Woodcut Across Five Centuries: Where Colour Enters the Print
Edited by Ellis Vey, the editorial pen name of Artbrush Editorial.
The Met dates Albrecht Dürer’s Small Woodcut Passion to 1509–10 and describes it as “Hand-colored woodcuts loose in red book binding.” In the carrying-of-the-cross scene among its additional images, a pale cross rises through a crowd of red, green, yellow and blue garments. Colour separates the bodies; black lines keep pulling them together.
Colour over a structure of lines
Look at the red robe in the lower left. Its broad colour makes the figure easy to find, but the folds remain a dense pattern of curves and short strokes. Beside it, the central grey drapery turns through a similar network of lines. The pale timber cuts across this busy surface, offering the eye a relatively open path through the crowd.
This is a useful way to look at a coloured print: follow one hue, then follow one line. The two routes need not coincide. A colour can gather a garment into a single shape while the lines inside it divide that shape into bends, creases and shadows. Here, colouring does not erase the graphic structure. It changes which parts announce themselves first.
Woodcut begins with a physical version of that distinction. As Wendy Thompson explains for The Met, the cutter removes the parts of a block that will not print; ink transfers from the raised surface to paper. Hand-colouring adds another operation to the impression. The record does not identify who coloured this set or when.
A face assembled through colour
Chuck Close’s Lucas/Woodcut, dated 1993, offers a different starting point. Even in The Met’s small online preview, a frontal head emerges from a restless field of coloured marks. The dark hair and beard frame the lighter face, while flecks of colour interrupt any expectation of smoothly blended skin. Recognition happens across the marks rather than through an uninterrupted contour.
The comparison changes how those Dürer garments look. Their colours help distinguish already articulated figures; in Close’s portrait, the scattered colours contribute to the face’s appearance as a whole. These are ways of reading the reproductions, not a claim that one process evolved directly into the other.
The Met’s wording, “Woodcut printed in colors,” initially suggests a neat contrast with hand-colouring. Another collection complicates it. MoMA describes its own impression of Lucas/Woodcut as “Woodcut and pochoir.” Pochoir uses a stencil to apply colour through openings. That additional term matters: the Met’s shorter description cannot establish that every coloured passage came from a woodblock.
The Met also names Karl Hecksher as printer and Pace Prints as publisher. Keeping those roles visible makes the work’s production less abstract without inventing a sequence of blocks, colours or printing passes.
Try looking at two distances
Open the linked records. With the Dürer detail, choose a coloured garment and trace the black lines through it. With Close’s portrait, let the face register first, then attend to the separate marks. Ask which features remain legible when you shift attention from the subject to the surface.
Keep physical scale separate from browser size. The Dürer group is listed only as “Dimensions vary.” The Met gives Close’s sheet as “Sheet: 46 1/2 in. × 36 in. (118.1 × 91.4 cm).” These are measurements of the sheet, including its margins, rather than a face-sized crop. A thumbnail can compress that distinction as readily as it compresses the marks.
Source notes
The Met, Small Woodcut Passion, 1975.653.112(1–38): the visual discussion uses additional image DP820400, not the record’s primary image. The Met, Lucas/Woodcut, 1996.298: dates, medium and sheet dimensions above follow this record. MoMA’s 337.1998 is a separate impression; its dimensions are not substituted here. Sources checked 6 November 2026.
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