Godfrey Kneller in the context of "John Smith (engraver)"

Mezzotint is a monochrome printmaking process of the intaglio family. It was the first printing process that yielded half-tones without using line- or dot-based techniques like hatching, cross-hatching or stipple. Mezzotint achieves tonality by roughening a metal plate with thousands of little dots made by a metal tool with small teeth, called a "rocker". In printing, the tiny pits in the plate retain the ink when the face of the plate is wiped clean. This technique can achieve a high level of quality and richness in the print, and produce a furniture print which is large and bold enough to be framed and hung effectively in a room.

Mezzotint is often combined with other intaglio techniques, usually etching and engraving, including stipple engraving. The process was especially widely used in England from the eighteenth century, and in France was called la manière anglaise (“the English manner”). Until the 20th century it has mostly been used for reproductive prints to reproduce portraits and other paintings, rather than for original compositions. From the mid-18th century it was somewhat in competition with the other main tonal technique of the day, aquatint.

A boyar or bolyar was a member of the highest rank of the feudal nobility in many Eastern European states, including Bulgaria, Kievan Rus' (and later Russia), Moldavia and Wallachia (and later Romania), Lithuania and among Baltic Germans. Comparable to Dukes/Grand Dukes, Boyars were second only to the ruling princes, grand princes or tsars from the 10th to the 17th centuries.

Monochrome printmaking is a generic term for any printmaking technique that produces only shades of a single color. While the term may include ordinary printing with only two colors — "ink" and "no ink" — it usually implies the ability to produce several intermediate colors between those two extremes.

In contrast with color printing, monochrome printing needs only a single ink and may require only a single pass of the paper through the printing press.

Thomas Betterton (August 1635 – 28 April 1710) was the leading male actor and theatre manager during Restoration England. He was the son of an under-cook to King Charles I and was born in London.

Pyotr Ivanovich Potemkin (Russian: Пётр Ива́нович Потёмкин; 1617–1700), also spelled Potyomkin, was a Russian courtier, diplomat and namestnik of Borovsk during the reigns of tsars Alexis I and Feodor III. He was a voivode during the Russo-Polish War (1654–1667) and took Lublin in 1655 and laid siege to Nyenschantz and Noteborg in 1656. Later he became a stolnik working as the tsar's ambassador.

A kit-cat portrait or kit-kat portrait is a particular size of portrait, less than half-length, but including the hands. The name originates from a famous series of portraits which were commissioned from Godfrey Kneller for members of the Kit-Cat Club, a Whig dining club, to be hung in their meeting place at Barn Elms. They are now mostly in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, with a selection of about twelve displayed in London and others at their satellite locations, including twenty on display at Beningbrough Hall in North Yorkshire.

The Hampton Court Beauties are a series of eight portraits by Sir Godfrey Kneller, commissioned by Queen Mary II, depicting the most glamorous ladies from her court. They adorn the state rooms of King William III at Hampton Court Palace.

They were probably originally commissioned to hang in the "water room" at the palace; however, after his wife's death in 1694, William III moved them to "the eating room downstairs" where they currently hang.

Sir Richard Steele (c. 1671 – 1 September 1729) was an Anglo-Irish writer, playwright and politician best known as the co-founder of the magazine The Spectator alongside his close friend Joseph Addison.