Jacques Barraband Art

Covey of Grouse I is a celebration of game birds in flight. A moment after taking off the birds have scattered in an explosion of aerial speed and agility. The etching reveal the d...

Covey of Grouse II – a celebration of birds in flight. Guy Allen’s etchings inspired by the fauna of Norfolk have a remarkable level of detail. His etchings capture the character a...

Plate 13 from La Suite Vollard. Bloch 229. Baer 444. Etching on Montval paper. Signed in pencil, from the edition of 260 (there was also an edition of 50 with larger margins). Printe...

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...

Rebecca Warren 1990 2007 Lithographic print on MDF, with pom-pom, cotton thread, wood shaving, twig, and wood chip 16 x 9 x 3 inches; 41 x 23 x 8 cm Edi...

paper: 22 x 15 in. printed image: 4 3/4 x 6 in. english translation: Long Hand Crab Latin

Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, Plate No. 26; Cocoa plant, caterpillar, pupa, and butterflies. The Netherlands: 1705. En...

Artist: William Augustus Osbaldiston (English, Active: Late 18th Century) Titles: "Coursing" (Plate 3), "Hawking" (Plate 7), and "Hare Hunting" (Plate 8) Portfolio: The British Sport...

Etching and drypoint on cream wove paper, full margins. Signed and numbered 59/75 in pencil, lower margin. Notations in pencil along the lower sheet edge, recto, well outside of ima...

Takashi Murakami Flowers Skateboard Deck: A collaboration between Takashi Murakami and his friend, the rising Japanese artist 'Madsaki' (bio below). The impression is an urban twist...

"Que pico de Oro" (What a Golden Beak) - Etching and Aquatint on Paper 5th or 8th edition print of "Que pico de Oro" from the Los Caprichos with burnished aquatints, drypoints etchi...

"Three Herons" - Hand Watercolor Engraving "Three Herons" from a collection of the Most Rare Birds Drawn and Engraved From Life, A Natural and Rational History of the Different Bird...