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Born at Bordeaux in 1827, Lalanne died in 1886. Strangely enough, illustrator as he was, his transpositions into black and white of subjects by Troyon, Ruysdael, Crome, Constable, and many others are not so striking either in actual technique or individual grasp as his original pieces. Constable, for instance, is thin, diffuse, and without richness. Mezzotinted by the hands of such a man as Lucas, we recognise the real medium for translating the English painter. A master of the limpid line, Lalanne shows you a huddled bit of Amsterdam or a distant view of Bordeaux, or that delicious prospect taken on a spot somewhere below the Pont Saint-Michel, with the Pont Neuf and the Louvre in the background. He had a feeling for those formal gardens which have captured within their enclosure a moiety of nature's unstudied ease. The plate called Aux Environs de Paris reveals this. And what slightly melancholy tenderness there is in Le Canal
Mead and others, were engraved by Arthur Pond and John Knapton; and in 1777 a series of about two hundred of the Duke of Devonshire's drawings was published by Alderman Boydell, which had been etched and mezzotinted by Richard Earlom, under the title of Liber Veritatis. This was the model on which Turner founded the publication of his own sketches under the title of Liber Studiorum.
At this time he was twenty-eight, and may therefore be assumed to be accurately represented in the portrait painted by Kneller in 1716, and mezzotinted a year later by Smith. Here he appears as a slight, delicate young man, wearing a close-fitting vest or tunic, and, in lieu of a wig, the dressing or "night-cap" which took its place.
The inquiry took time which he might better have spent in day-dreaming before the prospect of the gray March heaven, with the combs of the roofs and the chimney-pots mezzotinted against it.
Over the dull white marble mantelpiece hung a huge mezzotint, of violent contrast in black and white, a picture whose subject had without doubt given it the place of honour in this old-fashioned, tasteless, homely, comfortable room. It bore for a title The Fall of Nineveh, and it was designed and mezzotinted by John Martin. Let us look at this picture.
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