News Archives

Six Hundred Years of Botanical Illustration

Course Length: 26 hours
Course Week: 21–25 July 2025
Format: in person, Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Upperville, VA
Tuition: $1,185
Housing & food: $950*

This course surveys botanical illustration from the late medieval period to modern times, exploiting the outstanding collection of illustrated books and related drawings held in the Oak Spring Garden Library. Taking a broadly chronological approach, the development of botanical illustration is traced from medieval manuscript and early printed herbals, through florilegia and scientific plant illustration in the seventeenth century, […]

Identifying and Understanding Twentieth-Century Duplicating Technologies

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 6–11 July 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

This course will examine the history and identification of twentieth-century duplicating processes. Students will learn how these technologies operated, and, from that understanding, learn the capabilities and characteristics of each in order to effectively identify the process used on a given document or text.

We will cover the nineteenth-century origins of duplication, common duplicating processes like spirit, mimeography, xerography, and offset—as well as more unusual methods like verifax, […]

The Photographic Book since 1843

“The course gave me a different perspective on early photography and the development of the photobook.” — 2017 student

This course will explore the evolution of the photographically-illustrated book from the first commercially available example (William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature) to the present day. We will focus on the technical developments in the production of photographically-illustrated books, covering both photographic processes themselves and—in greater depth—the developments in photomechanical printing that have driven the historical expansion of the field. Students will look at key examples, exploring the books themselves and their surviving archival evidence for the technical, […]

Japanese Prints and Illustrated Books in Context

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 1–6 June 2025
Format: in person, University of Pennsylvania Libraries in Philadelphia, PA
Fee: $1,495

Japanese woodblock prints and illustrated books from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries are celebrated for their high technical and aesthetic achievements. In this course, we will look closely at both formats, putting these into their historical and cultural contexts. We will also think through how these materials were designed for their broad and largely literate audiences. By engaging a wide range of materials, we will consider how the goals for printed materials varied from transferring information to delineating artistic trends. […]

The Identification of Photographic & Digital Print Processes

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 1–6 June 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

This course will offer instruction in identifying and dating all major processes used in creating photographs, photomechanical prints, and digital prints. It will utilize original examples from the instructor’s collection, as well as those from RBS and the UVA library. Students are encouraged to bring their own objects for examination and discussion. The processes considered will fall into four broad categories: nineteenth-century, twentieth-century black and white, twentieth-century color, and twenty-first-century digital. The course will discuss methods for distinguishing photomechanical and digital prints from actual photographs. […]

Advanced Seminar in Book Illustration Processes

This seminar provides those who have already taken Book Illustration Processes to 1900 (I-20) with a further opportunity to work with files and packets containing original illustrations (the basic course uses only about a quarter of the school’s 400 illustration packets), and to look at some of the notable illustrated books in the UVA and RBS collections. The seminar will concentrate on book illustration between 1770 and 1914, though there will also be discussion of framing prints, ephemera, and maps, and some mention of earlier prints. More time will be spent on the historical contexts in which illustrations are produced than was the case with the basic course, […]

The History of Printed Book Illustration in the West

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 21–26 July 2024
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,395

This introduction to printed book illustration in the European tradition from the fifteenth century to the present day presents a chronological overview of techniques, genres, styles, and artists. The course centers on illustrations in typical publications, with an eye to changing technology and changing reader expectations rather than aesthetic appreciation, although private press books and major artists are also touched on. The focus of the course is mainly English, French, and American material, […]

Book Illustration Processes to 1900

“If you want to learn the ‘how to’ of illustrations, this is the course for you.” — 2017 student

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 20–25 July 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

The identification of primarily European illustration processes and techniques, including (but not only) woodcut and wood-engraving, etching, line engraving, stipple, aquatint, mezzotint, lithography, steel engraving, collotype, gravure and aquatint photogravure, and process line and halftone black-and-white and three-color relief printing.

Almost the sole medium of instruction in this lecture course will be actual examples of original prints drawn from the extensive RBS collections. […]