Label Text:
These important sheets (together with North West View of St. Donats Castle in Glamorgan Shire, 1775) date to the dawn of aquatint printing in Britain. Aquatint is an intaglio (“recessed-line”) printmaking process that uses an etching ground composed of particles of resin to incise the plate. Its ability to replicate the tonal effects of ink washes made it especially popular in late-eighteenth-century Britain, as painting in watercolor began its ascendency.
Two Brigands Frightening Three Fisherfolk is one of two designs exhibited publicly by Burdett, the first artist to make aquatints in Britain, beginning in 1771. In the same year, Burdett—a surveyor, cartographer, printmaker, and draftsman who was then based in Liverpool—had visited France, where Jean-Baptiste Le Prince had only recently (in 1769) arrived at a resin-ground aquatint method. But the British artist’s technique differs sufficiently from French practices to suggest that he developed it on his own: Burdett drew in acid with a brush on the aquatint ground, and used stopping-out varnish to define large areas of flat tone. Here, Burdett reproduces a wash drawing by John Hamilton Mortimer, who specialized in romantically costumed images of Italian brigands (or “banditti”) inspired by the example of Salvator Rosa.
EEB
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