0.3 Introduction: the birth of american artist printmaking

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In the 1882 catalogue for the New York Etching Club’s first independent exhibition at the National Academy of Design, club founderJames David Smillie published a colorful, highly romanticized account The New York Etching Club Exhibition Catalogue, 1882.This account was reprinted a few years later in J.R.W. Hitchcock’s Etching in America (New York: White, Stokes&Allen, 1886), a telling indication of the late-nineteenth-century public’s growing interest inthe new art of etching. Each copy of the book was illustrated with an impression from the etching plate created during thetechnical demonstration at the first meeting. of the group’s first meeting, held five years before:

About twenty interested artists had gathered one evening, by invitation, in the studio of a brother artist, “to assist.” Thescene was no doubt fittingly picturesque. Let us imagine a central light, properly shaded, above a table upon which are the simple appliances of etching.Aloft, a great sky-light is filled with dusky gloom; remote corners recede into profound shadow; easels loom up bearing vaguely defined work in progress;screens and rugs, bric-a-brac, all the aesthetic properties that we may believe to be the correct furniture of such a place, assume proper and subordinaterelations. Our imaginations having furnished the background, let us go on with the history.

Those twenty interested artists formed an impatient circle and hurried through the forms of organization, anxious for thecommencement of the real work of the evening. Copper plates were displayed; grounds were laid (that is, delicate coatings of resinous wax were spread upon the plates); etchings were made (thatis, designs scratched with fine points or needles through such grounds upon the copper); trays of mordant bubbled (that is, the acid corroded the metal exposed by the scratched lines, the surface elsewhere beingprotected from such action by the wax ground), to the discomfort of noses, the eager wearers of which were crowding and craning to see the work inprogress.

This process being completed, in cleansing the wax grounds and varnish from the plates the fumes ofturpentine succeeded those of acid. Then an elegant brother who had dined out early in the evening, laid aside his broadcloth,rolled up the spotless linen of his sleeves, and became for the time an enthusiastic printer. The smear of thick, pasty ink wasdeftly rubbed into the lines just corroded, and as deftly cleaned from the polished surface; the damped sheet of thin, silky Japanpaper was spread upon the gently warmed plate; the heavy steel roller of the printing press, with its triple facing of thick, softblanket, was slowly rolled over it, and in another moment, finding scant room, the first-born of the New York Etching Club wasbeing tenderly passed from hand to hand.”

Smillie’s catalog copy notwithstanding, the meeting was both a gathering of artists and a business initiative. Smillie and hisconstituents were intent on creating and serving a potentially lucrative market in the emerging American art world, which was characterized at the time by agold rush of artist organization. American industries of all kinds were expanding, and New York’s youthful native art world, following suit, sawtalented and ambitious artists claiming newly created niches. Smillie himself had worked towards forming an etching club for years.