"Noble or Commercial? The Early History of Mezzotint in Britain" by Ben Thomas

CITATION: Thomas, Ben. "Noble or Commercial? The Early History of Mezzotint in Britain." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 279-296. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How was mezzotint conceived in early modern Britain?
• Answer: Mezzotint was presented as an exotic trade in order to conceal its function.
• Method: Thomas collects records about mezzotint, its tools, its uses, and investigations into its origins. He describes the reaction from the Royal Society as initially open to the novelty of mezzotint, but soon after concerned with analytical observations.
• Assumptions: Thomas responds to a history of technology wherein technologies (like mezzotint) are rapidly introduced and publicly practiced. More importantly, Thomas works within a fraught system of commerciality and nobility. In the Restoration, the two terms become increasingly ambiguous, and the trades and sciences invoked do not help providing a clear distinction.
• Sententiae: "While it is certainly suggestive to find Huygens, the author of a treatise on light, and Boyle, who theorised that dark colours are related to rough surfaces, taking an interest in the first purely tonal printmaing method, it is also clear that prints were a peripheral concern for most royal society members." (293)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Thomas' essay pushes in a few too many directions at once for an explicit thesis: he doesn't fully address the implications of the mezzotint for the history of science, he concludes that it was not discussed in terms of the history of the trades, he does not discuss in great detail how it moved from commercial viability to un-viability. In part, this is because of the fraught nature of terms like "noble" and "commercial," which are not strongly linked to the trades or sciences that Thomas invokes.
• Synthesis: Thomas' essay seems at a glance like a compliment to Hunter's "Theory of Impression": both relate the Royal Society to the printed image. However, Hunter's essay addresses the philosophical implications behind scholarly images, whereas Thomas' essay shakes off such an association (as in the sententious quote).
  This essay also works alongside Fowler's thesis in favor of Renaissance Realism, insofar as one recognizable element of realism (light) was recognized and manipulated by the early moderns.
• Application: The economics of mezzotint seem to remove it from popular culture, but it would be interesting to see whether mezzotint prints were imitated and adopted for forms of lower culture, in the manner described by St. Clair for book sizes.