Print collector's quarterly (6.1916)

spontaneous quality of sketches. This quality, so rare
in portrait engraving, was peculiarly natural to Leoni,
who combined an instinctive facility with the knowl-
edge and skill of a portraitist of long experience. In
fact, one is tempted to regret that he did not disregard
the conventional forms and continue working in this
freer and more unconscious early manner. The early
plates are indeed so different in method and spirit that
they can hardly be said to lead up to those which follow;
the change is so sudden and decided that it is difficult to
account for, and one wonders whether these early plates
were done as a preparation for his later task, or whether,
on the other hand, they were not casual experiments,
which aroused his interest and inspired him with the idea
of producing a set of portraits of interesting personages.
In any case, Leoni approached this latter undertaking
in a wholly different spirit; banishing all suggestion of
sketches and studies, and devoting himself to produc-
ing a “uniform edition” of finished plates,' all of them
about the same size, and consistent in style and treat-
ment, — the portraits framed in with a neat moulding,
signed, dated, and with the name inscribed in proper
Latin form; accepting, in short, all the usual forms and
conventions of portrait engraving: everything which the
public of the time wanted and expected in a published
plate. He also dropped the more free and spontaneous
methods of his first plates, forcing himself to work on a
smaller scale, more carefully and precisely, and more or
less according to a deliberate system.
But in spite of the rather conventional ambition with
which he set to work on the plates of this published
series, they showed from the beginning certain decidedly
original traits. First of all, in the heads, instead of

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