Roeiboten op rivier bij maanlicht 1843 - 1856

This river scene was made by Jacobus Sörensen sometime in the mid-19th century, and it’s rendered in a printmaking technique called mezzotint. This painstaking process involves roughening the entire plate with a tool called a rocker, then smoothing out areas to create lighter tones. Looking closely, you can see the way that the mezzotint process results in a very fine gradation of light and shadow across the scene. The velvety blacks of the foreground gradually dissolve into the silvery tones of the moonlit sky. The artist would have spent hours scraping the metal plate to achieve this effect, a laborious process that demanded great skill and patience. In its own way, mezzotint was an early form of mechanical reproduction; these prints would have been relatively inexpensive to purchase. Consider the lives of the figures in this print, who are presumably working late on the river, in contrast to the artist’s own labor, and the many people who could possess this image. It reminds us how the Industrial Revolution changed not only the world, but how we see it.