Bathsheba, from A Collection of Prints in Imitation of Drawings

Publisher John Boydell sought to elevate the stature of British connoisseurship of art and to rival France in the production and trade of prints. This print by William Wynne Ryland is a copy of a drawing by François Boucher, now in the British Museum, that was once owned by well-known collector William Esdaile.Ryland’s studies of crayon-manner engraving in Paris inspired him to develop a simplified version he called stipple engraving, in which a series of dots are punched into a metal plate with a sharp needle tool. Although stipple engraving did not catch on at this time, it gained popularity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a means to reproduce the varying tonalities of paintings.