Katsunori Hamanishi Still-life Prints

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...

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...

This image is #17 of an edition of 35 Born in Charleroi, Belgium, Ravaux is an artist who mirrors her surroundings in the mezzotints she creates. She has portrayed see more . . . th...

This colored botanical mezzotint and line engraving finished with hand coloring by Johann Wilhelm Weinmann (1683-1741) is entitled "A. Ephemerum Virginianu flore Purpureo, B. Ephemer...

Rio Osmarin shows boats on the canal Rio de S. Provolo o de l'Osmarin in Venice) It was created in 2006 and this impression is #31 of 75 It is signed, titled, numbered and dated by...

This hand-colored botanical mezzotint and line engraving by Johann Wilhelm Weinmann (1683-1741) is entitled "A. Lathyrus Major Peremis Richern B. Lathyrus Narbonensis Flore Albescen...

Engraving with original hand-colouring. 1834. 230mm by 155mm. From Paxton's 'Magazine of botany and register of flowering plants' by Sir Joseph Paxton.

This color intaglio of the "New York Stock Exchange" was issued in a limited edition of 100. This impression is one of the Artist Proofs from the edition. The Stock Exchange is seen from Federal Hall...

The marriage between the art of science and the art of seeing was cemented by the invention of the lens. It is FIROS #48 in the catalogue raisonne. Carol Wax originally trained to b...

This hand-colored botanical mezzotint and line engraving by Johann Wilhelm Weinmann (1683-1741) is entitled "Pisum Mapis flore pupureo". It is plate 818 in Weinmann's monumental publ...

This black and white mezzotint is in an edition of 30. It is titled, numbered #1/30 and signed in pencil. Holly Downing is a painter and printmaker who has been making mezzotint e...