SENEFELDER, Jan Nepomuk František Alois

S.’s father, the actor Franz Peter S. married Katerina Volíkova, the landlord’s daughter in Prague in 1770. As a visiting actor, he acted in various German theatres until he settled in Munich in 1778. S. attended high school in Prague, and later the University of Ingolstadt, but was forced to leave his studies, due to the death of his father in 1791. For the next three years he joined a theatre group in order to support his mother and seven younger siblings.
During this time he took up printing of his own individual plays and began to experiment with the well-known printing process. In 1796 he succeeded in a new printing process for the first time, which he himself invented: stone printing or lithography. The following year he created the first special printing device for lithography and in 1798 he printed the first publicly spread lithography. S. described the first engraving in stone and drawings print (a transfer of images from one stone to another), print on textiles, in 1799 a solid lithographic chalk, autographic principle (transfer of drawings from paper to stone) and anastatical copy (overprint).
He received the privilege from King Maximilian Joseph to print on stones in 1799. A year later, at the request of a publisher Anthon André he equipped lithographic print houses in Offenbach and London. Due to a personal dispute with the publisher, the workshops planned for Paris, Berlin and Vienna were never opened. In 1801 he received a patent for a printing machine and moved his business to Vienna, where he, in 1803 arranged lithography workshop, but returned to Munich as early as 1806. Until 1809 he upgraded his process to chromolithography (colour printing). In October 1809 he was appointed inspector by the Bavarian king for the production of cadastral plans in a new Munich state printing house. As a substitute for lithographic slate a mixture of ground stone on metallic or paper foundation (papergraphy) was used for the new printing machine. He lived in Paris between 1819 and 1824. In 1826 he returned to Munich and developed the so-called printing on a mosaic (colour print from the plate) and the oil-print in 1833 (reproduction of oil paintings), carried out by printing on painting canvas.