But he said how a sparrow can't founder, d'ye see,
Without orders that come down below;
And many fine things, that proved clearly to me
That Providence takes us in tow."
But who would suspect the author of these lines to have been a painter, too? It appears that he occasionally practised art as a lover of nature, and from a series of views of Lake Scenery after his drawings, John Hill engraved some very fair aquatint plates. The two ovals we reproduce have therefore an added attraction as aquatints.
Printing in Colour.—The reader who has reached this point in the volume will have mastered the theory underlying all engraving that it is the interpretation of the drawings or pictures in colour of other men by the engraver or etcher into black and white. In its highest form where painters were engravers too, such as the seventeenth-century Dutch school of etchers, or in the French school of Nanteuil and Masson, or in the old masters of the Italian school, the engraver drew straight on to the copper and produced original work. But for the most part engravers were translators of other men's work in colour, translating the masses of colour on the canvas of the painter into the terms of engraving by means of lines, by means of dots, or by means of engraving in tone as in mezzotint and aquatint.
Upon the introduction of stipple engraving, the pernicious method of using brown and red-brown ink for printing the delicate fancy subjects and the finnicking pseudo-classical figures of Angelica
