remarque
Pluralremarques
- 1A small design etched into the margin of a printing plate, meant to be removed once the earliest proofs have been pulled.
She etched a delicate remarque of a sparrow in the plate's margin as a private signature.
Most remarques were burnished away once the first few proofs had been taken.
Note
An engraver's term taken over from French with its spelling intact, which keeps it visibly apart from the everyday word remark. The motif sits in the unprinted margin of an intaglio plate, outside the image proper. Because it is burnished away after the first proofs, its presence or absence is what separates the earliest impressions from all later ones.
- 2A print or proof identified by the small marginal design that later impressions no longer carry.
The dealer sold a rare remarque from the first run of the engraving.
Several remarques from that edition now hang in the museum.
Note
The name passes from the mark to the sheet that carries it, so a remarque can be the print itself, with a plural to match. Because the marginal design was taken off after the first proofs, such impressions belong to an early state, and collectors prize them for that. When a dealer offers a rare remarque, the sale is the whole print, not the small motif in its margin.
- 3Any feature that distinguishes a particular working stage of an engraving plate.
Experts use each remarque to identify which state of the plate produced a given print.
The faint remarques along the edge marked successive stages of the engraving.
Note
Here the word widens from one kind of mark to any detail that dates a plate, such as an added line, a correction or a marginal note. Engravers speak of a plate's successive states, and a remarque in this broader use is whatever tells one state from the next. It is the working vocabulary of experts sorting impressions of the same image into their proper order.
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Origin
Borrowed from French "remarque."