Mezzotint More Art

Leonard Merchant's mezzotint, "Snail in Cup" is inscribed for fellow artist, Fritz Eichenberg. While a student at the Central School for Arts and Crafts in London, a young Leonard Marchant found an engraving rocker in a cupboard and proceeded to turn himself into a master of the painstaking art of mezzotinting. Marchant, who has died in Shrewsbury aged 70, grew up in Simonstown, the Royal Navy's enclave in South Africa. Though his first job was as a parliamentary messenger, he taught himself to paint and, aged 19, was given a one-man show in Cape Town. Fired by this success, he left for England to study painting and, he claimed, to escape the stifling home atmosphere created by his Catholic mother and aunts. (His father was killed in the second world war.) Without contacts in London, he phoned Jacob Epstein, whose recommendation resulted in a grant to study briefly at the Central School. It was later, when studying full-time at the Central, that he saw the mezzotints of the Japanese master, Yozo Hamaguchi, in a London gallery. He was hooked. Creating a mezzotint is tedious in the extreme. The copper plate must first be prepared with a "rocker" which roughens the surface. A plate may be "rocked" 30 or 40 times. The rough texture is then reduced with a burnisher and a scraper, allowing the print a range of tones from velvety black through the greys to white. Marchant's plates could be months in the making. But the technical demands were the least of his worries. In its 18th- and 19th-century heyday, mezzotint was solely a reproductive medium, for copying masters such as Reynolds and Turner. The development of photography rendered it unfashionable, and by the 1960s the technique, known as la manière anglaise, was a bygone medium. Marchant, by now a teacher in printmaking at the Central, began to create original mezzotints with a colleague, Radavan Kraguly. A perfectionist, he seemed to revel in the straitjacket procedure. Perhaps it was the metaphor of bringing darkness out of light that appealed to this straight-talking, sometimes sombre, man, who would suddenly relax and light up like a gleaming hue on one of his prints. His work was of squares and triangles with the occasional cat, black and ominous, and carefully arranged still lifes, featuring plants, a seed pod, a pot he might have bought at auction to celebrate the sale of a print. There were one-man shows, notably at the Bankside Gallery. He sold well at the Royal Academy summer exhibition, was a Florence Biennale prizewinner, spent a fellowship year at the British School in Rome, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers. But making mezzotints was not a paying job. Marchant and his South African wife...

A play on words provides the title for this image -- a circle created out of the deconstructed parts of Singer IV This image is #37 from an edition of only 50, referenced as Firos 78...

In "Destinations", Frederick Mershimer creates an image of taxis rushing by the Fuller Building, better known as Flatiron Building. The building is only six feet wide at its rounded...

Set of Six Hand Coloured Botanical Prints/Lithographs and Engravings Published by G. Ridgway, S. Curtis, W. Baxter and W. Fitch Early Mid 19th Century Size: image: 8.5 x 5.5 inches P...

This view of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges is looking down "Plymouth Street" to the intersection of Jay Street. It is #35 in the catalogue raisonne by Retif & Salzer and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of City of New York...

In "Late Night", Frederick Mershimer created a winter scene where Berkeley Place meets Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn's Park Slope. This image, the seventh in t...

Sold without frame Executed in 2015, this work is a poster from an unnumbered limited edition of approximately 300, published by Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo on the occasion of the ...

Rencontres, or chance encounter, is a seemingly random assemblage of seashells, pine cones, and a children's spinning top. From a signed and numbered edition of 35, some of which wer...

Radovan D Kraguly (Yugoslavian, British, 1934-2022) 1964 Color Mezzotint Etching Leaf in Space Edition 25 of 40 Hand signed lower right Dimensions: framed 27 X 19.25, image 19 X 12 ...

Seascape , 70x70cm, print on canvas Edition 20 pcs.

Set of Six Hand Coloured Botanical Prints/Lithographs and Engravings Published by G. Ridgway, S. Curtis, W. Baxter and W. Fitch Early Mid 19th Century Size: image: 8.5 x 5.5 inches P...

Set of Six Hand Coloured Botanical Prints/Lithographs and Engravings Published by G. Ridgway, S. Curtis, W. Baxter and W. Fitch Early Mid 19th Century Size: image: 9.5 x 5.5 inches P...