Label Text:
Mezzotint is a variation of the drypoint technique. Its smooth tonal gradations and delicate textures are well suited to night views. After scoring the plate with a serrated tool (called a rocker) to create a dark tone when printed, the artist introduces light areas by scraping and burnishing the plate smooth. This process was valued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a means to replicate oil paintings; nineteenth-century artists, in contrast, embraced the medium’s potential for original, “painterly” prints.
Perhaps intrigued by tonal printmaking processes while printing for Arthur B. Davies (two of whose prints are displayed nearby), Haskell experimented with mezzotint between 1919 and 1920. Eagle Rock is likely an imagined landscape in the same vein as his etched cloud studies from this period. Its dramatic depth is remarkable for its small scale, an effect which links this twentieth-century print with its painted antecedents.
KG, How He Was to His Talents exhibition, March 24, 2011-August 7, 2011
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+1996.195 |
