Portret van Jan Hendrik Stuffken 1843 - 1904

This is a portrait of Jan Hendrik Stuffken, made with lithography by Johan Hendrik Hoffmeister. The essence of lithography lies in the interplay between the stone, the greasy crayon, and the water. The artist draws directly onto a prepared limestone slab, using a greasy crayon or tusche. The stone is then treated with a chemical solution, making the image receptive to oil-based inks and the blank areas receptive to water. When the stone is inked, the ink adheres only to the drawn image. This is then printed onto paper. The lithographic process, developed in the late 18th century, made images far more widely accessible than ever before, creating a boom in printed material. It offered a relatively inexpensive and efficient way to reproduce images and text. The resulting image, with its soft tonality and fine details, speaks to the democratizing influence of printmaking, and it is hard to separate the medium from the wider social context.