À la poupée

[11] The technique varied somewhat; an account based on a 19th-century Parisian practice said a fairly light "ground tint, usually brown black or grey" was applied first, all over except for flesh areas, giving a "slight tone" which "dominated the picture".

[12] But the leading early practitioner Johannes Teyler for one did not do this, inking purely linear plates in different colours, risking that, according to Antony Griffiths, the results "look very odd".

[13] Later printmakers generally used à la poupée inking with techniques that gave tone rather than just line, such as stipple engraving, mezzotint and aquatint.

[14] The earliest known example of the technique is an impression of a religious engraving of about 1525 by Agostino Veneziano, where the Virgin and Child are printed in red, and the surrounding saints and background in blue.

The earliest title page to use this was the Architectura of Wendel Dietterlin, with various Nuremberg editions from 1593 to 1598; this was a heavily-illustrated and very influential book on architectural ornament.

[22] In England, Elisha Kirkall was an early user, in mezzotints of the 1720s, and Robert Laurie, an engraver of maps and other subjects later in the century, extended the number of colours that were used, helping to make the technique fashionable again.

[24] Redouté had the many artists working from his watercolours print them with inking à la poupée and then hand-colour details where necessary.

[25] As other, cheaper, methods of colour printing developed in the mid-19th century, the usage of à la poupée declined.

But at the end of the century, a set of ten prints by Mary Cassatt was an early example of the technique being applied individually by a significant artist, rather than a printshop worker following a painted model.