Portrait of Mathew Stevenson

Art Historical Context

Step into the elegant world of 18th- to early 19th-century portraiture with William Richardson's *Portrait of Stevenson*, a delicate engraving now housed in the Metropolitan Museum Art's Drawings and Prints. Created during a time when printed portraits democratized access to likenesses of notable figures, this work captures the refined style of the Georgian era, where engravings served as affordable alternatives to paintings for collectors and the emerging middle class. Engraving, the medium here, involved incising fine lines into a metal plate with a burin, inking it, and pressing paper to t...