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The most common form of print from the Victorian era is the steel engraving, it gives a fine strong line and was capable of being pressed a great many times before the plate wore down.
Steel plates took over from copper plates as the preferred method of printing around 1820, when methods were developed for cutting the plates accurately.
Steel is much harder than copper so is a lot more wearing, steel plates were made in various ways: either by electroplating a previously engraved copper plate with steel, or by actually machining the plate with very hard steel tools.
Steel engravings would almost always be published as black and white prints, which is how we sell them, as we like to leave them in the original state, but many dealers colour them, sometimes to good effect.
One of the biggest and best publishers of the Victorian era was George Virtue, who bought the rights to a great many famous paintings to eatablish his business as a publisher of fine art prints, his flagship publication was the Art Journal - a monthly journal of the arts, each edition contained a presentation plate which was usually a finely steel engraved print.
The journal was a huge success running from 1848 up untill the 1890s, a great many fantastic plates were published and Virtue would normally reissue the plates bound in other books, whenever the illustrations were suitable.
Other publishers emulated his success and consiquently there were a lot of good quality steel engravings produced in the period, mostly as book plates. Naturally the majority of these books are now lost as the plates have been taken out for the last 100 years or so as they have been more prized as pictures for the wall than as book plates.
There are a few dog prints from this era, less than we would like unfortunately as steel is such a great medium, but we do find portrait style prints such as the greyhound at the top of this page and more commonly genre type scenes with dogs such as the cottage scene above.
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