11 Facts About Alois Senefelder

Johann Alois Senefelder was a German actor and playwright who invented the printing technique of lithography in the 1790s.

Alois Senefelder was educated in Munich and won a scholarship to study law at Ingolstadt.

Problems with the printing of his play Mathilde von Altenstein caused him to fall into debt, and unable to afford to publish a new play he had written, Senefelder experimented with a novel etching technique using a greasy, acid resistant ink as a resist on a smooth fine-grained stone of Solnhofen limestone.

Alois Senefelder then discovered that this could be extended to allow printing from the flat surface of the stone alone, the first planographic process in printing.

Alois Senefelder joined with the Andre family of music publishers and gradually brought his technique into a workable form, perfecting both the chemical processes and the special form of printing press required for using the stones.

Alois Senefelder was appointed 1809 to be the Inspector of a new Institution set up for this purpose in Bavaria called the "Lithographic Institute" in Munich.

Alois Senefelder secured patent rights across Europe and publicized his findings in 1818 in Vollstandiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerei which was translated in 1819 into French and English.

Alois Senefelder was able to exploit the potential of lithography as a medium for art.

Alois Senefelder was decorated by King Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria and a statue of him stands in the town of Solnhofen, where lithographic stone is still quarried.

Alois Senefelder lived to see his process become widely adopted both for art printmaking and as the dominant method of pictorial reproduction in the printing industry.

Alois Senefelder died in Munich, where he is buried in the Alter Sudfriedhof.