Mezzotint is a printmaking technique that works from dark to light. The artist first roughens the whole surface of a copper plate, so that, inked and printed as it is, it would give a sheet of solid black. The picture is then made by smoothing that rough surface back down, a little for the half tones and completely for the highlights. A mezzotint has no lines, only tones that shade into one another.
The word comes from the Italian mezzo, "half," and tinta, "tone," and it points at what was new about the technique. Before mezzotint, a printed shadow was made of lines. Engravers and etchers darkened an area by laying lines close together or crossing them, a method called hatching, and up close the eye could always pick out the lines.
Mezzotint gave printmakers the half tones themselves, with nothing to pick out. The French found another name for it, la manière noire, the dark manner, because every mezzotint begins as a black plate.
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Two men have a claim to the invention, and both worked in Amsterdam, at almost the same time. The first is Ludwig von Siegen, a German lieutenant colonel, who in 1642 sent a mezzotint portrait to his former patron with a letter claiming the technique as his own. The second is Prince Rupert of the Rhine, a Bohemian prince living in exile, who made The Great Executioner sixteen years later.
For a long time, the name that came with the invention was Rupert's. He was by far the more famous of the two, and a story grew up around him. In Brussels, the tale goes, he saw a sentinel busy with a musket that the night dew had rusted, and the pitted barrel gave him the idea of making a picture out of roughened metal. The story may well be a legend, and Siegen's dated portrait comes first.
The two claims are less opposed than they look. Siegen found the technique, while Rupert made it faster and passed it on to others, which is how it reached London. To me, the fairest way to put it is this: Siegen made the first mezzotint, and Rupert made mezzotint known.
What You'll Discover
What Siegen sent to his patron in 1642.
How a picture comes out of a black plate.
Why mezzotint suited copies of oil paintings.
What Rupert's rocker marks still show.
How London made it the English manner.