Francesco Bartolozzi was born in Florence, Italy on 25 September 1725. He was the son of a goldsmith, who early taught the use of the burin to his boy who, when ten years of age, engraved two heads which gave promise of his future powers. At the Florentine Academy, he learnt to work in oil, chalks and aquarelle. Unsurpassed by any artist of his day in his knowledge of anatomy and with a passion for the antique, the young Bartolozzi became a master in depicting beauty of expression, movement, and form. He was originally destined to follow the profession of his father, but exhibited so much skill and taste in design that he was instead placed under the supervision of Ignazio Hugford (1703-78) and Giovanni Domenico Ferretti (1692-1768), who instructed him in painting. After devoting three years to that art, he went to Venice and at the age of 18, was apprenticed to the Venetian historical engraver Joseph Wagner. His first productions in Venice were plates in the style of Marco Ricci, Zuccarelli, and others. After six years, with the end of his apprenticeship, he married Lucia Ferro and the young pair, at the invitation of Cardinal Giovanni Gaetano Bottari, spent some time in Rome. There, he produced a set of engravings representing the frescoes at Grottaferrata by Domenichino depicting the life of St Nilus. Returning to Venice, his fame grew rapidly. In 1763 he met Richard Dalton, art dealer and Librarian to King George III, who invited him to London and promised him the post of Engraver to the King and dangled before him the prospect of a three-year contract to engrave a series of paintings by 17th-century Italian painter Guercino. Bartolozzi set out for England the following year. Soon after arriving in London, he gained the promised appointment, with a salary of £300 a year. A great proportion of his work was drawn from the art of Giovanni Batista Cipriani and Angelica Kauffmann. He also made many engravings of paintings by Italian masters. Bartolozzi’s work was admired for its subtle modulations of light and shade and his sensitive and graceful portrayal of the human form. He also contributed a number of plates to John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. Such was the esteem of his peers and the King, he was appointed a Founding Member of the Royal Academy in 1768. It remains a matter of some puzzlement that despite being one of Europe’s finest printmakers, he was elected to that august body as a painter, rather than an engraver. However, after Bartolozzi’s election, the RA refused to allow engravers to become full members for 80 years. The Academicians argued that the work of printmakers was merely mechanical copying, a position rejected by the engravers and most of them boycotted the RA in consequence. In London, he engraved over two thousand plates, nearly all in the stipple or the ‘red-chalk style’, a method recently invented by the French, but brought into vogue and elevated into a distinct art by Bartolozzi. He devoted himself to the human figure, and his engravings abound in sweet and tender types of beauty, graceful in form and outline. Everywhere are found delicate modulations of light and shade with a roundness, finish, and suggestion of flesh never before seen in engraved work. Bartolozzi’s drawing was superb; and although he was a reproductive artist, he improved the work he copied, especially the drawing, even Sir Joshua Reynolds thanking him for such a service. His pupils called him ‘the god of drawing’. His splendid line work was obscured by the great popularity attained by his stippled prints, and his few etchings show a free, bold, and unfettered sweep of line. They, too, were reproduced from pictures by others, but the translation always improved on the original. Among Bartolozzi’s best reproductions are the Royal Academy Diploma, The Marlborough Gems, the Illustrations to Shakespeare, and some of his small Tickets, all in stipple; and The Silence and Clytie, engraved in pure line. He also successfully used the new stipple technique to reproduce the famous coloured portrait drawings of Holbein from the Royal Collection at Windsor in 1793. In 1802 he became the founding president of the short-lived Society of Engravers. In 1802 Bartolozzi accepted the post of Director of the National Academy of Lisbon, was knighted and died there on 7 March 1815. He was buried in the church of Saint Isabella. His son Gaetano Stefano Bartolozzi was also an engraver.