achieved with his indigo vat just had to be the most beautiful colour in existence.
The magnificence of the indigo blue became even more evident once he had helped the master wheel the barrow of wet linen down the hill to the river where they let the length of cloth out into the current to rinse. At first, the printed patterns were barely visible as the cloth swayed from side to side in the river, but by and by, sprigs of white flowers appeared, as if by magic, glistening whiter and whiter as the river washed away the printed clay paste from the cloth. Tobias would gaze at the old man napping beside him on the pier and feel the pleasant warmth of affection within himself. The master was so very unlike all of the other craftsmen in town. These were often impatient and even cross-tempered with the boys who ran in and out of the workshops in the afternoon. And the master knew infinitely more than these others, and not only things about the Blaudruck. Tobias wished nothing more than to become apprentice to the master.
After fifty years as a printer of indigo dyed linen, the master was a keen judge of character. During these years, dozens of journeyman dyers from all over Europe had come to his little town of Szepesbéla in the Kingdom of Hungary, often staying a week or two, each with the steadfast intention of learning the secrets of the Blaudrucker. The master, being one of the foremost guardians of these secrets, could usually intuit which man would profit from his stay in Szepesbéla, and which would not. He was not about to divulge his entire store of trade secrets to any one man, even though no journeyman would ever be given the opportunity to establish himself in the town as long as the master was still in the business. As for young Tobias, however, if he did choose to become a textile printer, he would be ready for his certification as a master printer in about ten years’ time. By then, the master would be over seventy-five years old, and because he didn’t have children, he would be in a position to allow his printworks with all its inventory to pass without any reservation to his former apprentice, Tobias Lang.
Sadly, he drowned after falling into the river while rinsing a length of his Blaudruck the very year Tobias finished school and was ready for an apprenticeship. The printworks was closed down, and in order to settle the master’s outstanding debts, all goods and chattels were sold by auction to a prosperous textile printer in the town of Gölnicbánya, seventy miles to the south. Tobias made a point of attending the auction, not with the hope of buying anything, but with the intention of seeking an apprenticeship with a master dyer. Master Breuer, who had made the winning bid on the printing blocks and other paraphernalia from the recently defunct printworks in Szepesbéla, also accepted Tobias’ bid to be taken as an apprentice at Breuer’s own printworks in Gölnicbánya.
An Apprenticeship in Gölnicbánya
Gölnicbánya was not, like Szepesbéla, a quiet little town in the Carpathians, but a bustling artisan town that had been established on one of the major trade routes from Europe to the Orient, a town where East and West met and exciting new developments in the trades were a matter of course. Breuer’s dye-and printworks was, even for such a town, an unusually creative workshop. During his years with Master Breuer, Tobias not only enhanced his knowledge of the Blaudruck technique; he also gained a superb working knowledge of calico printing, which after years of arbitrary trade restrictions was becoming a very prospering occupation all over Europe. Moreover, Breuer’s printworks was the only establishment in the Kingdom of Hungary that specialised in the production of indigo printed textiles, that is to say, dark blue patterns printed directly on linen or calico, as opposed to the traditional Blaudruck, in which the resist printed pattern shows up against a dark blue background once the dye resistant printing paste has been rinsed from the cloth.
Breuer had gained knowledge of this technique years before during his time as a journeyman dyer in England. It had been a closely guarded secret at the dyeworks where Breuer was first employed. The master had refused to divulge to anyone the exact concentration of chemicals in the vats in which he developed the indigo printed linen. The vats were always prepared the night before they were needed when the master was alone in the workshop. Breuer had soon realised that the printed cloth was first dipped in a vat which contained a water solution of copperas and immediately afterwards in a separate vat which contained a slurry of freshly slaked quicklime. He would, however, need to work out the optimal concentrations for these two chemicals once he had returned to Hungary and started his own dyeworks. Having become a master dyer in his own right, Breuer was not as secretive towards his own apprentices, but he did make them promise never to produce any indigo printed cloth within the borders of Hungary as long as he was still in business.
The regulations of the dyer’s guild in Hungary stipulated for its members a five-year service of apprenticeship with a master of the trade and three subsequent years as a journeyman. Having earned his journeyman’s certificate with Master Breuer, Tobias left Hungary for southern Germany and the city of Heidelberg, eventually working his way northward to the town of Eckernförde, near the Danish border. The late spring of 1784 saw him aboard the merchant ship Margareta destined for St. Petersburg in Russia. About halfway to St. Petersburg, the ship was run aground in a sudden storm off the western coast of Gotland, and Tobias found himself stranded on an island he had never heard of. (As Tobias wrote in 1802 to Herrn Breuer, his Lehrmeister in Gölnicbánya, Hungary: “Ein Kleiner Bericht, seit dem ich von Herrn Meyer in Eckernförde anno 1784 abgereist, will ich dir überlassen. Meine Tur von Holstein war nach Stockholm und von da nach Petersburg, bin ich aber nicht weiter alls Gotland gekommen, von welches Land ich vor niemals was gehört und bin auch jetzt hier.”)
The City of Visby, Gotland
With no immediate means of continuing his journey, he was obliged to seek employment in the city of Visby. Fortunately, he had managed to save most of his belongings from the shipwreck; among these were both his library of printing blocks and his journeyman’s Wanderbuch of pattern drawings and dye recipes. Christopher Brügger, a well-to-do dyer in the city, was very much impressed when Tobias approached him in search of employment, and he proposed the establishment of a calico printworks in Visby with Tobias as journeyman printer and dyer. Herr Brügger was more businessman than practising tradesman, and thus he encouraged the young journeyman to build up the practical aspects of this enterprise according to his own judgment. All went well for four years, but Master Brügger went bankrupt in 1788 as the result of the failure of several other business ventures. He humbly requested the board of trade in Visby to make an exception of the calico printworks. This enterprise was, as he explained to the council, a much greater asset to the city itself, not to mention the country as a whole, than it could ever be to his creditors. The business was very profitable, competently run by an assiduous and gifted young man.
This appeal was ignored; the printworks was closed down; the various tools and stores were auctioned off and dispersed; and the property itself was sold in order to help settle Brügger’s debts to his creditors. Tobias found himself stranded once again. Angry and disillusioned, he decided to leave Visby, and so booked passage on a ship bound for Constantinople, but the mayor refused to issue him a passport until all of the circumstances surrounding the bankruptcy had been cleared up.
Beyond Printmaking
In this manner, Tobias became a lifelong resident of the city. The printworks was never reopened. Instead, he turned to other occupations and became in time a well-known and respected industrialist in Visby. Aside from many new business ventures, he nonetheless continued throughout his life to work and to experiment with textile dyeing and printing, keeping numerous journals, originally, perhaps, with the intention of having them published. Later in his life, this work was more geared towards helping his son, Johan Daniel, to establish himself in the city as a calico printer. Sadly, this son, having served his mandatory five-year apprenticeship with a local dyer, was blinded in a blasting accident at a nearby quarry in 1834. Tobias died two years later at the age of seventy-five. Although several of his enterprises continued to operate for a number of years after his death, his pattern sheets, printing blocks, and dyer’s journals were packed into wooden crates in the loft of his house and forgotten.
Nowadays, over a century and a half since his death, Tobias Lang is still a well-known and respected person in Visby. His two-storey house in Kopparsvik, an area just south of the city wall, was left standing by itself when his adjoining factory was torn down in 1903. Following a painstaking renovation, the house became headquarters for the island’s handicraft society in 1994. The building that housed his original calico printworks, built incorporated into the medieval city wall a mere stone’s throw from the famous thirteenth-century Powder Tower, is also still standing, although not now put to any use. Ask any native of the city about Tobias Lang and you will at the very least learn that he was a man of great reputation, that he was in some way involved in manufacturing, and that he built the tallest of Visby’s landmark windmills, the one called “Tormentor” because of six storeys with a ceiling height that doesn’t allow for a miller taller than 5’ 10”.
A Sugar Crate in the Regional Museum of Gotland
My personal acquaintance with Tobias Lang began one morning towards the end of May in 1987. I was on my way into the conservator’s workshop at the Regional Museum of Gotland with the intention of examining a medieval wood sculpture that had been brought in from one of the outlying parishes. I could see the sculpture on a table by the window, but reaching it would not be that easy. A new inventory was evidently being made of the numerous artifacts from the museum’s storerooms, and the workshop was cluttered to overflowing with wooden crates and cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes. With a clumsiness that was inexcusable in a room full of priceless antiques, I tripped over an old-time wooden sugar crate that was awkwardly positioned near the doorway. Luckily, nothing was damaged, but in the midst of my unintentional haste into the room, some wooden object, half-wrapped in tissue paper, had caught my eye. Uppermost in the sugar crate was a finely carved textile-printing block.
Forgetting my original errand for the moment, I unwrapped the block, which was one of about twenty in the crate, and I laid it next to the sculpture on the table by the window. I had learned earlier in some obscure context about this collection of woodblocks. At that time, however, I had summarily dismissed them as the work of some unschooled country craftsman and had not taken the trouble to look for them in the museum storerooms. To make amends for such an unwarranted assumption, I now took the time to carefully examine this particular woodblock.
As a long-time woodworker, I had nothing but admiration for this piece of work. Although I knew a considerable amount about block making, having taught myself the skill some years earlier when I was studying the history and technique of Japanese woodblock printing, I knew next to nothing about textile printing. I wondered how old the woodblock could be and to whom it had once belonged. How had the printer handled it? What sort of dye had he used, and how had he spread it on the block? How had he kept the block in register on the cloth as he printed his pattern, and how had he managed to print evenly from the first repeat to the last?
In an adjoining room, several people were busy sorting through old acquisition reports and photographing the related artifacts for the museum’s new database. This seemed the best place to start my research. I discovered that I was not the first person to examine the contents of the old sugar crate since it had first been delivered to the museum in 1890. The textile historian Ingegerd Henschen had examined the printing blocks in 1960 when she was at the Regional Archives in Visby researching the business files of a certain Tobias Lang, who was born in the Kingdom of Hungary in 1761, and who died in the city of Visby in 1836. She assigned most of the blocks to him, suggesting that he had brought them along on his passage from the Continent and had managed to retrieve them from the stranded ship.
Tobias’ Notes
During the next few days, I went page by page through Tobias Lang’s Wanderbuch and his later dyer’s notebooks in search of some guidance in the procedures of eighteenth-century textile dyeing and block printing. In addition to his dyer’s notebooks and his collection of pattern sheets, the very extensive Tobias Lang Archive at the Regional Museum of Gotland also contains his complete business records since these were transferred to the museum from the Regional Archives. His outgoing correspondence is preserved in the form of rough drafts. Even memorabilia from his private life, such as his children’s school notebooks and various fragments from his own literary compositions, are to be found interspersed among the business ledgers, receipts, and store records. I quickly came to know and admire this man. My real purpose in studying these records was, however, to see if I could find any of his eighteenth-century techniques of textile printing that might be replicated in the late twentieth century. On the one hand, I was reasonably sure that I could make a printing block that would work just as well as any of the blocks in the crate. (It’s doubtful that Tobias had cut his own blocks. The guild would have discouraged any calico printer who also wanted to make his own woodblocks. Textile printing was one occupation; textile blockmaking was an entirely different occupation, and one that did not fall under the jurisdiction of the dyer’s guild.) On the other hand, I was unsure as to which of the hand-block printing styles that Tobias had learned from Master Breuer of Gölnicbánya would be suitable for artisan textile printing in more modern times.
Calico Printing
The calico style of textile printing entailed block printing the cloth with a metallic salt solution, called a mordant, that had been thickened to a workable viscosity with either gum arabic or gum tragacanth, after which the printed cloth was steeped in a hot dyebath prepared from dyer’s madder (Rubia tinctorum). Various shades of madder red were obtained by printing different parts of the design with more than one type of mordant. Black was obtained by printing a thickened solution of ferrous acetate onto cloth that had previously been steeped in a mordant bath prepared from Turkish oak galls. Shades of yellow were obtained by steeping the mordant printed cloth in a dyebath prepared from weld (Reseda luteola). Blue was obtained by hand painting the printed cloth with indigo (Indigofera tinctoria) that had been reduced in a solution of orpiment (arsenic trisulphide).
Blaudruck
The indigo resist (Blaudruck) style of textile printing was produced by first block printing the cloth with a paste consisting of china clay (kaolin), gum arabic, tallow, lead sugar, copperas, and blue vitriol. After several weeks of proofing, the printed cloth was dipped a number of times in a vat prepared from powdered indigo, copperas, and quicklime. Once the paste had been thoroughly washed off, the pattern appeared in glistening white against a dark blue background.
Englisherblaudruck
The third style of eighteenth-century textile printing had been called Englischerblaudruck by Master Breuer of Gölnicbánya, who, by means of out and out industrial espionage, had misappropriated the secret recipe from the master dyer in England who had first discovered it. The direct printing of indigo pigment onto cotton or linen cloth was a simple enough mater for someone already adept at textile printing by handblock. The indigo was simply wetted out and ground into a very fine paste to which was added a thin solution of gum arabic, in much the same manner as for a mordant printing paste but without simmering the paste; indigo is not water soluble. Once printed, the cloth was dipped in the vat in the manner of the Blaudruck; however, in this case the reduction of the indigo dyestuff was accomplished by the use of two separate vats, one for the copperas solution and one for the lime slurry. The cloth was dipped in one and then the other, repeatedly, until the indigo was entirely reduced and the colour of the printed pattern had changed from a dull bluish black to a deep saturated blue.
The danger was, of course, that the copperas solution, which is the actual reducing agent for the indigo in this case, would soon begin to strip the pattern from the cloth if the solution was too concentrated or if the printed cloth was kept submerged in the vat for too long. Tobias Lang did a considerable amount of research into this problem at his printworks in Visby between the years 1784 and 1788, hoping to find the perfect recipe for developing the Englischerblaudruck. He wrote to his Lehrmeister in 1802 that he was completely satisfied with the work he had done.
Finding Lang’s Work
While I was working my way through the Tobias Lang archive, I also began a search through the museum’s collection of textiles to see if I could find anything that Tobias might have printed. Because the entire collection was documented in photographs, my search went quickly, but also seemed to end in disappointment. There was not a sign of any Blaudruck, nor even a swatch of printed calico. Almost on a whim, I decided to check the linings in the museum’s collection of eighteenth-century ladies’ jackets. The linings were not visible in the photographs, although they were mentioned in the descriptions. Only one of these was described as having a printed lining. The acquisition documents seemed to show that this particular jacket had been made for either Gustaviana Elisabet Löwenström (1764-1844) or her daughter, Carolina Lovisa (1788-1869). (Gustaviana’s husband had been the infamous Jacob Johan Ankarström, who assassinated King Gustav III of Sweden at a masquerade ball at the Royal Opera in 1792. Following Ankarström’s public flagellation and gruesome execution for regicide, the family name was by royal license changed to Löwenström. Thus it would appear that the jacket was tailored at some point in time after 1796, the year Gustaviana permanently moved to Visby from Stockholm.)
I retrieved the superbly woven silk brocade jacket from storage and carefully opened it, while leaving it on its hanger. The lining was masterfully block printed in dark indigo blue on a bleached linen ground fabric. The slight edge haloing in the pattern showed the fabric to have been printed and developed according to Master Breuer’s Englischerblaudruck technique. The pattern design was unmistakeably by Tobias Lang. Tobias must have printed the linen at his printworks in Visby on some occasion between the years 1785 and 1789. It was surely he who had supplied the lining material for the silk jacket that the tailor had in the making, probably at Gustaviana Löwenström’s insistence.
Cutting the First Woodblock
Finding what would turn out to be Tobias Lang’s only surviving textile print helped me to make up my mind about which of the three eighteenth-century block printing techniques I should attempt to resurrect. Almost at once, I began to cut a printing block to which I had transferred one of the pattern drawings in the archive that I thought Tobias had designed with the Englischerblaudruck technique specifically in mind. I first printed the pattern using a synthetic dye in order teach myself to handle the block on the tiering tray and on the printing table. It took a few weeks of practice before I was able to print evenly and with well-joined repeats. The colour, however, left much to be desired. No matter how I mixed the fibre reactive dyes, I could not get a blue that was even close to the saturated colour of the natural indigo that Tobias Lang had used for the print on the jacket lining.
I decided to follow Tobias’ recipe for the printing paste to the letter. Once the indigo was properly ground, the gum arabic paste printed just as well as the alginate paste I had prepared for the synthetic dyes. The colour of the pattern was bluish black, which, even prior to reduction, was infinitely more pleasing than anything I had been able to achieve using synthetic dyes. I opted for a modern all-in-one sodium hydrosulphite/sodium hydroxide reduction vat for my prints instead of the separate copperas and lime vats that Tobias had used. I suppose that I was extremely lucky in getting the chemical concentrations and the immersion time right from the very first print I reduced. After a few minutes out of the vat, my first indigo print had oxidised to a deep, saturated blue with an even more pronounced edge haloing than on the lining of Gustaviana’s silk jacket. I was inescapably hooked on the art of the Englischerblaudruck. I still am.
