Surrealist Still-life Prints

Salvador Dali - Original Handsigned Etching From La Quête du Graal Dimensions: 45 x 33 cm Handsigned Edition: 38/100 (from the rare deluxe suite aside from the standard edition) Cat...

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...

Set of 4 double-page mezzotint engravings, printed in colour and finished by hand. [Published: H. Lentz and H.G. Neubauer, Regensburg, 1737]. An attractive collection of fine plates...

The Forager convenes with the council of miniature sprites in a sylvan glen, the figures delicately illuminated with holographic foil and dimensional details. This elaborate print fe...

Cherry is etching on paper, realized by the French artist and print-maker master Mario Avati (1921-2009). Hand-signed on the lower right and numbered on the lower left in pencil. Ed...

Amsterdam VI is an intriguing early career aquatint dry-needle etch print by renowned French-Dutch artist Olivier Julia. It depicts a detail of an old Amsterdam house facade is both ...

KATSUNORI HAMANISHI (b.1949) SITUATION X (S. 32) Mezzotint Signed, titled and numbered 6/90 in pencil. 13 1/4 x 11 5/8 inches, sheet 18 1/4 x 14 1/2 inches. Excellent condition. She...

Python is a hand-pulled mezzotint in an edition of 25. This is #7/25. Jacob Crook was born in St. Louis, MO in 1985. Crook works primarily in the intagli...

Many Fans by a.muse, 2017 is 15" x 11" -- an original print, dated, titled, signed recto (on front) by artist. An intaglio printmaking process (made on an etching press), the 1/1 w...

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...

Artist: K.B. Hwang Title: Cherries (Music Sheet) Year: 1987 Medium: Mezzotint on BFK Rives, Signed in Pencil Image Size: 7 x 11 inches Paper Size: 13 x 17 inches Frame Size: 16...

Flower and Pot Color mezzotint, 1983 Signed, numbered, and dated in pencil John Szoke Graphics blindstamp, lower right Edition: 150 (100/150) Image si...