CAN NOT, perhaps, better commence

of the considerations which have prompted me to write it. It is well known that for many years past, influenced by the decline of mechanical engraving, I have advocated the restoration of that more vital form of it which was practiced by the great masters of painting who were their own engravers, and which, in consequence, has come to be known as "painter-engraving" or "painter-etching." Not that the etching process, which is, after all, but one form of engraving, is essential to the perfection of this kind of art, for the painter, as a matter of fact, used that particular form of it which suited him best; the early Germans and Italians preferring the burin, the Dutch and Flemings the etchingneedle, while all of them together, with Dürer at their head, depended, in an equal degree and at the same time, on wood-cutting. The ground, however, which was common to all these men, and which to this day determines the value and the interest which attach to their work, and which distinguishes it from all forms of modern engraving, is that it was original. Each man of them, as he worked, worked at least as much with his brain as with his hands; a process of thought preceded and determined every line he made, and that line became, as much as the words he uttered or the changes in his face, an intellectual expression-an expression, that is to say, of the genius that was in him. It is for this reason that I would place painteretching or painter-engraving-I prefer the latter term as most comprehensive at the head of the engraver's art. I place it there because, by the freedom of hand which the process permits, it is the readiest exponent of the painter's thought. Human thoughts succeed each other at all times with a wonderful rapidity, but in the brain of the genius with such rapidity as to overtake and, if the expression may be used, to overlap, each other. Before one can be recorded, unless the means of expression be very prompt, it is displaced by another, or, if not displaced, confused and attenuated.

But while there can be no question of the greater intellectuality of that process of art which is capable of the readiest expression-and the etching process is facile princeps in this respect--it must not be lost sight of that there are qualities essen

tial to perfect engraving which can only

Such a quality is tonality, and such also are breadth, balance, chiar - oscuro, and the effects which belong to atmospheric phenomena, and which are necessary to what is called aerial perspective. If, therefore, etching, as the readiest and most incisive mode of artistic expression, stands at one end of the monochromatic scale, it is reasonable to assume that that form of engraving which lends itself best to the painter-like qualities just referred to should stand at the other. Such a process is mezzotint. Not the "mezzotint" which we see nowadays, and which is a mixture of everything but mezzotint, but mezzotint in its purest form as it was practiced by its earliest employers, Siegen, Rupert, and their immediate followers, and which, without any decline, but rather the contrary, has been handed down to us by the artists who succeeded them, and whose art may be said to have culminated in the genius of Turner. I may be wrong, but I am under the impression that the art in this its earliest and most interesting phases is little if at all known in America. We in England, at all events, hardly knew it till, by a timely demonstration of its capabilities by an exhibition at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1881, it was, so to speak, revealed to us. In that exhibition-which, by-the-way, like all exhibitions of the kind, to be instructive should be chronological-after specimens signed "Rupert P.," we were shown work by men whose names the majority of us had never heard of: of Johann Thomas of Ypres, who flourished about 1650; of Theodore Caspar of Fürstenberg, canon of Mainz, ad vivum fecit, 1656; of the brothers Wallerant and Bernard Vaillant, circa 1650; of John Verkolj Amstelodamus, 1650; of Paul van Somer, 1649; of John Vandervaart of Haarlem, 1647; of Nicholas van Haften of Gorcum, 1670; of Francis Place, "gentleman of Yorkshire," 1728; of George White, who was the first to combine etching with mezzotint, 1734; of George Vertue, "antiquarian and author," 1756; of Sir Christopher Wren; and, alas! of that misplaced genius Francis Kite, whose ingenuity brought him to the pillory for forgery, and who, after 1725, was known only by his alias of "Milvius"; of George Lum

ley, again, friend of Francis Place; and last, after a century of great reproductive but not original mezzotint artists, of Turner, the greatest of them all. And what was also especially interesting as a feature of this exhibition was, as indeed must always be the case in similar comparative displays of original work, that the method of one of these men in no respect resembled that of another, or, though the principle in all was the same, was even carried out by the same instruments, some of them using one kind of tool for laying their grounds, some another, and some instruments the fashion of which is not clearly indicated by the kind and quality of the work they did. And here, if I might do so, I would strongly recommend as a means of reviving and disseminating a knowledge of forgotten or neglected forms of art, the formation of such clubs as the Burlington in America.*

* The Burlington Fine Art Club was formed for the purpose of bringing together in social intercourse amateurs, collectors, and others interested in art, and affording them a ready means of intercommunication on matters connected with the fine arts, and facilitating the exhibitions of neglected or forgotten forms of art, and of acquisitions made from time to time by members and their friends. A sim

Meanwhile what the exhibition of 1881 has taught us as to the history of mezzotint engraving is this-that it was not invented, as is commonly supposed, by Prince Rupert, but by Ludwig von Siegen, Kammerjunker to the Landgrave of Hesse; that the first known print executed by Siegen in this manner (a portrait of the Landgrave's mother, Amelia Elizabeth) is dated 1642; that Siegen did not communicate his discovery to Rupert till 1654; and that the date of the earliest print by Rupert is 1658; consequently that all the dictionaries and treatises giving a different account of the matter from the Parentalia," and the accounts digested by Walpole from the MSS. of Vertue, of Killegrew, and of Evelyn, down to 1835, are wrong; and even that dates heretofore confidently stated to be on certain prints, and to mark the epoch of their execution, are also wrong. In a word, it is difficult to say what these chronological exhibitions by this club have not taught us by the simple process of first showing us what to unlearn. I refer with a certain satisfaction to this, because it was at my suggesilar club with the same objects has been formed at. Liverpool.

tion that this order was first given to these historical exhibitions of the club, and because, as was the case with the exhibition of Rembrandt's etchings, they have obliged us to correct and modify so many of our beliefs.

The principle on which the process of mezzotint is founded, and the process itself, may be thus described: A plate of bright copper or steel is "rocked" backward and forward and in all directions by a tool having a sharp serrated edge till its whole surface is indented and torn up. A sort of warp-and-woof pattern is thus produced upon it, while a pile like that of velvet is thrown up and evenly distributed over its whole surface. This pile, if charged with printers' ink, would print black; the pile removed by a "scraper" and the warpand-woof pattern laid bare, the plate would print gray; the warp-and-woof pattern itself removed, white-because the plain surface of the plate would again be reached. If, however, instead of removing the whole of the pile, only half of it be removed, a tint is obtained half-way between black and gray-a mezzotint. The art, there fore, of the mezzotint engraver consists in scraping away the metallic pile and in

removing so much of the warp-and-woof pattern beneath it as he may find necessary to obtain the exact tints or tones he requires, and his skill lies in the precise value which he is able to give to each of these tones and tints.

The instruments necessary to the purpose are three-a "rocker" or "cradle" with which to lay the ground; a sharp knife or "scraper" with which to cut away the pile; and a burnisher with which to remove partially or entirely the warp-andwoof pattern below it. There is, however, no hard and fast rule as to the exact fashion of these instruments, or even as to the method of using them, the earliest mezzotinters having had recourse to a variety of methods for "laying their grounds." Thus Claude, who like Rembrandt seems to have heard of the process and tried it on one of his etched plates, rubbed its surface with pumice - stone, and then burnished away the tint produced by it; Everdingen used a process which the nature of his work does not render very obvious; Rembrandt employed the etching-needle itself in such a way as to throw up with its point as much of the pile, or "burr," as he required; Siegen had a method of his own,

which produced an effect not unlike "stipple" (a mode of engraving previously in use); Rupert, whose work is singularly fine and painter-like, was contented to ground his plate as he went on, and in the degree necessary to each part of it, by the action of the burin or dry point with which he was actually working, his principle being not unlike that of Rembrandt. Turner obtained his color sometimes by the roulette, as in the etching of "Kirtstall Abbey," and sometimes, as in "The Calm," by a granulated substratum analogous to the warp-and-woof pattern, produced by what is called "soft ground etching." Others, again, used special tools to obtain the effect of different tissues-a rocker with a plain chisel-like edge, for instance, for silken materials, a tool with a serrated edge for grosser textures, and so

engraver-the moment, that is to say, that the art began to be used for utilitarian and commercial as distinct from artistic purposes-these differences in procedure vanished also. Henceforth, from the Earloms and McArdells downward, an absolute uniformity as to procedure prevails, the serrated rocker being the sole grounding instrument used, and the whole surface of the plate being covered in an equal degree before the work began.

Then arose the phenomenon, for it was nothing less, of the great school of English mezzotint-the "royal domain," as Ruskin calls it, "of the painter-engraver, and which, as a means of chiar-oscuro," he declares, "will never again be approached."

With this judgment of the keenest and honestest of art critics I fully concur. I hold and entirely believe that, with intellectual etching as its Alpha and sensitive mezzotint as its Omega, the whole arena of the engraver's art is covered; that we need go, for every great and painterlike quality, no farther afield; and that all intermediate processes are comparatively imperfect, chiefly because they are superfluous. There is, besides, in this art

know not. Certain it is, however, that in a delicate appreciation of the subtleties of gradation, in the perception of the infinite and tender differences of which the monochromatic scale is susceptible, and in our power to express those differences, we may really claim to have in us some of the qualities at least which go to the making of great artists. In a word, I believe this quality, which is undoubtedly native, and which found its loftiest expression in the genius of Turner, to be climatic, just as I believe the superfluous energy" of the Americans (lamented by Herbert Spencer, but which to me is healthy and delightful) to be also climatic. The Dutch, whose sur

an impertinent one, seeing that on its existence depends in no small degree the reception they will give to the proposals in this paper. To my mind there is nothing unreasonable in the fact that the denizens of drier climates should see, as they sometimes do, a sort of madness in what may be called the rainbow art of Turner's later time. It was not madness for all that, but a simple striving after qualities, unattainable perhaps, but real, and fully worth trying for as the ultimate and highest development of the painter's art. To the rendering of these qualities mezzotint lends itself in a singular degree. Nor is it less effective in its treatment of more