A Representation of the Meteor Seen at Paddington about 12 Minutes before 11 o'clock, on the Evening of the 11th of Feb. 1850

At twelve minutes before 11 PM on the evening of February 11, 1850, a brilliant meteor streaked across London's night sky before exploding in a dazzling burst of trailing flames. The meteor provided a dramatic celestial show directly over one of the largest cities in the world, and immediately became an object of study, recorded and published in many scientific journals and newspaper accounts. By good luck, the painter and sculptor Matthew Cotes Wyatt happened to witness the meteor over Paddington; sensing a market, he published this velvety mezzotint of the view two months later. Mezzotint is a time-consuming process in which the artist roughens the copper plate so that the whole surface holds ink and can print in black; the printmaker then coaxes the image out of the blackness by burnishing away the bits that should be white, smoothing the plate so the surface will not hold ink in those spots. The technique had largely gone out of fashion by 1850, but the rich darks and brilliant lights that it allows were a perfect choice for this dramatic nighttime scene.