John Dixon (English, born Ireland, 1720/30-1804)
after John Hamilton Mortimer (English, 1740-1779)
An Incantation
INV-1332
John Dixon (English, born Ireland, 1720/30-1804)
after John Hamilton Mortimer (English, 1740-1779)1772
An Incantation
John Dixon (English, born Ireland, 1720/30-1804) after John Hamilton Mortimer (English, 1740-1779) →mezzotintprint
Date
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.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
The Wallace L. DeWolf and Joseph Brooks Fair Collections
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.