Walker is perhaps his best work, and his portrait of Rubens after that master's canvas of himself is another deserving of mention. We give a reproduction of one of his mezzotints after Sir Godfrey Kneller's portrait of The Right Honourable Spencer Compton, Baron of Wilmington, which is a pleasing piece of mezzotint engraving, faithful to the work it translates and typical of so much of the portraiture of that period. Peter Pelham is worthy of renown as having introduced the art of mezzotint into America in 1726.
It is of interest, too, to note that three engravers carried the art to Ireland—Thomas Beard, John Brooks, and Andrew Miller—and established an art centre in Dublin, which at a later date sent forth four illustrious pupils—McArdell, Houston, Spooner, and Purcell—who added lustre to the glorious period from 1770 to 1800, when the finest series of mezzotint portraits ever seen were scraped after Sir Joshua Reynolds, Romney, and their contemporaries, immortalising their canvases and bringing enduring renown to the greatest of English native arts, the art of engraving in mezzotint.
John Faber, junior (1684-1756), is the last of the early eighteenth-century school prior to the great outburst of enthusiasm and unexampled splendour of the days when superb prints after Reynolds and his school are numbered by hundreds. John Faber the elder was born in Holland in 1660. He came to this country and was one of the earliest engravers in mezzotint. He died at Bristol in 1721. His plates are completely overshadowed by the work
