The etching revival was the re-emergence and invigoration of
etching
Etching is traditionally the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio (incised) in the metal. In modern manufacturing, other chemicals may be used on other types ...
as an original form of
printmaking
Printmaking is the process of creating artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand processed techniq ...
during the period approximately from 1850 to 1930. The main centres were France, Britain and the United States, but other countries, such as the Netherlands, also participated. A strong collector's market developed, with the most sought-after artists achieving very high prices. This came to an abrupt end after the
1929 Wall Street crash wrecked what had become a very strong market among collectors, at a time when the typical style of the movement, still based on 19th-century developments, was becoming outdated.
According to
Bamber Gascoigne
Arthur Bamber Gascoigne (24 January 1935 – 8 February 2022) was an English television presenter and author. He was the original quizmaster on ''University Challenge'', which initially ran from 1962 to 1987.
Early life and education
Gasco ...
, the "most visible characteristic of
he movement.. was an obsession with
surface tone", created by deliberately not wiping all the ink off the surface of the printing plate, so that parts of the image have a light tone from the film of ink left. This and other characteristics reflected the influence of
Rembrandt
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (, ; 15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669), usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker and draughtsman. An innovative and prolific master in three media, he is generally consid ...
, whose reputation had by this point reached its full height.
![Moving into the Boat MET DP822242 (cropped)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Moving_into_the_Boat_MET_DP822242_%28cropped%29.jpg)
Although some artists owned their own printing presses, the movement created the new figure of the star printer, who worked closely with artists to exploit all the possibilities of the etching technique, with variable inking,
surface tone and ''retroussage'', and the use of different papers. Societies and magazines were also important, publishing albums of varied original prints by different artists in fixed editions.
![Charles Meryon, The Apse of Notre-Dame, Paris, 1854 II](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Charles_Meryon%2C_The_Apse_of_Notre-Dame%2C_Paris%2C_1854_II.jpg)
The most common subjects were landscapes and townscapes, portraits, and genre scenes of ordinary people. The mythological and historical subjects
still very prominent in contemporary painting rarely feature. Etching was the dominant technique, but many plates combined this with
drypoint
Drypoint is a printmaking technique of the intaglio family, in which an image is incised into a plate (or "matrix") with a hard-pointed "needle" of sharp metal or diamond point. In principle, the method is practically identical to engraving. The ...
in particular; the basic action of creating the lines on the plate for these was essentially the same as in
drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art in which an artist uses instruments to mark paper or other two-dimensional surface. Drawing instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, various kinds of paints, inked brushes, colored pencils, crayons, ...
, and fairly easy for a trained artist to pick up. Sometimes other
intaglio printmaking techniques were used:
engraving
Engraving is the practice of incising a design onto a hard, usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it with a Burin (engraving), burin. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or Glass engraving, glass ...
,
mezzotint
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 tonali ...
and
aquatint
Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching that produces areas of tone rather than lines. For this reason it has mostly been used in conjunction with etching, to give both lines and shaded tone. It has also been used h ...
, all of which used more specialized actions on the plate. Artists then had to learn the mysteries of "biting" the plate with acid; this was not needed with pure drypoint, which was one of its attractions.
Historical outline
During the century after Rembrandt's death the techniques of etching and drypoint brought to their highest point by him gradually declined. By the late eighteenth century, with brilliant exceptions like
Piranesi,
Tiepolo
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo ( , ; March 5, 1696 – March 27, 1770), also known as Giambattista (or Gianbattista) Tiepolo, was an Italian painter and printmaker from the Republic of Venice who painted in the Rococo style, considered an import ...
and
Goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (; ; 30 March 174616 April 1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His paintings, drawings, and ...
most etchings were reproductive or illustrative. In England the situation was slightly better, with
Samuel Palmer
Samuel Palmer Hon.RE (Hon. Fellow of the Society of Painter-Etchers) (27 January 180524 May 1881) was a British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker. He was also a prolific writer. Palmer was a key figure in Romanticism in Britain and p ...
,
John Sell Cotman
John Sell Cotman (16 May 1782 – 24 July 1842) was an English marine and landscape painter, etcher, illustrator, author and a leading member of the Norwich School of painters.
Born in Norwich, the son of a silk merchant and lace dealer, Co ...
,
John Crome
John Crome (22 December 176822 April 1821), once known as Old Crome to distinguish him from his artist son John Berney Crome, was an English landscape painter of the Romantic era, one of the principal artists and founding members of the Norw ...
and others producing fine original etchings, mostly of landscape subjects, in the early decades of the 19th century.
The Etching Club
The Etching Club (also known as Etching Club, the London Etching Club, and the British Etching Club; or the Junior Etching Club for its younger membership grouped separately) was an artists' society founded in London, England, in 1838 by Charl ...
, founded in 1838, continued to maintain the medium.
As the century progressed, new technical developments, especially
lithography
Lithography () is a planographic method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone (lithographic limestone) or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by the German a ...
, which was gradually able to
print successfully in colour, further depressed the use of etching. The style typical of the Etching Revival really begins in France with the prints of the
Barbizon School
The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement towards Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name f ...
in the 1840s and 50s. A number of artists, mainly painters, produced some landscape etchings which seemed to recapture some of the spirit of the
Old Master print
An old master print is a work of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition. The term remains current in the art trade, and there is no easy alternative in English to distinguish the works of "fine art" produced in printmakin ...
.
Charles-François Daubigny
Charles-François Daubigny ( , , ; 15 February 181719 February 1878) was a French painter, one of the members of the Barbizon school, and is considered an important precursor of impressionism.
He was also a prolific printmaker, mostly in etchin ...
,
Millet
Millets () are a highly varied group of small-seeded grasses, widely grown around the world as cereal crops or grains for fodder and human food. Most species generally referred to as millets belong to the tribe Paniceae, but some millets al ...
and especially
Charles Jacque
Charles-Émile Jacque (23 May 1813 – 7 May 1894) was a French painter of Pastoralism and engraver who was, with Jean-François Millet, part of the Barbizon School. He first learned to engrave maps when he spent seven years in the French Army.
...
produced etchings that were different from those heavily worked reproductive plates of the previous century. The dark, grand and often vertical format townscapes of
Charles Meryon, also mostly from the 1850s, provided models for a very different type of subject and style which was to remain in use until the end of the revival, though more in Britain than France.
The steel-facing of plates was a technical development patented in 1857 which "immediately revolutionized the print business". It allowed a very thin coating of iron to be added to a copper plate by
electroplating
Electroplating, also known as electrochemical deposition or electrodeposition, is a process for producing a metal coating on a solid substrate through the reduction of cations of that metal by means of a direct electric current. The part to be ...
. This made the lines on the plates much more durable, and in particular the fragile "burr" thrown up by the drypoint process lasted much better than with copper alone, and so a greater (if still small) number of rich, burred, impressions could be produced.
Francis Seymour Haden
Sir Francis Seymour Haden PPRE (16 September 1818 – 1 June 1910), was an English surgeon, better known as an original etcher who championed original printmaking. He was at the heart of the Etching Revival in Britain, and one of the founder ...
and his brother-in-law, the American
James McNeill Whistler were among the first to exploit this, and drypoint became a more popular technique than it had been since the 15th century, still often combined with conventional etching. However, steel-facing could lead to a loss of quality. It is not to be confused with
steel engraving
Steel engraving is a technique for printing illustrations based on steel instead of copper. It has been rarely used in artistic printmaking, although it was much used for reproductions in the 19th century. Steel engraving was introduced in 1792 by ...
on wholly iron plates, popular in the same period but almost always for mezzotints and commercial printing.
Several people were of special importance to the French Etching Revival. The publisher
Alfred Cadart
Alfred Cadart (4 April 1828 – 27 April 1875) was a French printer, writer and publisher, notable for his major part in the etching revival in mid-19th-century France and beyond. As founder of the French Société des Aquafortiste ...
, the printer Auguste Delâtre, and
Maxime Lalanne
François Antoine Maxime Lalanne (November 27, 1827 – July 29, 1886) was a French artist known for his etchings and charcoal drawings (fusain).
Early life
Maxime Lalanne was born in Bordeaux on November 27, 1827, to Anne (previously Anne Cecil ...
, an etcher who wrote a popular textbook of etching in 1866, established the broad contours of the movement. Cadart founded the ''Société des Aquafortistes'' in 1862, reviving the awareness of the beautiful, original etching in the minds of the collecting public.
Charles Meryon was an early inspiration, and close collaborator with Delâtre, laying out the various possible techniques of modern etching and producing works that would be ranked with Rembrandt and
Dürer.
For Hamerton and others, the father of the British Etching Revival was Francis Seymour Haden, the surgeon etcher, who, with his brother-in-law, the American, James McNeill Whistler, produced a body of work starting around 1860 that still stands as one of the highpoints of etching history.
Haden was a collector and authority on the etchings of Rembrandt and it comes as no surprise that as Whistler, the younger man, began to show signs of veering far from the 17th-century model, Haden and he parted company. Figures from other countries included
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch ( , ; 12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) was a Norwegian painter. His best known work, ''The Scream'' (1893), has become one of Western art's most iconic images.
His childhood was overshadowed by illness, bereavement and the dr ...
in Norway,
Anders Zorn
Anders Leonard Zorn (18 February 1860 – 22 August 1920) was a Swedish painter. He attained international success as a painter, sculptor, and etching artist. Among Zorn's portrait subjects include King Oscar II of Sweden and three American ...
in Sweden, and
Käthe Kollwitz
Käthe Kollwitz ( born as Schmidt; 8 July 1867 – 22 April 1945) was a German artist who worked with painting, printmaking (including etching, lithography and woodcuts) and sculpture. Her most famous art cycles, including ''The Weavers'' and ''T ...
in Germany.
![Stephen Parrish, November, 1880, NGA 183602](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Stephen_Parrish%2C_November%2C_1880%2C_NGA_183602.jpg)
It was Whistler who convinced the artist
Alphonse Legros
Alphonse Legros (8 May 1837 – 8 December 1911) was a French, later British, painter, etcher, sculptor, and medallist. He moved to London in 1863 and later took British citizenship. He was important as a teacher in the British etching rev ...
, one of the members of the French Revival, to come to London in 1863; later he was a professor at the
Slade School of Fine Art
The UCL Slade School of Fine Art (informally The Slade) is the art school of University College London (UCL) and is based in London, England. It has been ranked as the UK's top art and design educational institution. The school is organised as ...
.
This linking of the art of the two countries, though short-lived, did much to validate etching as an art form. Very soon, French etching would show the same modernist signs that French art showed generally, while English and American etching remained true to the kind of technical proficiency and subject matter artists revered in Rembrandt. One distinct aspect of the revival, in contrast with the Old Master period, was an interest in giving unique qualities to each impression of a print.
Artists who only or mainly made prints, and usually drawings, were few. Meryon, who was colourblind and so effectively prevented from painting, is probably the most significant. Haden, who was strictly speaking an amateur, is another. Most artists continued to work in paint, but while some are now mainly remembered for their prints (
Félix Bracquemond
Félix Henri Bracquemond (22 May 1833 – 29 October 1914) was a French painter, etcher, and printmaker. He played a key role in the revival of printmaking, encouraging artists such as Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro to use th ...
, Bone and Cameron for example), others achieved fame in the more prestigious medium of paint, and it tends to be forgotten that they were printmakers at all.
Degas
Edgar Degas (, ; born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, ; 19 July 183427 September 1917) was a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings.
Degas also produced bronze sculptures, prints and drawings. Degas is espec ...
,
Manet
A wireless ad hoc network (WANET) or mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a decentralized type of wireless network. The network is ad hoc because it does not rely on a pre-existing infrastructure, such as routers in wired networks or access points ...
and
Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...
are examples of this; Whistler perhaps remains known for both.
![Clevelandart 1941](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Clevelandart_1941.72.jpg)
Although the theorists of the movement tended to concentrate on monochrome prints in the traditional techniques of etching, drypoint, and some mezzotint, and the term "etching revival" (and so this article) is mainly concerned with works in these, many artists also used other techniques, especially outside Britain. The French, and later the Americans, were very interested in making
lithograph
Lithography () is a planographic method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone (lithographic limestone) or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by the German a ...
s, and in the long run this emerged as the dominant artistic printmaking technique, especially in the next century after the possibilities for using colour became greatly improved. The same artists of the Barbizon school who etched were the main users of the semiphotographic etching-like technique of the ''
cliché verre
Cliché verre, also known as the glass print technique, is a type of "semiphotographic" printmaking. An image is created by various means on a transparent surface, such as glass, thin paper or film, and then placed on light sensitive paper in a ...
'', between the 1850s and 1870s.
The fashion for
Japonisme
''Japonisme'' is a French term that refers to the popularity and influence of Japanese art and design among a number of Western European artists in the nineteenth century following the forced reopening of foreign trade with Japan in 1858. Japon ...
from the 1870s gave a particular spur to the movement towards colour, as brightly coloured Japanese ''
ukiyo-e
Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surfac ...
'' woodblock prints began to be seen and admired in Europe. The situation was reversed in Japan compared to Europe, with multi-coloured prints but a still strong tradition of monochrome
ink and wash painting
Ink wash painting ( zh, t=水墨畫, s=水墨画, p=shuǐmòhuà; ja, 水墨画, translit=suiboku-ga or ja, 墨絵, translit=sumi-e; ko, 수묵화, translit=sumukhwa) is a type of Chinese ink brush painting which uses black ink, such as tha ...
s, few of which were seen in Europe. Many printmakers tried their own methods of achieving similar effects, with
Mary Cassatt
Mary Stevenson Cassatt (; May 22, 1844June 14, 1926) was an American painter and printmaker. She was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh's North Side), but lived much of her adult life in France, where she befriended Edgar De ...
's very complicated prints, including ''
à la poupée
''À la poupée'' is a largely historic intaglio (printmaking), intaglio printmaking technique for making colour prints by applying different ink colours to a single printing plate using ball-shaped wads of cloth, one for each colour. The paper ...
'' inking, among the most effective. The Japanese printmakers used multiple woodblocks, one for each colour, and there was something of a revival in
woodcut
Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas that ...
, which hardly any serious artists had worked in since the 16th century.
Though the styles and techniques typical of the revival fell out of fashion after about 1930, the interest in artistic printmaking has endured, and significant artists still very often produce prints, generally using the signed
limited edition
The terms special edition, limited edition, and variants such as deluxe edition, or collector's edition, are used as a marketing incentive for various kinds of products, originally published products related to the arts, such as books, prints, r ...
presentation that the revival pioneered. Though lithographs are generally more common, an outstanding set using traditional etching is the ''
Vollard Suite
The ''Vollard Suite'' is a set of 100 etchings in the neoclassical style by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, produced from 1930-1937. Named after the art dealer who commissioned them, Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), the suite is in a number of mu ...
'' of 100 etchings by
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...
, "undoubtedly the greatest etcher of
he 20th
He or HE may refer to:
Language
* He (pronoun), an English pronoun
* He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ
* He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets
* He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' ...
century", produced from 1930 to 1937 and named after
Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), the art dealer who commissioned them.
Later artists
![Pelham Bay MET DP818539](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Pelham_Bay_MET_DP818539.jpg)
In France the 1890s saw another wave of productivity in printmaking, with a great diversity of techniques, subjects, and styles. The album-periodical ''
L'Estampe originale'' (not to be confused with the similar ''
L'Estampe Moderne'' of 1897–1899, which was all lithographs, leaning more to
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau (; ) is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. The style is known by different names in different languages: in German, in Italian, in Catalan, and also known as the Modern ...
) produced nine issues quarterly between 1893 and 1895, containing a total of 95 original prints by a very distinguished group of 74 artists. Of these prints, 60 were lithographs, 26 in the various intaglio techniques (with a third of these using colour), 7 woodcuts, a
wood engraving
Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image or ''matrix'' of images into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and ...
and a
gypsograph.
The subjects have a notably large number of figures compared to earlier decades, and the artists include Whistler,
Toulouse-Lautrec
Comte Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa (24 November 1864 – 9 September 1901) was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist and illustrator whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in the la ...
,
Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (, ; ; 7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a French Post-Impressionist artist. Unappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of colour and Synthetist style that were distinct fr ...
,
Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (; 25 February 1841 – 3 December 1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Re ...
,
Pissarro
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro ( , ; 10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies). H ...
,
Paul Signac
Paul Victor Jules Signac ( , ; 11 November 1863 – 15 August 1935) was a French Neo-Impressionist painter who, working with Georges Seurat, helped develop the Pointillist style.
Biography
Paul Signac was born in Paris on 11 November 1863. H ...
,
Odilon Redon
Odilon Redon (born Bertrand Redon; ; 20 April 18406 July 1916) was a French Symbolism (arts), symbolist painter, printmaker, Drawing, draughtsman and pastellist.
Early in his career, both before and after fighting in the Franco-Prussian War, he ...
,
Rodin
François Auguste René Rodin (12 November 184017 November 1917) was a French sculptor, generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin possessed a uniqu ...
,
Henri Fantin-Latour
Henri Fantin-Latour (14 January 1836 – 25 August 1904) was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers.
Biography
He was born Ignace Henri Jean Théodore Fantin-La ...
,
Félicien Rops
Félicien Victor Joseph Rops (7 July 1833 – 23 August 1898) was a Belgian artist associated with Symbolism and the Parisian Fin-de Siecle. He was a painter, illustrator, caricaturist and a prolific and innovative print maker, particularly in ...
and
Puvis de Chavannes
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (14 December 1824 – 24 October 1898) was a French painter known for his mural painting, who came to be known as "the painter for France". He became the co-founder and president of the Société Nationale des Bea ...
. Almost all of
Les Nabis contributed:
Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard (; 3 October 186723 January 1947) was a French painter, illustrator and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. A founding member of the Post-Impressionist ...
,
Maurice Denis
Maurice Denis (; 25 November 1870 – 13 November 1943) was a French painter, decorative artist, and writer. An important figure in the transitional period between impressionism and modern art, he is associated with ''Les Nabis'', symbolism, a ...
,
Paul Ranson
Paul-Élie Ranson (29 March 1861 – 20 February 1909) was a French painter and writer associated with Les Nabis.
Biography
He was born in Limoges. His mother died in childbirth, so he was raised and educated by his grandparents and his ...
,
Édouard Vuillard
Jean-Édouard Vuillard (; 11 November 186821 June 1940) was a French painter, decorative artist and printmaker. From 1891 through 1900, he was a prominent member of the Nabis, making paintings which assembled areas of pure color, and interior s ...
,
Ker-Xavier Roussel
Ker-Xavier Roussel (10 December 1867 – 6 June 1944) was a French painter associated with Les Nabis.
Biography
Born François Xavier Roussel in Lorry-lès-Metz, Moselle in 1867, at age fifteen he studied at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris; al ...
,
Félix Vallotton
Félix Édouard Vallotton (; December 28, 1865December 29, 1925) was a Swiss and French painter and printmaker associated with the group of artists known as . He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut. He painted portra ...
, and
Paul Sérusier
Paul Sérusier (9 November 1864 – 7 October 1927) was a French painter who was a pioneer of abstract art and an inspiration for the avant-garde Nabis movement, Synthetism and Cloisonnism.
Education
Sérusier was born in Paris. He studied a ...
. British artists included
William Nicholson,
Charles Ricketts
Charles de Sousy Ricketts (2 October 1866 – 7 October 1931) was a British artist, illustrator, author and printer, known for his work as a book designer and typographer and for his costume and scenery designs for plays and operas.
Ricketts ...
,
Walter Crane
Walter Crane (15 August 184514 March 1915) was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children's book creators of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Ka ...
and
William Rothenstein
Sir William Rothenstein (29 January 1872 – 14 February 1945) was an English painter, printmaker, draughtsman, lecturer, and writer on art. Emerging during the early 1890s, Rothenstein continued to make art right up until his death. Though he c ...
, and besides Whistler
Joseph Pennell
Joseph Pennell (July 4, 1857 – April 23, 1926) was an American draftsman, etcher, lithographer and illustrator for books and magazines. A prolific artist, he spent most of his working life in Europe, and is known for his interest in landmarks, l ...
was American.
In Britain a later generation included three artists working very largely in etching who were knighted. These were the "high priests" of the English movement:
Muirhead Bone
Sir Muirhead Bone (23 March 1876 – 21 October 1953) was a Scottish etcher and watercolourist who became known for his depiction of industrial and architectural subjects and his work as a war artist in both the First and Second World Wars.
A ...
,
David Young Cameron
Sir David Young Cameron (28 June 1865 – 16 September 1945) was a Scottish painter and, with greater success, etcher, mostly of townscapes and landscapes in both cases. He was a leading figure in the final decades of the Etching Reviv ...
(these two both born and trained in
Glasgow
Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popul ...
), and
Frank Short
Sir Francis Job "Frank" Short PPRE (19 June 1857 – 22 April 1945) was a British printmaker and teacher of printmaking. He revived the practices of mezzotint and pure aquatint, while expanding the expressive power of line in drypoint, etc ...
. Like others, they "treated a narrow range of subjects with a dour earnestness", according to
Antony Griffiths
Antony Vaughan Griffiths, (born 28 July 1951) is a British museum curator and art historian, specialising in prints and drawings. From 1991 to 2011, he served as Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum. He was Slade Profe ...
.
[Griffiths, 69] Myra Kathleen Hughes and
William Strang
William Strang (13 February 1859 – 12 April 1921) was a Scottish painter and printmaker, notable for illustrating the works of Bunyan, Coleridge and Kipling.
Early life
Strang was born at Dumbarton, the son of Peter Strang, a builder, an ...
were other leading figures. Many artists turned to illustrating books, usually with lithographs. In America,
Stephen Parrish,
Otto Bacher,
Henry Farrer
Henry Farrer (March 23, 1844 – February 24, 1903) was an English-born American artist known for his tonalist watercolor landscapes and etchings.
Life
Farrer was born in London, the younger brother of artist Thomas Charles Farrer. Thomas ...
, and
Robert Swain Gifford
Robert Swain Gifford (December 23, 1840 – January 15, 1905) was an American landscape painter. He was influenced by the Barbizon school.
Early life and education
Gifford was born on Nonamesset Island, in the Elizabeth Islands, When he was ...
might be considered the important figures at the turn of the century, though they were mostly less exclusively dedicated to printmaking than the English artists. The
New York Etching Club was the main professional etching organization.
The final generation of the revival are too numerous to name here but they might include such names as
William Walcot
William Walcot (10 March 1874 – 21 May 1943) was a Scottish architect, graphic artist and etcher, notable as a practitioner of refined Art Nouveau (Style Moderne) in Moscow, Russia (as Вильям Францевич Валькот). His t ...
,
Frederick Griggs
Frederick Landseer Maur Griggs (30 October 1876 – 7 June 1938) was an English etcher, architectural draughtsman, illustrator, and early conservationist, associated with the late flowering of the Arts and Crafts movement in the Cotswold ...
,
Malcolm Osborne,
James McBey
James McBey (23 December 1883 – 1 December 1959) was a largely self-taught artist and etcher whose prints were highly valued during the later stages of the etching revival in the early 20th century. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Lett ...
,
Ian Strang (son of William), and
Edmund Blampied
Edmund Blampied (30 March 1886 – 26 August 1966) was one of the most eminent artists to come from the Channel Islands, yet he received no formal training in art until he was 15 years old. He was noted mostly for his etchings and drypoin ...
in Britain,
John Sloan
John French Sloan (August 2, 1871 – September 7, 1951) was an American painter and etcher. He is considered to be one of the founders of the Ashcan school of American art. He was also a member of the group known as The Eight. He is best known ...
,
Martin Lewis,
Joseph Pennell
Joseph Pennell (July 4, 1857 – April 23, 1926) was an American draftsman, etcher, lithographer and illustrator for books and magazines. A prolific artist, he spent most of his working life in Europe, and is known for his interest in landmarks, l ...
and
John Taylor Arms
John Taylor Arms (April 19, 1887 – October 13, 1953) was an American etcher.
Life
Arms was born in Washington, DC in 1887. He studied law at Princeton University, transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, to ...
in the United States. Griggs' pupil
Joseph Webb only began etching in the last years before the collapse of the price bubble, and persisted in etching "Romantic pastoral landscapes" into the late 1940s.
Books, critics and theory
![Francis Seymour Haden, Thames Fishermen, 1859, NGA 1077](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Francis_Seymour_Haden%2C_Thames_Fishermen%2C_1859%2C_NGA_1077.jpg)
The revival attracted some hostile criticism.
John Ruskin
John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and politi ...
(despite having practised it to illustrate some of his books) described etching in 1872 as "an indolent and blundering art", objecting to both the reliance on chemical processes and mostly skilled printers to achieve the final image, and the perceived ease of the artist's role in creating it. In France the poet
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (, ; ; 9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) was a French poetry, French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist and art critic. His poems exhibit mastery in the handling of rhyme and rhythm, contain an exoticis ...
was very supportive of Meryon and other specific French professionals, and admired Haden and Whistler. But writing in 1862 he was hostile, for similar reasons to Ruskin, to what he saw as the English phenomenon of an etching craze among amateurs (like Haden) and even ladies, hoping it would never in France "win as great a popularity as it did in London in the heyday of the
Etching Club, when even fair "ladies" prided themselves on their ability to run an inexperienced needle over the varnish plate. A typically British craze, a passing mania which would bode ill for us".
To counter such criticisms, members of the movement wrote not only to explain the refinements of the technical processes, but to exalt original (rather than merely reproductive) etchings as creative works, with their own disciplines and artistic requirements. Haden's ''About Etching'' (1866) was an important early work, promoting a particular view of etching, especially applicable to landscapes, as effectively an extension of drawing, with its possibilities for spontaneity and revealing the creative processes of the artist in a way that became lost in a highly finished and reworked
oil painting
Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of ...
.
[Chambers, Introduction]
![Zaandam2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Zaandam2.jpg)
Oil painting was soon to come up with developments (notably
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open Composition (visual arts), composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating ...
) to overcome these limitations, but Haden's rhetoric was effective and influential. He advocated a style of "learned omission", according to which the fewer lines there were on a plate, "the greater would be the thought and creativity residing in each line".
[ In accordance with this, Haden (like Meryon) disliked the addition of surface tone during printing, and fell out with Whistler over this and similar issues. Haden wrote: "I insist on a rapid execution, which pays little attention to detail", and thought that ideally the plate should be drawn in a single day's work, and bitten in front of the subject, or at least soon enough after seeing it to retain a good visual memory. Haden had devised his own novel technique where the etching was drawn on the plate while it was immersed in a weak acid bath, so that the earliest lines were bitten the deepest; normally the drawing and biting were performed as different stages.][Chambers, Chapter 1]
In France Haden's ideas reflected a debate that had been underway for some decades over the comparative merits of quickly executed works such as the oil sketch
An oil sketch or oil study is an artwork made primarily in oil paint in preparation for a larger, finished work. Originally these were created as preparatory studies or modelli, especially so as to gain approval for the design of a larger commissi ...
, and the much lengthier process of making a finished painting. The critic Philippe Burty
Philippe Burty (6 February 1830 – 3 June 1890) was a French art critic. He contributed to the popularization of Japonism and the etching revival, supported the Impressionists, and published the letters of Eugène Delacroix.
Burty was born in ...
, in general a supporter of both Haden and etching in general, nonetheless criticized his views on the primacy of quickly executing works, pointing to the number of states in Haden's own prints as showing that Haden did not entirely follow his own precepts. In the mid-1860s Haden argued against Ruskin's sometimes violently expressed objections to etching; what Haden saw as etching's strength, the ease of transmitting the thought of the artist, was exactly what Ruskin deplored: "in the etching needle you have an almost irresistible temptation to a wanton speed".[
]Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Philip Gilbert Hamerton (10 September 1834 – 4 November 1894) was a British artist, art critic and author. He was a keen advocate of contemporary printmaking and most of his writings concern the graphic arts. He was an important theorist ...
had become an enthusiastic promoter of etching in Britain. He had trained as a painter, but become a professional art critic
An art critic is a person who is specialized in analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating art. Their written critiques or reviews contribute to art criticism and they are published in newspapers, magazines, books, exhibition brochures, and catalogue ...
and amateur etcher. His ''Etching and Etchers'' (1868) was more an art history than a technical text but it did much to popularize the art and some of its modern practitioners. His ideas had much in common with those of Haden, favouring a spare style where what was omitted was as important as what was included, an important theme of Haden.[ The book went through many editions till the 20th century. By the 1870s Hamerton was also publishing an influential periodical, titled '' The Portfolio'', that published etchings in editions of 1000 copies. The French ''A Treatise on Etching'' by Lalanne was translated by S.R. Koehler and published in the United States in 1880. It played a significant role in the Etching Revival in America.
]
Boom and bust
The etching revival relied on a well-developed art trade
An art dealer is a person or company that buys and sells works of art, or acts as the intermediary between the buyers and sellers of art.
An art dealer in contemporary art typically seeks out various artists to represent, and builds relationsh ...
, with galleries, dealers, clubs, and at the top end auction houses. This was in place by 1850 in London, Paris and other major centres, and continued to expand greatly in Europe and America. Prints had the additional and unique option of the magazine "album"; this was even more useful for lithograph
Lithography () is a planographic method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone (lithographic limestone) or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by the German a ...
s, which could be reliably printed in larger numbers, but also very useful for the traditional monochrome techniques, once steel-faced plates were in use. This art trade fed both the traditional collectors market of the well-off, who kept most of their prints in portfolios, but also a larger and rapidly expanding middle-class market, who mainly wanted a certain number of images to frame and display in their homes, and now wanted original works rather than, or as well as, reproductive ones (the reproductive print meanwhile enjoying a huge boom by expanding its market to lower middle-class and working-class groups).
By the early 20th century, and especially in the decade after the end of the First World War, a very strong body of well-off collectors led to a huge boom in prices for contemporary prints by the most highly regarded artists, sometimes called the "super-etchers", which very often exceeded those for good impressions of prints by Rembrandt and Dürer, let alone other Old Masters. The boom was somewhat cynically exploited by many artists, who produced prints in a rather excessive number of states, often described as "proof states", so encouraging collectors to buy multiple copies. Muirhead Bone is believed to hold the record, with 28 states for one print. Surface tone also individualized impressions.
More usefully, the enduring habit of numbering and signing prints as limited edition
The terms special edition, limited edition, and variants such as deluxe edition, or collector's edition, are used as a marketing incentive for various kinds of products, originally published products related to the arts, such as books, prints, r ...
s began at this period. This does certify authenticity and reflect the limited number of top quality impressions that can be taken from an intaglio plate before it begins to show wear. Today it is used for marketing reasons even for prints such as lithograph
Lithography () is a planographic method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone (lithographic limestone) or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by the German a ...
s, where such a limit barely applies. Whistler began charging twice as much for signed impressions as for unsigned ones; this was for a series in 1887, in fact of lithographs.
After rising to its highest in the 1920s, the market for collecting recent etchings collapsed in the Great Depression
The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...
after the 1929 Wall Street crash, which after a period of "wild financial speculation" in prices, "made everything unsaleable". The prints curator at the British Museum
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...
, Campbell Dodgson
Campbell Dodgson, CBE DLitt Hon RE (13 August 1867 – 11 July 1948) was a British art historian and museum curator. He was the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum in 1912–32.
Biography Student
Campbell Dodgson was the eighth ...
, collected contemporary prints which he later gave to the museum. He began collecting and writing about Muirhead Bone's prints when Bone first exhibited in London in 1902, paying one or two guineas at Bone's dealer. By 1918 he was paying far higher prices, up to £51 and £63. He continued to buy Bones up to the 1940s, by which time the prices were back to 1902 levels. However a record price of £250 was paid for ''Ayr Prison'' (1905) "Bone's masterpiece" (according to Dodgson) "as late as 1933", bought by Oskar Reinhart
Oskar Reinhart (11 June 1885 – 16 September 1965) was a Swiss arts patron and art collector, born in Winterthur. His collection now fills two museums, the Kunst Museum Winterthur , Reinhart am Stadtgarten in the centre of Winterthur, and the O ...
in Switzerland.
Without a large group of collectors many artists returned to painting, though in the US from 1935 the Federal Art Project
The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administrati ...
, part of the New Deal
The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Cons ...
, put some money into printmaking. Etchings fell hugely in value until the 1980s when a new market (albeit a small one) began to develop for what is now seen as a small but important tributary of the stream of 19th- and 20th-century art.
As well as the Great Depression, the monochrome tradition of Haden and Whistler had reached something of a dead end, "largely resistant" to "the need to find recognisably modern subject-matter and forms of expression". A review in 1926 by Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was an American realist painter and printmaker. While he is widely known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching.
Hopper created subdued drama ...
of ''Fine Prints of the Year, 1925'' expressed this with some brutality: "We have had a long and weary familiarity with these 'true etchers' who spend their industrious lives weaving pleasing lines around old doorways, Venetian palaces, Gothic cathedrals, and English bridges on the copper ... One wanders through this desert of manual dexterity without much hope ... Of patient labour and skill there is in this book a plenty and more. Of technical experiment or strongly personal vision and contact with modern life, there is little or none". Etching, of urban subjects similar to his later paintings, had been important in establishing Hopper's early reputation, but around 1924 he decided to concentrate on painting instead.[Carey, 234]
Status of artists
Printmaking had traditionally had a much lower status in the art world, especially the notoriously conservative academies, than the "major" media of painting and sculpture. This had long been a bone of contention between the Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly in London. Founded in 1768, it has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects. Its pur ...
in London and the reproductive printmakers, who in 1853 finally won the ability to be elected to the inferior membership status of "Academician Engraver", and some space in the Academy's important exhibitions. At the start of the revival the majority of artists concerned were also painters, and not especially concerned by this disparity, but over the last decades of the 19th century this changed, as artists whose main efforts went into printmaking became more common.
In England Haden was the main activist on this front, beginning in 1879 in a series of lectures on etching at the Royal Institution, and continuing over the following years with a flow of letters, articles and lectures. His role as co-founder and first President of the Society of Painter-Etchers, now the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers
The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE), known until 1991 as the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, is a leading art institution based in London, England. The Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, as it was originally styled, was ...
, was part of these efforts, also providing a new set of exhibitions. Although several artists such as Frank Short and William Strang (both elected full RA in 1906) were better known for their prints than their paintings, and helped to agitate for change from within the Academy, the distinction between "Academician Engravers" and full "Academicians" was not abolished until 1928.
Notes
References
*Carey, Frances, "Campbell Dodgson (1867-1948)", in Antony Griffiths (ed), ''Landmarks in Print Collecting – Connoisseurs and Donors at the British Museum since 1753'', 1996, British Museum Press,
*Chambers, Emma, ''An Indolent and Blundering Art?: The Etching Revival and the Redefinition of Etching in England'', 2018 (first published 1999), Routledge, , 9780429852824
google books
*Collins, Roger, ''Charles Meryon: A Life'', 1999, Garton & Company, , 9780906030356
* Gascoigne, Bamber. ''How to Identify Prints: A Complete Guide to Manual and Mechanical Processes from Woodcut to Inkjet'', 1986 (2nd Edition, 2004), Thames & Hudson, with sections not page-numbers
* Griffiths, Anthony, ''Prints and Printmaking'', British Museum Press (in UK), 2nd edn, 1996
*Ives, Colta Feller, ''The Great Wave: The Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on French Prints'', 1974, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
* Mayor, Hyatt A., ''Prints and People'', Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton, 1971,
*Salsbury, Britany. “The Etching Revival in Nineteenth-Century France.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014
online
*Stein, Donna M., Karshan, Donald H., ''L'Estampe originale; A Catalogue Raisonné'', 1970, The Museum of Graphic Art, New York
Further reading
*Elizabeth Helsinger et al., ''The ‘Writing’ of Modern Life: The Etching Revival in France, Britain, and the U.S., 1850-1940'', Chicago, 2008.
* Twohig, Edward (2018). ''Print Rebels: Haden - Palmer - Whistler and the origins of the RE (Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers)''. London: Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers. .
* Lang, Gladys Engel; Lang, Kurt (2001). ''Etched in memory: the building and survival of artistic reputation'', 2001, University of Illinois Press, . OCLC 614940938
External links
*Salsbury, Britany, and Conte, Lisa
"L'Estampe Originale: A Rare Print Portfolio Now Online"
Metropolitan Museum of Art blog, 6 March, 2015
Documenting the Gilded Age: New York City Exhibitions at the turn of the 20th century
A New York Art Resources Consortium The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) consists of the research libraries of three leading art museums in New York City: The Brooklyn Museum, The Frick Collection, and The Museum of Modern Art. With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundatio ...
project. Exhibition catalogs from the Etching Revival.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Etching Revival
Etching
Printmaking
Modern art
Art movements