An engraving begins with refusal. The burin does not glide the way a pen glides; it plows, lifting a bright curl of copper ahead of the cut. Every line on the finished print was once a furrow: ink held below the surface of the plate, which is all intaglio has ever meant.

Before printing, the plate is inked and then wiped almost clean. What stays in the furrows becomes the image; what stays on the surface — a breath of gray the printer chooses to leave — is called plate tone, and it is where the mood of an impression lives.

This is why no two impressions are twins. The plate wears, the paper cockles differently, the printer’s hand is a day older. Connoisseurs read impressions the way tasters read vintages1 — and the words they reach for, silvery, burred, exhausted, describe the plate’s life as much as the picture.

burin — the engraver’s steel, lozenge-shaped in section, pushed with the palm rather than dragged like a pen. intaglio — Italian intagliare, “to cut in”: any print whose ink sits in recessed lines rather than on raised surfaces. 1 — The habit is old: Adam Bartsch was grading “qualities of impression” in his catalogues by 1803.