Under the ægis of Ryland and Bartolozzi, however, and with the inspiration of Angelica Kauffman’s “harmonious but shackled fancy,” as a contemporary critic put it, for its initial impetus, stipple was developed as a separate and distinctive branch of the engraver’s art. Its popularity was now to be further enhanced by the gentle and persuasive aid of colour. Ryland had seen many specimens of colour-printing in Paris, when he was with François and with Boucher; he now bethought him that, just as the public fancy had been captured by red-chalk imitations, so might it be enchanted by engraved representations of water-colour drawings actually printed in colours. Angelica Kauffman and Bartolozzi eagerly encouraged the idea, and the two engravers, after many experiments, determined the best process of colouring and printing from the plates. Apparently they rejected the multi-plate method tried six years previously by that interesting artist Captain William Baillie; and Ryland’s earliest colour-prints were partially tinted only with red and blue. Mrs. Frankau tells us, on the authority of a tradition handed down in his old age from James Minasi, one of Bartolozzi’s most trusted pupils, that an Alsatian named Seigneuer was responsible for all the earlier colour-printed impressions of Ryland’s and Bartolozzi’s stipples after Angelica Kauffman and Cipriani, that then he set up on his own account as a colour-printer, much recommended by Bartolozzi, and largely employed by the publishers, and that his printing may be traced, though unsigned, by a transparency of tone due to the use of a certain vitreous white which he imported in a dry state from Paris. Minasi must, of course, have been a perfect mine of Bartolozzi traditions, but when my father in his boyhood knew him and his musical son, the distinguished engraver would talk of nothing but music, for in 1829, with steel plates superseding the copper, and lithography triumphant, there seemed no prospect that the coloured stipples, already some time out of fashion, would eighty years later be inspiring curiosity as to how they were done. One sees, of course, many feeble colour-prints of the period, which of old the undiscriminating public accepted as readily as to-day they buy, for “old prints,” modern cheap foreign reproductions which would disgrace a sixpenny “summer number.” On the other hand, the really fine examples of the old-time colour-printing, combined with brilliant engraving--and, of course, only fine things are the true collector’s desiderata, irrespective of margins and “state” letterings, and other foolish fads--are certainly works of art, though a very delicate art of limited compass.