The Great Age of English Mezzotints - Hood Museum of Art

fig. 9. Valentine Green after Joseph Wright of Derby, Experiment on the Air Pump, 1769,mezzotint. Purchased through gifts from the Lathrop Fellows; 2008.10.Several of the earliest mezzotint versions of Wright’s works were themselves exhibited,including Valentine Green’s (1739–1813) Experiment on the Air Pump, published on his own in1769 as his grandest and most complex print to date (fig. 9). The printmaker faithfully renderedthe depiction of a variety of poses and facial expressions, heightening the nighttime drama of afamily observing a traveling lecturer as he demonstrates the potentially lethal effects of his pneumaticdevices. The image’s quality, delicacy, and precision soon attracted the attention of thepublisher John Boydell (1719–1804), who purchased the plate immediately after the exhibitionof Green’s mezzotint and reissued it in late June of the same year.From the 1760s onward in London, the annual exhibitions of the Society of Artists, theRoyal Academy, and other organizations drew large numbers of visitors and critics. The Englishwriter and connoisseur Horace Walpole (1717–1797) complained in 1770 that “the rage to seethese exhibitions is so great that sometimes one cannot pass through the streets.” He immediatelyadded that “another rage is for prints,” with the consequence that prices for mezzotints inparticular—“which I have been collecting for thirty years”—had recently increased by as muchas 500 percent (Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 211). In addition to these major events, regular displayscould be found at print shops around the city. In one humorous composition of 1773, Miss Macaroniand Her Gallant at a Print Shop (fig. 10), John Raphael Smith (1751–1812) represented10