The Best Portraits in Engraving

Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator and abolitionist, turned his formidable eloquence to a surprising subject: the art of engraving. In this 1875 volume, he mounts a passionate defense of an art form often dismissed as mere reproduction, arguing that the finest portrait engravers transcend copying to achieve something profoundly original. Through detailed examinations of masters like Albrecht Dürer, whose crystalline precision seems to trap light itself on copper, and Rembrandt, whose atmospheric burin work captures the flutter of a living expression, Sumner reveals how engraving demands not just technical mastery but genuine artistic vision. He traces the evolution of the medium, showing how artists across centuries solved the same impossible puzzle: how to translate the softness of human skin, the depth of a gaze, the weight of a presence into the language of incised lines. This is Victorian art criticism at its most fervent, a book that insists engraving is no handmaiden to painting but a sovereign art with its own truths to tell.