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 CHAPTER VIII

LINE ENGRAVING—THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The rise of the landscape school—Engraving merged into illustration of books—Increased activity and wider scope—The growth of the merely picturesque—Decadence of line engraving.

To make a broad distinction the seventeenth century excelled in portraits, in which art the French school rose to the grandest heights in line engraving, and we may associate the eighteenth century with landscape and figure subject in line, obviously omitting the golden period of mezzotint engraving in England in the eighteenth century.

In France the painters of fêtes galantes of the school of Watteau and Pater and Nicolas De Troy, of Lancret and Boucher, had their interpretive engravers, of whom Laurent Cars and Cochin, Tardieu and Le Bas are representative. But in the days of Louis XV. a craze seized the fashionable world to employ the graver as a pastime. Courtiers and noblemen, fine ladies, including the Queen herself, added engraving to their other follies. The result