The colophon

Every notebook keeps a colophon, the page that says how the object was made. This one is short, the way the old ones were.

The plates

The plates on this board are pen-and-ink drawings and wash studies made for the notebook. They show the kind of sheet a house portrait produces: line, shade and the house alone. None of them reproduces a living artist's commission, and none of them stands in for a work that belongs to somebody's family.

The words and the rights

The entries are written for this site and may be quoted with a link back to the sheet they came from. A portrait of a house belongs, in the practice this notebook describes, to the person who commissioned it; the right to reproduce the drawing stays with the hand that drew it. That distinction matters and the board keeps it: a client may give prints to the family, but the artist keeps the sheet's copyright unless the commission says otherwise.

The desk

Corrections and questions travel by mail. Write to the desk through the address in the footer of any page, naming the plate number of the sheet in question. Errors of fact are fixed and noted; arguments about hatching are read with pleasure and answered more slowly.