Art Institute of Chicago

An Incantation

John Dixon (English, born Ireland, 1720/30-1804)

Date

1772

Medium

Mezzotint with touches of engraving in black on ivory laid paper

Culture

England

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

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 .

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