History of Pen & Ink

A pen (Latin pinna, feather) is a long, thin, rounded device used to apply ink to a surface for the purpose of writing or drawing, usually on paper.

Ancient Indians were the first to use the pen. According to ancient text the earliest of pens made in India used bird feathers, bamboo sticks etc. The old literature of Puranas, Ramayana and Mahabharta used this kind of pen roughly 500 BC. Ancient Egyptians had developed writing on papyrus scrolls when scribes used thin reed brushes or reed pens from the Juncus Maritimus or sea rush.
The reed pen might well have been used for writing on parchment as long ago as the First Dynasty or about 3000 BC. Reed pens continued to be used until the Middle Ages although they were slowly replaced by quills from about the 7th century. The reed pen, generally made from bamboo, is still used in some parts of Pakistan by young students and is used to write on small boards made of timber.

The Quill pen was used in Qumran, Judea to write some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date back to around 100 BC. The scrolls were written in Hebrew dialects with bird feathers or quills. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europeans had difficulty in obtaining reeds and began to use quills. There is a specific reference to quills in the writings of St. Isidore of Seville in the 7th century. Quill pens were still widely used in the 18th century, and were used to write and sign the Constitution of the United States of America in 1787.

A copper nib was found in the ruins of Pompei showing that metal nibs were used in the year 79.
There is also a reference in Samuel Pepys' diary for August 1663. A metal pen point was patented in 1803 but the patent was not commercially exploited. John Mitchell of Birmingham started to mass produce pens with metal nibs in 1822, and thereafter the quality of steel nibs had improved enough that dip pens with metal nibs came into generalized use.

The earliest historical record of a pen employing a reservoir dates back to the 10th century. In 953, Ma'ād al-Mu'izz, the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, demanded a pen which would not stain his hands or clothes, and was provided with a pen which held ink in a reservoir and delivered it to the nib. This pen may have been a fountain pen, but its mechanism remains unknown, and only one record mentioning it has been found. A later reservoir pen was developed in 1636. In his Deliciae Physico-Mathematicae (1636), German inventor Daniel Schwenter described a pen made from two quills. One quill served as a reservoir for ink inside the other quill. The ink was sealed inside the quill with cork. Ink was squeezed through a small hole to the writing point. In 1809, Bartholomew Folsch received a patent in England for a pen with an ink reservoir.
While a student in Paris, Romanian Petrache Poenaru invented the fountain pen, which the French Government patented in May 1827. Fountain pen patents and production then increased in the 1850s, especially steel pens produced by John Mitchell.

Slavoljub Eduard Penkala from Croatia became renowned for development of the mechanical pencil (1906) – then called an "automatic pencil" – and the first solid-ink fountain pen (1907). Collaborating with an entrepreneur by the name of Edmund Moster, he started the Penkala-Moster Company and built a pen-and-pencil factory that was one of the biggest in the world at the time. This company, now called TOZ-Penkala, still exists today. TOZ stands for "Tvornica olovaka Zagreb," which means "Zagreb pencil factory."

The Vitruvian Man is a world-renowned drawing created by Leonardo da Vinci around the year 1487. It is accompanied by notes based on the work of the famed architect, Vitruvius. The drawing, which is in pen and ink on paper, depicts a male figure in two superimposed positions with his arms and legs apart and simultaneously inscribed in a circle and square. The drawing and text are sometimes called the Canon of Proportions or, less often, Proportions of Man. It is stored in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, Italy, and, like most works on paper, is displayed only occasionally.

The drawing is based on the correlations of ideal human proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius in Book III of his treatise De Architectura. Vitruvius described the human figure as being the principal source of proportion among the Classical orders of architecture.

Many pre-modern cultures around the world developed the comparatively cheap and portable medium of pen and ink art to a high level of sophistication, notably the Chinese and Japanese. In late imperial China (1644-1912), of all the arts, pen and ink calligraphy was the most respected.
Pen and ink calligraphy was raised to a high level in Arabic writing, since Islam forbids the representation of living beings. In some forms of Arabic calligraphy, the letters were delicately formed to suggest an image related to the meaning of the phrase being written, without being an actual image of a living being. There was a strong parallel tradition at the same time among Aramaic and Hebrew scholars, seen in such works as the Hebrew illuminated bibles of the 9th and 10th Centuries. For more information on Arabic and Hebrew medieval calligraphy see: Calligraphy.
In Western art, pen and ink artwork can be traced back to the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Winchester and Canterbury manuscripts of the 9th century, characteristic of which are lively precise figures and animals amid decorative foliage and fine calligraphy.
In the Georgian and early Victorian periods in England, pen and ink was mostly used for quick sketches, often with a high degree of abstraction. George Romney produced a number of notable ink sketches of Emma Hamilton which are noted for the economy of his strokes, in which he produced instantly recognizable figures with a dozen lines. Later English artists developed the pen and ink drawing into a finished artform, probably the finest examples of which are the 1825 series of visionary landscape drawings by Samuel Palmer.

Ink is a very versatile medium and has been used for thousands of years. It can be used in many ways, including with a brush. However, the traditional method of application, as well as the most useful, is the pen.

Like many of the arts which it is possible to practice with just a minimum of tools and materials, the status of pen and ink work is now very low in the contemporary art world, and it also suffers because drawing is not now generally taught in art schools today.