the Print Room will open vistas of as wide expanse, "like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific." A permanent picture gallery exists, too, in the old printsellers' windows in London and other great cities, where fine examples are exposed for sale, and many happy and envious moments may be passed in contemplating these masterpieces of the eighteenth century.
Richard Earlom (1743-1822) employed etching in skilful manner in his subjects after various masters. This use of etching had by this time become universal in mezzotint, and in the series by Earlom after Claude's Liber Veritatis he was the father of the nineteenth-century school of mezzotint engravers of landscape.
This school of landscape mezzotints produced some fine work. We reproduce a print from S. W. Reynolds after the painting of Richard Wilson, whose imaginative and romantic stilliness and ruined castles and dreamy expanses claim kinship with the classic style of Claude. The Distant View of Rome from Tivoli after Poussin is by the same engraver. (Facing p. 248).
But at the head of the nineteenth-century school of landscape in mezzotint stands Turner with his Liber Studiorum. Turner etched the leading theme of the plate, and in some instances worked upon it himself in mezzotint before it passed from his hands to his engravers, but he always exercised a firm control over every detail they wrought on his plates.
As we have indicated in the previous chapter, the Liber is a study in itself. The plates were engraved
