A from The Metropolitan Museum of Art t Cover: The Standard Bearer (detail) by Prince Rupert (1619-1682) alter Pietro della Vecchia MEZZOTINTS from The Metropolitan Museum of Art THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART Sept. 4 > Nov. 3, J 968 THE SMITH COLLEQE MUSEUM OF ART NORTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS Nov. 20 - Dec. 29, 1968 THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS MUSEUM OF ART Jan. 10 - Feb. 3, 1969 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-6G722 S> THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS MUSEUM OF ART Miscellaneous Publications No. 74 o Jo I ACKNOWLEDQMENTS The present exhibition was organized by Mr. John Ittmann, a student in the Department of History of Art at the University of Kan­ sas. Mr. Ittmann's work in the Print Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art during the summer of 19(38 was supported in part by an undergraduate research grant from the College of Arts and Sciences, The University of Kansas. All of the prints included in this exhibition with the few exceptions noted in the catalogue are from the collection of the Print Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the Metropolitan it has been possible to supplement the exhibition with additional prints, includ­ ing a small group of early color mezzotints, which are not listed in the present catalogue. We wish to thank the Trustees and Staff of The Metropolitan Museum of Art for approving the loan of these prints and The Smith College Museum of Art and Michael Wentworth for additional loans. Mr. Ittmann wishes to express his personal thanks to Mr. McKendry, Miss Janet Byrne and to all the members of the Print Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for their unfailing cooperation; to Miss Eleanor Sayre of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for her en­ couragement and advice; and to Mrs. Martin Cohn and Miss Elizabeth Hoover of the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, and Mr. Michael Wentworth of The Smith College Museum of Art for their valuable assistance. JOHN J. MCKENDRY, Curator of Prints The Metropolitan Museum of Art CHARLES CMETHAM, Director The Smith College Museum of Art A. BRET WALLER, Director The University of Kansas Museum of Art 167177 It would appear a Paradox to discourse to you of a Graving with­ out a Graver, Burin, Point, or Aqua Fortis; and yet is This perform'd without the assistance of either: That which gives our most perite and dextrous Artists the greatest trouble, and is longest finishing (for such are the hatches, and the deepest shadowes in plates) should be here the least considerable, and the most expedititious; That, on the contrary, the Lights should be in this the most Laborious, and yet perform'd with the greatest facility: That what appears to be effected with so little Curiosity, should yet so accurately resemble what is generally esteem'd the very greatest; viz. that a print should emulate even the best of Drawings Chiaro oscuro, or (as the Italians term it) pieces of the Mezzo Tinto, so as nothing either of Vago da Carpi, or any of those other Masters who pursu'd his attempt, and whose works we have al­ ready celebrated, have exceeded, or indeed approach'd; especially, for that of Portraits, Figures, tender Landskips, and History, &C. to which it seems most appropriate, and applicable. JOHN EVELYN, Sculptura, London, 1662 INTRODUCTION Mezzotint engraving was in its infancy when the well-known diarist John Evelyn published his Sculptura, a history of engraving on copper, which included in a short chapter this brief and somewhat obscure reference to the newly developed printing process.' Though he did not describe the procedure, he did suggest something of the difference be­ tween the mezzotint and the other printmaking techniques then in use. Painters had long known how to create atmospheric depth by means of gradations of color, and by the seventeenth century they were exploiting this knowledge to produce paintings remarkable for their bold contrasts of light and dark, their dramatic chiaroscuro effects. It is not surprising that the printmakers of the period should try to keep pace with the established modes of visual expression. Until the de­ velopment of the mezzotint, however, printmakers were hampered in their attempts to reproduce the full range of tonal values available to the painter. The woodcut, the dominant mode of graphic expression in the fifteen and early sixteenth centuries, survived in the seventeenth cen­ tury mainly in the form of 'chiaroscuro' prints: color woodcuts of two or more tones printed from separate blocks to give a wide range of light and shadow. But rather than effecting a gradual transition of tonal values, the highlight and shadow of the chiaroscuro woodcut are printed in fiat areas of color, and the success of this method depends more on decorative outline of form and subtle juxtaposition of hue. By the beginning of the seventeenth century two processes, en­ graving and etching, had become the prevailing media of graphic art. In the former, lines are incised into a copper plate mechanically by the graver or burin, while in the latter, lines are produced chemically by the action of acid or aqua fortis. In simplest terms, a design is traced with a needle or point on a plate which has been covered with a waxy substance. When immersed in acid the wax repels the chemical while the traced design is "bitten" through into the copper. Both etching and engraving are essentially linear techniques, in which the darkest shadows must be built up by a network of cross-hatched lines. LUDWIG VON SIEGEN (1609-after 1676) Portrait of Amelia Elizabeth, Landgravine of Hesse Cassel Whereas a great master like Rembrandt could adapt the print- maker's tools to the expression of his personal style and produce original works of exceptional brilliance, the printmaker of the seven­ teenth century was mainly concerned with the interpretation of the work of other artists. Consequently, he was constantly experimenting with the tools at hand to arrive at a means which might best effect the translation of the painter's rich variety of tone. A portrait of Otiver Cromwell by J. (?) van de Velde (cat. no. 1) offers but one isolated example of the printmaker's exploration in new directions for this purpose. The etcher's acid must have suggested to van de Velde the method by which he was able to roughen the entire background and border of this portrait in a manner analogous to the aquatint process, which was not to become an established technique until the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1642, about the same time that Rembrandt was producing etchings notable for their dramatic chiaroscuro, and some ten years before van de Velde printed his portrait of Cromwell,2 Ludwig von Siegen, a soldier in the service of William VI, Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, engraved a portrait of William's mother (cat. no. 2) in which he was able to suggest finely graduated shading in a new way. His shadows were built up by the manipulation of a fine-toothed wheel, or 'roulette,' used as a pencil or brush might be, the dotted lines ap­ plied with parallel strokes following contour to model form. That Siegen's method of engraving led directly to the subsequent develop­ ment of the mezzotint has long been established. However, his method differed considerably from the first detailed account of the procedure published by Alexander Browne, a London print publisher, in his Ars Pictoria, 1669: "The Manner or Way of Mezo Tinto:— First take a very well polished plate of Copper, and ruffen it all over with your Engin one way, then cross it over with the Engin again, and if you find occasion then cross it over the third time, untill it be ruffened all over alike (that is to say) if it were to be printed, it would print black all over; this done, take Charcole or black Chalk to rub over the plate, and then draw your design with white Chalk upon the plate, then take a sharp stift, and trace out the outlines of the design you drew with the white Chalk, and where you would have the light strike strongest, take a burnisher, and burnish that part of the plate where you would have the light strike as clean as it was when it was first polished; where you would have the fainter light, you must not polish it so much, and this way you may make it either fainter or stronger, according to your fancy. As for the manner or shape of the Engin, they are divers, and if any ingenious person have a desire to have any made, the Author will give them farther directions."3 The 'Engin' or 'rocker,' as it came to be called, is a chisel-like tool rounded at the end. Its tapering blade is chanelled like a file with parallel grooves which form a toothed profile at the rounded cutting edge. The tool is literally rocked back and forth on the plate, the pressure applied causing the teeth to raise a fine burr over the entire surface of the plate. At this stage, if the plate were printed it would yield an impression of deep, velvety black. The image itself is produced by working the prepared plate with burnisher and scraper, from dark to light, as it were, to produce delicate gradations of greys and pearly whites. Since Siegen built tones with the roulette and worked from light to dark, leaving blank the areas where tone was not required, his prints, strictly speaking, were not mezzotints. It had not been possible to identify with certainty the person responsible for the development of the rocker to roughen the entire plate, and the consequent use of the burnisher and scraper, until the publication in 1960 by Miss Orovida Pissarro of an extract from the Evelyn manuscripts on deposit in Christ Church, Oxford.4 In the brief chapter on the mezzotint in Sculptura quoted above, Evelyn credits the invention of the mezzotint to Prince Rupert of Pfalz, Count Palatine of the Rhine (cat.