Ben Arthur

The master etcher and teacher Frank Short did much to revive the tonal technique of mezzotint in the late nineteenth century. In 1885 he began re-creating many of the drawings J. M. W. Turner had made for his own mixed-intaglio series, the Liber Studiorum (itself inspired by Claude Lorrain’s Liber Veritatis, in the Earlom mezzotint edition). In Ben Arthur, one of the forty-seven plates Short reproduced from the Liber Studiorum, the image begins in darkness—to be gradually revealed as the printmaker scrapes out lighter areas with a burnishing tool. Short was not only a master of translation of others’ works into mezzotint. He also used aquatint and etching for the direct expression of landscape, sometimes even taking prepared plates down to the Thames River and capturing the tones and textures of the bridges, ships, and water from along the shore.