Facsimile reprint of the first edition originally published in London in 1883 by Henry Sotheran & Co. 'Mezzotint' is a printing process of the intaglio family, in which the surface of a metal plate is roughened evenly; the image is then brought out by smoothing the surface, creating the image by working from dark to light. The mezzotint technique, invented in Germany in the 1640s, found its apogee in 18th-century England as the ideal medium for reproducing oil paintings. The method is tonal rather than linear: the forms and highlights are pulled out of an overall dark background by scraping or burnishing in the highlights. Whereas a few painters, notably Thomas Frye, became gifted mezzotinters, the most skilfull practitioners like John Raphael Smith, Valentine Green and Richard Earlom were professional engravers who made brilliant interpretive plates after England's best-known artists including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Zoffany, Stubbs and Joseph Wright of Derby. The proper appreciation of mezzotints depends crucially on two absolute prerequisites: the quality of the impression and the condition of the paper.

Such is the nature of the technique that a mezzotint plate can only give a small number of impressions before the burr on the plate gets worn down by the pressure of printing, so that what should print black and velvety comes out looking flat and grey. Despite its date, still a standard reference work for mezzotints. Very scarce.