To make a mezzotint, an artist roughens the entire surface of a copper plate with a fine-toothed, crescent-shaped tool called a rocker. If inked at this stage, the plate would print a solid, velvety black. The artist then creates the image by partially scraping and burnishing away areas of the roughened plate to yield a range of dark-to-light tones. The mezzotint reached the height of its popularity in eighteenth-century England, when the medium was widely used to reproduce paintings, particularly portraits. Here are two states—or changes that the artist made to the plate—for a mezzotint of the famous actor David Garrick in the role of Kitely, a jealous husband from Ben Johnson’s comedy Every Man in his Humor. In the early, velvety black state the rocker marks are still visible at the bottom—neither the lettering identifying the print nor the highlights have been added yet.