Floral Still Life with a Sunflower

Art Historical Context

In the late Baroque era around 1690, German engraver Elias Christoph Heiss crafted *Floral Still Life with Sunflower*, a delicate mezzotint print on laid paper measuring just 18.2 x 14.4 cm. Heiss, active in Augsburg, was among the early masters of mezzotint—a revolutionary intaglio technique invented in the 1640s that allowed artists to achieve lush, painterly effects through a textured "rocked" copper plate, producing deep velvety blacks and subtle tonal gradations unmatched by earlier engraving methods. This small-scale work captures the opulent beauty of flowers, with the sunflower—a New W...