?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
WALLERANT VAILLANT Young Artist with a Statue of Cupid.
Mezzotint, circa 1665. 277x213 mm; 10 7/8x8 3/8 inches, small margins. A very good impression of this scarce, early mezzotint.
Vaillant (1623-1677) was a Dutch Golden Age painter-printmaker. Born in Lille, he came from a family of artists, he studied in Antwerp and Amsterdam and stayed in Paris for several years during the mid-1650s. In 1658, he traveled with his brother to Frankfurt and Heidelberg, where he helped master the mezzotint technique of engraving with Prince Ruprecht of the Rhine while he was his artistic tutor.
Prince Ruprecht (1619-1682) and Vaillant are credited with improving the nascent process of mezzotint engraving that had been developed by Ludwig von Siegen around 1654. This labor-intensive process, in which a prepared plate was burnished in order to bring out the subject (working from dark to light), was created and used, for much of the following century that it remained popular, to reproduce paintings--namely subjects by masters like Caravaggio, Ribera and others imbued with heavy chiaroscuro.
Prince Ruprecht was also a nephew of Charles I (reigned 1625-1649), and commanded the royalist forces during the English Civil War (1642-1648). He demonstrated the new technique of mezzotint to the Royal Society in London in 1661.
