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Although etching died out as the most visible force in the subsiding graphic arts movement, a few highly successful artists, includingThomas Moran, continued making large prints that sold well. James D. Smillie went on making beautiful prints and became a teacher of etching, and JosephPennell would go on making prints for years, ultimately contributing to a revival of the medium in the early 1910s. Other, later members of the club—mostnotably Charles Mielatz—continued experimenting with the medium, taking the art of etching off in new “urban” directions.
The American Water Color Society continued to show etchings after the New York Etching Club ended its formal exhibitions in 1894.Evidence of such is noted in reviews of their exhibitions in The Magazine of Art in 1895 and 1896, and as late as 1898 in The Art Amateur magazine.
A few years after the death of James D. Smillie in 1909, a fledgling group of artist printmakers calling themselves the New YorkSociety of Etchers organized in 1913. New York Etching Club member Joseph Pennell exhibited in the group’s first show, in 1914, as did several relativenewcomers, including Kerr Eby, Bertha Jacques, George Plowman, and Ernest Roth. When this group returned in 1916 for a second exhibition under the banner of theBrooklyn Etching Club, Keeping track of etchers, etchers’ organizations, and any given organization’s provenance and membership can have aresearcher wobbling between the vexing and the entertaining. When John Taylor Arms, for example, tried his hand at a brief history of the Brooklyn Society ofEtchers, his “Annual Report of the President, 1932,” which accounted for how the Brooklyn Society of Etchers came to be known as the Society of American Etchers,also took a futile stab at the daunting task of documenting late-nineteenth- century etchers’ organizations.While Arms’s report states that the Society ofAmerican Etchers was formed in 1880, the New York Times , The Magazine of Art , The Art Amateur , and The Critic Magazine all reported 1888 as the year of the society’s founding. It was generally reported that year that Thomas Moranhad been elected President, Frederick Dielman Treasurer, and C. Y. Turner Secretary of the “new” Society of American Etchers. The November 25, 1888, New York Times also reported that the new society was holding a small exhibition in The Ortgies Gallery (on lower Fifth Avenue) andthat “Most if not all of the members are of the New York Etching Club.” That exhibition included etchings by Thomas Moran, Mary Nimmo Moran, Charles Platt,and Stephen Parrish, among others. Mr. Arms’ annual report also stated that “The incorporation of the society as the Society of American Etchers, and itsamalgamation with the earlier Society of American Etchers, was accomplished on December 17, 1931,” and that “by joining” the original Society of AmericanEtchers, the Brooklyn Society of Etchers “becomes, in a sense, the oldest print organization in America.” Actually, there were several older Americanprintmakers’ groups: the Boston Etching Club, formed in February 1880; the Philadelphia Society of Etchers, formed in May 1880; and the Cincinnati EtchingClub, formed in fall 1880. Oldest of all was the New York Etching Club, which held its first meeting on November 12, 1877. My research into late nineteenth-century printmakers has occasionally led me to early twentieth-century print exhibition catalogues, including some from the Brooklyn Society of Etchers.Particularly interesting are those revealing connections to such nineteenth- century printmakers as Frederick Dielman, Mary Cassatt, Edith Loring Getchell,Charles Mielatz and Joseph Pennell, among others. Years ago, while perusing microfilm spools at the New York Public Library, I discovered an otherwise unrecorded exhibition catalogue of a printmaker’s society named the New York Society of Etchers, documenting their first exhibition in 1914. Not only was ita namesake, previously unknown to me, for the group that I founded in 1998, but it also was linked, through some of its membership, with the late-nineteenth-century New York Etching Club. One of the quiet thrills of working on the research leading to this volume has been the discovery of this series of links,through these overlapping memberships, leading back from today’s New York Society of Etchers to that seminal organization, the New York EtchingClub. the list of exhibitors included Charles F. W. Mielatz, the risingAmerican artist printmakers John Taylor Arms, John Marin, John Sloan, and dozens more. The first revival of American etching was under way, with artistprintmaking positioned to play an important role in the future of American art.
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