Mezzotint is a form of tonal engraving. The engraver first creates a surface that will print solid black by roughening the surface of a copper plate with a serrated tool called a 'rocker'. This process raises a fragile burr of displaced copper which will hold a lot of printing ink. The design is then created by smoothing this burr in varying degrees to print a range of velvety tones. For white highlights, the engraver polishes the burr completely away, making the plate perfectly smooth once more, so no ink will adhere after the surface has been wiped. Mezzotint is particularly suited to reproducing the tonal gradations of painting.

John Smith was the most important mezzotinter in late Stuart England as well as being a print publisher. A generation before the now more famous William Hogarth, he was the first native born British printmaker to earn an international reputation. Active from 1683 to 1729 he made his name and his fortune as the creator of portrait mezzotints but in the same period he also made or published 'subject' mezzotints, a blanket term for everything which is not a portrait.

Smith was taught mezzotinting by Isaac Beckett who learnt the technique from John Lloyd, who in turn learnt it from the Dutch printmaker Abraham Blooteling (1640-1690) who was resident in London from 1673-1680. Smith began his career around 1683 mezzotinting portraits for other publishers but by 1687 was beginning to act as his own publisher and by the early 1690s had taken over from Isaac Beckett (died 1688) as the mezzotinter who had an agreement with Kneller to reproduce his portraits. This professional partnership between an artist and a printmaker is similar to one or two other important examples of the same phenomenon (Raphael and Marcantonio Raimondi, John Constable and David Lucas) in being a crucial vehicle for the dissemination of a painter's work at the same time as it pushed a talented printmaker to new heights of achievement.