0.3 Introduction: the birth of american artist printmaking  (Page 2/9)

In 1877, the year the New York Etching Club was founded, there was no recognized arts capital in the United States. But within arelatively short time, building on the strength of established cultural institutions, enormous population growth, the Industrial Revolution, and a post-Civil War economic expansion, there was an explosion of artist organization locally that would eventually see New York City take center stage on thenational art scene, with graphic arts at the center of the action.

New York was replete with well-known artists’ studio buildings in the late 1870s. Most of the artists at the first meeting of theclub lived or worked in one of three—including Smillie’s studio building, where that first meeting was held. The attendees knew each other from otherassociations, including the National Academy of Design, the Salmagundi Sketch Club, and the American Water Color Society. (In reality, the New York EtchingClub was an offshoot of the American Water Color Society.)

The Industrial Revolution brought along with it a rapid expansion of the graphic arts. Men and women all over New York werefilling—and endeavoring to control—all manner of newly created markets. When the New York Etching Club was formed, there were already models for such societiesin New York, and Smillie was also well aware of organizational activities among etchers in France and Great Britain, and the staging for such in Philadelphiaand Boston. Exclusive artists’ clubs could offer many benefits, from the sharing of technical expertise to promoting artists and their genres. Smillie was eagerto promote etching and see it develop into a viable business endeavor. By 1882, his work was producing dividends: The public embraced the New York EtchingClub’s first stand-alone exhibition, and members’ works sold well.

The original twenty-one members of the New York Etching Club were all established and even important artists in other genres.Most were experienced painters; others were photographers, architects, designers, or recognized for their commercial trade work in engraving,lithography and mezzotint. There were a few experienced etchers among them, but none was a practicing “artist-printmaker” by today’s standards. With a fewexceptions—most notably, Robert Swain Gifford and Henry Farrer—etching as a medium for artistic expression was new to most of the club’s firstmembers.

Smillie’s ambitions aside, many of the etching novices appear to have been motivated to learn etching more out of aesthetic interestthan business interest at first. There was, after all, no real market for “artist prints” in the club’s early years. The etchers did not create the market for print sales in America. On the contrary, there hadexisted for decades a well-developed market for decorative engravings, lithographs, wood engravings, mezzotints and reproductive etchings. The new“artist etchings,” or “painter etchings,” however, were a departure from mass- produced prints. Lithographic artists largely shared a common graphic art style,as was the case with wood and metal plate engraving. Broadly standardized graphic arts styles rendered these media predictable in appearance and somewhatcommonplace in the eyes of the public. The evolution of the “painter etcher” provided many of those already working in the printing trades an artistic outletand untapped market for their “free hand etchings.” At the club’s founding, no one foresaw the boom in the collecting of etchings that lay justahead. Prior to late 1881, the New York Etching Club functioned as much as a social club organized around a growing interest among artists in “free hand” or“painter etching” as it was a group interested in becoming serious printmakers of saleable works.