The Face of Britain: Portrait Mezzotints of the Eighteenth Century
Saturday, March 21, 2009 - Sunday, July 5, 2009
Mezzotint is a technique for producing prints of great range of tone and subtle variety of texture. It involves systematic roughing of the entire surface of the same copper plate used for engraving and etching. A completely prepared plate would accept ink uniformly and print as an even black. An image is generated by the selective reduction of the roughened copper, partial scraping and burnishing to produce intermediate tones, complete cleaning and polishing to produce highlights, in the eventual print. Because the process is painstaking and builds an image negatively––from black toward white––it requires frequent checking of progress by the printing of intermediate impressions (“proofing”). Because the grain of the plate is extraordinarily fine, it wears very quickly, yielding many fewer impressions than any other technique. Because the surface of the print itself is delicate, it is more easily damaged than one produced by any other technique. Such problems and limitations aside, mezzotint boasts incomparable fidelity to pictorial properties and extraordinary material appeal.
Mezzotint is overwhelmingly associated with British printmaking. Invented in
Germany and developed in Holland, the technique was brought to England in the late seventeenth century by Dutch printmakers like Verkolje. In the art of Britain, with religious images practically excluded and the social ordered celebrated, portraits had unique prominence. Mezzotint gave them wide currency and, beyond most line engravings, conveyed their sumptuousness. The earliest native English mezzotints, like those of John Smith, adhered to Dutch standards. Starting in the 1750s, a generation of Irish‐born engravers brought unprecedented skill and refinement to the reproduction of portraits, above all those of Joshua Reynolds. By the 1770s a second generation of English engravers was rivaling the excellence of the Irish and expanding production to the other great portrait painters. Portrait mezzotints continued into the nineteenth century, but their fashion was passing. Easy to articulate and to print in large edition, lithographs and then photographs made it essentially obsolete. Still, to this day the technique is commonly called the
“English manner” in other European languages.
Mezzotint is overwhelmingly associated with British printmaking. Invented in
Germany and developed in Holland, the technique was brought to England in the late seventeenth century by Dutch printmakers like Verkolje. In the art of Britain, with religious images practically excluded and the social ordered celebrated, portraits had unique prominence. Mezzotint gave them wide currency and, beyond most line engravings, conveyed their sumptuousness. The earliest native English mezzotints, like those of John Smith, adhered to Dutch standards. Starting in the 1750s, a generation of Irish‐born engravers brought unprecedented skill and refinement to the reproduction of portraits, above all those of Joshua Reynolds. By the 1770s a second generation of English engravers was rivaling the excellence of the Irish and expanding production to the other great portrait painters. Portrait mezzotints continued into the nineteenth century, but their fashion was passing. Easy to articulate and to print in large edition, lithographs and then photographs made it essentially obsolete. Still, to this day the technique is commonly called the
“English manner” in other European languages.