A fore-edge painting is a scene painted on the edges of book pages. There are two basic forms, including paintings on fanned edges and closed edges.[1] For the first type, the book's leaves must be fanned, exposing the pages' edges for the picture to become visible. For the second, closed type, the image is visible only while the book is closed.
The fundamental difference between the two fore-edge styles is that a painting on the closed edge is painted directly on the book's surface (the fore-edge being the opposite of the spine side). In contrast, the fanned fore-edge style has watercolor applied to the top or bottom margin (recto or verso) of the page/leaf and not to the actual "fore"-edge itself.
To begin a fore-edge painting artists clamped the slightly fanned pages of a book between the boards of a special press that held them in place while keeping pressure off the cover boards.[2] While the paints used for fore-edge paintings are watercolors, artists needed to use them carefully. If water was first used on the pages the paint would bleed through to the inner pages or remove the gold of the fore-edges. Artists needed to slowly build up the colors of the fore-edges to avoid oversaturating the paper. Watercolour was the only paint that could be used when doing these paintings because others (acrylics and oils) would crack and crumble with age.[3]
- ^ "Fore-edge Paintings". www.brandeis.edu. Retrieved 2022-10-18.
- ^ "Hidden In Plain Sight: A Brief History of Fore-Edge Painting - HRVI". www.hudsonrivervalley.org. Retrieved 2022-10-18.
- ^ How Fore-Edge paintings are done - a masterclass, archived from the original on 2021-12-13, retrieved 2021-10-26