Mezzotint

The process was especially widely used in England from the eighteenth century, and in France was called la manière anglais (“the English manner”).

[4] Sir Frank Short (1857–1945) was an important pioneer of the mezzotint revival in the United Kingdom along with Peter Ilsted (1864–1933) in Denmark.

His earliest mezzotint print dates to 1642 and is a portrait of Countess Amalie Elisabeth of Hanau-Münzenberg, regent for her son, and von Siegen's employer.

The rocker seems to have been invented by Prince Rupert of the Rhine, a famous cavalry commander in the English Civil War, who was the next to use the process, and took it to England.

Godfrey Kneller worked closely with John Smith, who is said to have lived in his house for a period; he created about 500 mezzotints, some 300 copies of portrait paintings.

The Wax book was responsible for a substantial upsurge in the number of artists creating mezzotints in the United States and worldwide.

[14] Two great advantages of the technique were that it was easier to learn and also much faster than engraving proper, as well as giving a rich range of tones.

This was crucial for what was known at the time as the furniture print, a mezzotint that was large enough and with sufficiently bold tonal contrasts to hold its own framed and hung on the wall of a room.

[16] Jacob Christoph Le Blon (1667-1741) used the dark to light method and invented the three and four-colour mezzotint printing technique by using a separate metal plate for each colour.

A similar process was used in France later in the century by Le Blon's pupil Jacques-Fabien Gautier-Dagoty and his sons; their work included anatomical illustrations for medical books.

[21] Because the pits in the plate are not deep, only a small number of top-quality impressions (copies) can be printed before the quality of the tone starts to degrade as the pressure of the press begins to smooth them out.

Bamber Gascoigne said of an example he illustrated with before and after details "the dark tones have been clumsily renewed with the roulette; the result is brutal in close-up but will seem adequate when the whole print is viewed at a normal distance".

[24] Standard sizes used in England were known× as "royal", 24 × 19 in., "large", 18 × 24 in., "posture", 14 × 10 in., and "small", 6 × 4 in, and ready-made frames and albums could be bought to fit these.