 |
|
||||||||||||||
| |||||||
English Portrait Painters: In his experimentation, unfortunately, Reynolds often used impermanent mediums and resorted to a thick impasto which has cracked with time. As a draftsman, too, he had his limitations. Nevertheless, he is still ranked as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of English portrait painters. John Ruskin could say of him, in the second lecture of Two Paths: "Considered as a painter of individuality in the human form and mind, I think him, even as it is, the prince of portrait-painters. Titian paints nobler pictures and Vandyck had nobler subjects, but neither of them entered so subtly as Sir Joshua did into the minor varieties of human heart and temper."Other artists used photography in a more slavish manner, basing whole compositions on the Camera image. This was particularly true of portraiture. William Etty's Self Portrait (London, National Portrait Gallery) is hardly more than an enlarged copy of a calotype by Hill and Adamson, made in 1844, on the occasion of the artist's visit to Edinburgh. Many American painters relied upon daguerreotypes in the pose and delineation of the features of celebrities. Charles Loring Eliot, a popular American portraitist, for example, based his painting of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper on a daguerreotype ascribed to Mathew B. Brady.
Mezzotints. An early process similar to engraving, but producing tonal and wash effects rather than line drawings. The plate is "rocked" by a many-toothed tool until evenly roughened. The design is procured by scraping and burnishing the higher lights. When the surface has been inked all over and wiped, the ink is retained by the roughnesses and leaves the scraped and burnished surfaces in varying degrees. On paper the print shows an almost lineless design in soft velvety black-and-white effects. Brilliant productions were made by this process in England during the 18th century, when the works of the English portrait painters were reproduced. Many reproductions were also made of Morland's paintings, showing pastoral scenes and figure compositions. |
|||||||
| Home | About Us | Contact Us | Site Map | Links | Library |
All Rights Reserved
