Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/367

 By the aid of the accompanying reproductions it will be seen what are the next steps. The upper illustration shows the plate after it has had a few tints scraped out. In mezzotint no lines are employed, and the subject to be engraved is wrought by scraping away the burr in the lighter tones with a tool known as a "scraper" and in the high lights polishing it quite smooth with a "burnisher." This operation is carefully continued until the plate reaches a condition to give an impression as is shown in the lower illustration.

This style is really engraving in tone, and the especial qualities of mezzotint are richness and delicate gradation and the painter-like quality which enables the engraver to work much in the same manner as the painter did on his canvas. He can free himself from the shackles of lines which are a conventional method to suggest colour and tone. Its most fitting application is in the translation of the works of painters which depend for their effect on powerful chiaroscuro. It is eminently fitted to represent portraits, but its use in landscape is restricted, as it cannot reproduce the crisp and sparkling character of foliage nor the dazzling high lights of an open scene, but it can and does, especially under the master-hand of Turner, give a romantic feeling of awesome grandeur to landscape.

The inventor of mezzotint was Ludwig von Siegen, an officer who had been in the service of the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. He settled at Amsterdam, and his first plate, executed in 1642, was a portrait of the Landgrave's mother. In 1654, when at