An Incantation
John Dixon
1772
- Medium
- Mezzotint with touches of engraving in black on ivory laid paper
- Dimensions
- Image/plate: 61 × 48.5 cm (24 1/16 × 19 1/8 in.); Sheet: 66.9 × 51.5 cm (26 3/8 × 20 5/16 in.)
- Genre
- mezzotint
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago
Tags
engraving (printing process)mezzotintprintingprintprints and drawingpaper (fiber product)
About
The Romantic painter John Hamilton Mortimer etched a series of Shakespearean heads in the mode of Thomas Frye’s Life-Sized Heads. However, this encounter between a powerful, aged sorceress and a terrified maiden has no literary source. Mortimer invented it himself, possibly responding to a critic’s assertion that Shakespeare was the only English genius who could successfully depict the preternatural realm. Dixon published another theatrical mezzotint that same year, Mr. Garrick in Richard III.
