Copy That - The Revolution in Photomechanical Printing

The ingenious Czech (Bohemia as it was at the time) artist and inventor linked Vienna and Lancaster and from a Lancaster printing works first made fine art copies available to the masses through a photo-mechanical process of his own invention was Karel Klic.

This now little-known artist and inventor was the first person to mechanise and democratise the means of fine art reproduction. His Lancashire-invented intaglio rotogravure – a photo-mechanical process for accurate copying and multi-copying -revolutionised the printing of pictures in the press, in books and for home decoration.

Intaglio rotogravure was devised with the encouragement of the Storey Bros & Co of Lancaster.

Karel Klic, also by experimenting with the use of pin-hole perforations in tissue as a stage in the reproduction of paintings, represents a forerunner, in a sense, of today’s pixels.

1892 saw the Storey Bros set up and put in motion their first rotary photogravure machine proper for printing images on baize, oil-or leather cloth, thus opening the way for a media significant venture, the rapid and eventually cheap mechanical reproduction of works of art on paper. This first setting up of a rotogravure machine at Lancaster’s White Cross Mill and, a few years later, of the Rembrandt presses in Queens Mill, Aldcliffe Road, which set in train the phenomenon proper of the modern mass reproducibility of the work of art.

The first turning of the Rembrandt rotary press at Storey’s Queens Mill in Lancaster marked a moment in media history. This was the beginning of the broadcast paper picture, in perfect facsimile, rolling off a press in whatever numbers were needed at a relatively cheap price. The copying machine had come into being. Art, reproduced art, in multi-copies, was at last finally available. It was the dawn of the democratization of the aesthetic sense and the aesthetic product.

The process spread to the USA by early 1900 as a former Storey photographer, Ernest Bradshaw, introduced rotogravure there.

In the first decade of the 20th century average production at Rembrandt was some 5,000 prints a day, though after 1910, the introduction of three sheet-fed Foster presses allowed for 1,000 impressions an hour.

The picture postcard, which became universal in the Edwardian era, owed its very existence to rotary photogravure.

By 1910, the ordinary man and woman could now buy, keep and look at a full-colour copied masterpiece, reproduced in the finest detail in their own home.

Art, craftsmanship, chemical experimentation and technological nous combined to disseminate works of art.

Klic’s claim to fame is that he was as gifted at producing his own original portraits and landscapes, in touch with the ‘aura’ of tradition, as he ultimately was at making modernity by devising how to photo-mechanically reproduce those of others in all their subtle detail – and being the first to do so – in Lancaster.

2026 marks 100 years since Karel Klic died and our exhibition in The Gallery, at the highly appropriate Storey, will celebrate his remarkable life and inventiveness. The exhibition, which will reveal rare and distinctive artefacts about Klic’s life’s work, gathered from across Europe and the USA, plus contemporary installations and artworks created by artists throughout 2026.

Our programme is indebted to research and guidance from Dr David Steel, a retired Lancaster academic, author of the book Karel Klic, Lancaster and the Democratisation of Art. We are also grateful for all the expert help and consultation we have received from Roger Farnham and Harry Magee, authors of Blueprint: Photography and Engineering, from the Glasgow Print Studio.