11. Sir Frank Short (1857-1945)
after J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851)

Ehrenbreitstein to Coblenz, No. 2

(click on image to print)
Ehrenbreitstein, No. 2

Ehrenbreitstein to Coblenz, No. 2

Soft-ground etching and mezzotint, 1913, 274 x 397 mm., Hardie 95. Very fine impression on chine-appliqué with large, full margins, signed in pencil. Twenty-three years after his first approach, Short made a second print of the same Turner watercolor, larger, more detailed and in mezzotint rather than aquatint. Though clearly the same subject, the two could not be more different, the first embodying a spontaneous response to a vision, the second more carefully balancing the effects and including many details passed over in the first. Which to prefer is a matter of taste, but No. 2 uses all the available subtleties of mezzotint technique to gradate the intensities of shadows and reflections and is a magnificent translation of Turner’s watercolor.