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“*To find out the prices of these lithographs, contact us”

In 1771, the uneventful death of his father forced him to leave his studies to support his mother and eight siblings. Driven by the desperation for any kind of job, he became an actor and soon enough, wrote what was to become one of his era’s most successful plays, Connoisseur of Girls.

Like many artists during his time, he struggled with his finances and had slowly fallen into debt. Upon the completion of his play, Mathilde von Altenstein, the level of his debt had escalated that he was unable to afford any means to publish it. This financial conundrum pushed his resourcefulness to the brim. Senefelder experimented with a novel etching technique using a greasy, acid resistant ink as a resist on a smooth fine-grained stone of Solnhofen limestone. He then discovered that this could be extended to allow printing from the flat surface of the stone alone, the first planographic process in printing.

He joined with the André family of music publishers and gradually brought his technique into a workable form, perfecting both the chemical processes and the special form of printing press required for using the stones. He called it "stone printing" or "chemical printing", but the French name "lithography" became more widely adopted.

He secured patent rights across Europe and publicized his findings in 1818 in Vollstandiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerei which was translated in 1819 into French and English. A Complete Course of Lithography combined Senefelder's history of his own invention with a practical guide to lithography, and remained in print into the early 20th century.

Senefelder was also able to exploit the potential of lithography as a medium for art. Unlike previous printmaking technique such as engraving which required advanced craft skills, lithography allowed the artist to draw directly onto the plate with familiar pens. As early as 1803 André published in London a portfolio of artists lithographs, entitled Specimens of Polyautography.

In 1837, lithography had been further developed to allow full color printing from multiple plates, and chromolithography was the most important technique in color printing until the introduction of process color.



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