Cliché Verre is a combination of art and photography. In brief, it is a method of either etching, painting or drawing on a transparent surface, such as glass, thin paper or film and printing the resulting image on a light sensitive paper in a photographic darkroom. It is a process first practiced by a number of French painters during the early 19th century. The French landscape painter Camille Corot

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was a French landscape painter and printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century...

 was the best known of these. Some contemporary artists have developed techniques for achieving a variety of line, tone, texture and color by experimenting with film, frosted Mylar, paint and inks and a wide assortment of tools for painting, etching, scratching, rubbing and daubing.

Cliché Verre is French. Cliché

Cliché

A cliché or cliche is an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning,...

is a printing term: a printing plate cast from movable type; while verre means glass.

Cliché Verre was one of the earliest forms of reproducing images before the advent of the camera. As a precursor to photography, Cliché Verre could accurately represent the original scene without the tonal variations available in modern day photography.

External links

• http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/121455/cliche-verre
• http://www.photography.com/articles/history/cliche-verre/
• http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/arts/design/14bald.html
• http://www.silverprint.co.uk/info/sos27.html