Bartolozzi has been called the Achilles of eighteenth-century engraving, and certainly his productiveness and his influence were on quite an heroic scale; nor was the vulnerable heel wanting to complete the simile. This was his spendthrift love of epicurean living, which gradually dulled his artistic conscience until it made no attempt to distinguish between the demands of art and a commercial popularity. Luxurious in his habits, free with his hospitality, generous to a fault with his purse, he looked with a satisfied eye on the ever-expanding market for the coloured stipple-print, which practically he had created, or, at least, auspicated with beautiful offerings. And as he saw that the public would now accept almost anything tendered to it in the name of a colour-print, however meretricious the design or poor the engraving, he seems to have sacrificed artistic scruples to the constant need of money-making. If his purse was a sieve, the popular craze for colour prints must keep on filling it. So Bartolozzi, the great and famous engraver, whose sure draughtsmanship had long been as a leaning-staff to the printsellers and many an artist, actually encouraged vain but incompetent amateurs, several of them quite pleasant ladies with pretty ideas, to make feeble, mawkish designs, which perhaps he would correct in drawing, before giving them to often half-fledged engravers, and turning them upon the market in poorly, hurriedly stippled plates, specious in coloured inks. As his best pupils, Tomkins, Cheesman, Schiavonetti, Ogborne, Marcuard, left him, and set up as independent engravers, Bartolozzi’s studio, with its innumerable workers, gradually developed into little more than a factory for turning out popular prints as rapidly as possible. This hurry for the market seems, however, to have affected not only Bartolozzi and his engravers, but the printselling world generally. The art critic of the “Monthly Mirror” for 1796, while blaming the printsellers as the cause, protested against the “slovenly and imperfect manner” in which so many prints were being turned out, declaring, moreover, that this was influencing the painters to an indifference about the execution of such works as were intended for prints, making them “contented to satisfy the print or bookseller with the mere effect of light and shade.”