Etching revival
Encyclopedia
The Etching Revival is the name given by at the time, and by art historians, to the renaissance of etching
Etching
Etching is the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio in the metal...

 as an original form of printmaking
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...

 during a period of time stretching approximately from 1850 to 1930.

Historical outline

During the century after Rembrandt's death the techniques of etching and drypoint
Drypoint
Drypoint is a printmaking technique of the intaglio family, in which an image is incised into a plate with a hard-pointed "needle" of sharp metal or diamond point. Traditionally the plate was copper, but now acetate, zinc, or plexiglas are also commonly used...

 brought to their highest point by him gradually declined. By the late eighteenth century, with brilliant exceptions like Piranesi and Tiepolo
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo , also known as Gianbattista or Giambattista Tiepolo, was an Italian painter and printmaker from the Republic of Venice...

 , most etchings were reproductive or illustrative.

However, in the 1840s and 50's in France, a number of artists did produce some landscape etchings which seemed to recapture some of the spirit of the old master print
Old master print
An old master print is a work of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition . A date of about 1830 is usually taken as marking the end of the period whose prints are covered by this term. The main techniques concerned are woodcut, engraving and etching, although there are...

. Daubigny, Millet
Jean-François Millet
Jean-François Millet was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France...

 and especially Charles Jacque
Charles Jacque
Charles-Emile Jacque was a French painter of animals and engraver who was, with Jean-François Millet, part of the Barbizon School...

 produced etchings that were different from those heavily worked reproductive plates of the previous century. Three people were of special importance to the French Etching Revival - the publisher Cadart, the printer Auguste Delatre and Maxime Lalanne
Maxime Lalanne
François Antoine Maxime Lalanne was a French artist known for his etchings and charcoal drawings .-Early life:...

, an etcher who wrote a popular textbook of etching in 1866.

"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.

However, before the translation of Lalanne's book, Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Philip Gilbert Hamerton , was an English artist and art critic and author.He was born at Laneside, a hamlet in Crompton, Lancashire, England. His mother died giving birth to him, and his father died ten years later...

 had become an enthiusiastic promoter of etching in Britain. 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. 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.

For Hamerton and others, the father of the British Etching Revival was Francis Seymour Haden
Francis Seymour Haden
Sir Francis Seymour Haden , was an English surgeon, best known as an etcher.He was born in London, his father, Charles Thomas Haden, being a well-known doctor and lover of music. He was educated at Derby School, Christ's Hospital, and University College, London, and also studied at the Sorbonne,...

, the surgeon etcher, who, with his brother-in-law, the American, James Whistler, produced a body of work starting around 1860 that still stands as one 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.

It was Whistler who convinced the artist Alphonse Legros
Alphonse Legros
Alphonse Legros , painter, etcher and sculptor was born in Dijon. His father was an accountant, and came from the neighbouring village of Véronnes....

, one of the members of the French Revival, to come to England as a teacher. 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.

Notable etchers

There are literally hundreds of artists, whose names are now more-or-less unknown, who became proficient etchers and whose works were avidly collected from the 1890s till 1930.

In Britain the first wave included:
  • Muirhead Bone
    Muirhead Bone
    Sir Muirhead Bone was a Scottish etcher, drypoint and watercolour artist.The son of a printer, Bone was born in Glasgow and trained initially as an architect, later going on to study art at Glasgow School of Art. He began printmaking in 1898, and although his first known print was a lithograph, he...

    ,
  • David Young Cameron
    David Young Cameron
    Sir David Young Cameron was a Scottish painter and etcher.-Biography:Cameron was the son of the Rev. Robert Cameron and was born in Glasgow, Scotland. From around 1881 he studied at the Glasgow School of Art and in 1885 enrolled at the Edinburgh Schools of Art...

    ,
  • Frank Short and
  • William Strang
    William Strang
    William Strang was a renowned Scottish painter and engraver.He was born at Dumbarton, the son of Peter Strang, builder, and educated at the Dumbarton Academy. He worked for fifteen months in the counting-house of a firm of shipbuilders before going to London in 1875 when he was sixteen...

    .


In the United States :
  • Thomas Moran
    Thomas Moran
    Thomas Moran from Bolton, England was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. Moran and his family took residence in New York where he obtained work as an artist...

    ,
  • Stephen Parrish
    Stephen Parrish
    Stephen Parrish was a painter and an etcher from the United States.-Biography:Parrish was engaged in mercantile pursuits until he was 30, when he applied himself to art, studying for a year with a local teacher. In 1878 he first exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia, and in 1879 at...

    ,
  • Otto Bacher,
  • Henry Farrer
    Henry Farrer
    Henry Farrer was an English-born American artist known for his tonalist watercolor landscapes and etchings.-Life:...

    , and
  • Robert Swain Gifford
    Robert Swain Gifford
    Robert Swain Gifford was an American landscape painter. He was influenced by the Barbizon school.Much of his work focuses on the landscapes of New England, where he was born. He, along with Victorian contemporaries from the White Mountain and Hudson River Schools, helped immortalize the majestic...



might be considered the important figures at the turn of the century, and the New York Etching Club
New York Etching Club
The New York Etching Club was the first professional organization in America devoted to the medium of etching. Its founders were inspired by the Etching revival that had blossomed in France and England in the middle 19th century...

 was formed as the primary professional etching organization. The next generation of etchers are too numerous to name here but they might include such names as William Walcot
William Walcot
William Walcot was a British architect graphic artist and etcher, notable as a practitioner of refined Art Nouveau in Moscow, Russia . His trademark Lady's Head keystone ornament became the easily recognizable symbol of Russian Style Moderne...

, Frederick Griggs, Malcolm Osborne
Malcolm Osborne
Malcolm Osborne was a British artist known for his prints of landscapes, urban views and portraits.-Chronology:*1 August 1880 born at Frome, Somerset, the fourth son of Alfred Arthur Osborne , Schoolmaster,-and his wife Sarah Elizabeth nee Biggs,...

, James McBey
James McBey
James McBey was a self-taught artist and etcher whose prints were highly valued during the later stages of the etching revival in the early 20th century....

 and Edmund Blampied
Edmund Blampied
Edmund Blampied was one of the most eminent artists to come from the Channel Islands, yet he received no formal training in art until he was 16 years old...

 in Britain, John Sloan
John French Sloan
John French Sloan was an American artist. As a member of The Eight, he became a leading figure in the Ashcan School of realist artists. He was known for his urban genre painting and ability to capture the essence of neighborhood life in New York City, often through his window...

, Martin Lewis
Martin Lewis (artist)
Martin Lewis was born in Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia on June 7, 1881. He was the second of eight children and had a passion for drawing. At the age of 15, he left home and traveled in New South Wales, Australia, and in New Zealand, working as a pothole digger and a merchant seaman. He...

 and John Taylor Arms
John Taylor Arms
-Life:Arms was born in Washington, DC in 1887. He studied law at Princeton University, transfering to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, to study architecture, graduating in 1912. After serving as an officer in the United States Navy during World War I, he devoted himself full-time...

 in the United States.

Fall in popularity

Etching as a collected and therefore as a practised art appears to have died with the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

. Without a large group of collectors many artists returned to their canvases. 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.
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