Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/380

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his Catherine, Lady Bamphylde, is a masterly plate, and in first state has brought £357 10s., in third state £43.

To continue the list:—William Ward, John Dean, a delicate translator of Gainsborough, too rarely rendered into mezzotint, John Greenwood, Edward Fisher, John Jones, David Martin, William Pether, William Dickinson, James Walker, John Young, and Richard Earlom.

This is not the place to dwell upon the qualities of individual engravers nor to enumerate the names of those who practised the art during the latter years of the eighteenth century: there were a hundred engravers who produced work after the canvases of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and there were innumerable translations of the wonderful landscapes and subjects of Morland. The styles of these two artists are especially fitted to be rendered into mezzotint, as their loose broad brush work and flowing masses of colour lend themselves naturally to a treatment so akin to their own, where the artist in metal depended for his effects on striking contrast and chiaroscuro.

The large field of mezzotint need not frighten the beginner who feels himself naturally attracted thereto; he need not approach it in the spirit that some people, according to Hazlitt, "talk of the allegory in Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' as though they feared it would bite them." The intricacies of this art of engraving are many, but patient study in the gallery of framed mezzotints hanging in the British Museum will elucidate much that is obscure, and a ticket to