Aquatint is a way of making prints that gives patches of shading instead of lines. The artist works on a copper plate, and every hollow in its surface holds ink that a press then pushes onto paper.
In aquatint those hollows are a fine grain bitten into the metal by acid. Printed, they give a shading that can be pale or almost black, like a wash, ink thinned with water and spread with a brush.
That likeness to painting gave the technique its name. In Italian it is acquatinta, "dyed water," and the early French printmakers who took it up called it gravure au lavis, "engraving in wash."
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Imitating washes was the whole point at first. Aquatint was perfected in eighteenth-century France to reproduce drawings done with a brush, and in England it became the favorite way to give a print shading, above all to copy watercolors.
Then, in Madrid in 1799, the Spanish painter Francisco Goya turned the same grain toward something far darker. In Los Caprichos, "The Caprices," a series of satirical prints, the texture that had imitated soft washes fills whole backgrounds with night.
A Dutch experiment around 1650
Yet the technique is older than Goya, and older than its French success. The first aquatint was made around 1650 in Amsterdam by a Dutch printmaker, Jan van de Velde IV, and one of the faces he printed with it belonged to the most powerful man in England.
What You'll Discover
How resin and acid make a gray.
Who gave it its English name.
What Goya did with the dark.
What a brush dipped in sugar can do.
How Mary Cassatt printed it in color.