Miss Kitty Dressing
Thomas Watson
1781
- Medium
- Mezzotint, with traces of engraving, in dark brown on ivory laid paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 40.9 × 32.9 cm (16 1/8 × 13 in.); Plate: 45.3 × 33 cm (17 7/8 × 13 in.); Sheet: 58.7 × 46 cm (23 1/8 × 18 1/8 in.)
- Genre
- mezzotint
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago
Tags
mezzotintprintprints and drawingpaper (fiber product)
About
Thomas Watson was one of the most gifted mezzotint engravers of his generation. In this intimate and slightly humorous example after a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, he achieved a convincing sense of interior candlelight illumination through his soft touch. The portraits in this image appear to depict the same girls found in Wright’s similarly lit composition An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, an oil painting now in the National Gallery in London.
