An Incantation
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.)
Classification
mezzotint
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
133282
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
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.