Lithographic printing was developed in Germany in 1796 by Alois Senefelder. Lithography is a printing technique that allows multiple reproductions of an image drawn with greasy crayon on a certain type of limestone. When the naturally absorbant stone is wetted before printing, the printing ink will be retained in areas containing grease and repelled in all other areas. The characteristic of this printing technique lies in the fact that the image area and the non-image area react differently to the presence of ink. Lithography joined the older techniques of relief and intaglio printing and greatly expanded the range of what could be printed.
One of the technologies exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (also known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition) was the new method of color printing: chromolithography. Although lithography had become widespread, it was initially a single-color printing method. Early experiments with color lithography were perfected in 1837 when a French printer patented a process named chromolithography. After analyzing the colors contained within the original subject, the printer separated them into a series of printing plates and printed these component colors one by one. The beauty of this process is due to the talented artists who created the original designs, frequently in watercolor, and the skilled craftsmen who traced the original art onto lithographic stones.