A NEW MEZZOTINT
We have received from Messrs. P. and D. Colnaghi & Co. an impression of a mezzotint by Mr. H. Scott Bridgwater after Raeburn’s portrait of Mrs. Home Drummond of Blair Drummond, which they have just published. Raeburn loses nothing in Mr. Bridgwater’s translation, indeed the mezzotint has greater merit as a work of art than the original picture; we have seen no modern engraving in mezzotint which we can regard as its equal. Mr. Bridgwater has produced a work worthy to rank with the best mezzotint engraving of the eighteenth century—with the work even of such a master of the art as J. R. Smith; and this portrait of Mrs. Drummond is very much superior to some of the eighteenth-century mezzotints for which absurd prices are being paid by people who regard everything that comes from the eighteenth century with indiscriminating admiration. We do not believe that anyone of taste and judgement, who was not blinded by the eighteenth-century glamour, could seriously maintain that any mezzotint of Valentine Green’s is to be compared as a work of art with Mr. Bridgwater’s latest work. We have little enough to boast of in modern artistic production; let us at least recognize good work when we meet with it; the best work of modern artists has been done in black and white, and most of the modern works of art that are really worth collecting are drawings or etchings; to these we can now add some mezzotints, among which Mr. Bridgwater’s Mrs. Drummond is perhaps the most notable. The issue is restricted to 350 impressions, all artist’s proofs.