“A noted Oyster Room near the Theatres—Time 3 o’Clock in the Morning.”

Samuel Alken Jr. and Thomas Sutherland.

“A noted Oyster Room near the Theatres—Time 3 o’Clock in the Morning.”

London:

Thomas Kelly,

1823, with the plate used to print it.

Purchased with funds donated by Florence Fearrington through the good offices of Terry Belanger.

Like mezzotint, aquatint is an intaglio printing process in which the surface of the printing plate is distressed to achieve gradations of tone. To identify an aquatint, one looks for different levels of graining in the image caused by various levels of etching; the grain will appear as small islands of white in a black sea. RBS owns a set of eight steel-faced copper aquatinted plates “engraved” by Thomas Sutherland from drawings by the British sporting artist Samuel Alken Jr. (1784–1825), who specialized in hunting and sporting scenes.

From the collection of Rare Book School