Northern Lights, Bossekop, January 19, 1839 at 7.40 pm

Northern lights on the sky above an open landscape. Himely was a Swiss artist who participated in expeditions to the Arctic where he found motifs from Finnmark, Svalbard and the Faroe Islands. The technique he used for the prints like this is called aquatint, which is to carve or etch mark on the surface of a plate of copper or zinc, fill the markings with paint and the plate is then put thru a printing press with paper to produce a negative image of the carved image.