Etching revival
The etching revival was the re-emergence and invigoration of etching as an original form of printmaking 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collectors, at a time when the typical style of the movement, still based on 19th-century developments, was becoming outdated.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, the "most visible characteristic of ... 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, whose reputation had by this point reached its full height.
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.
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 in particular; the basic action of creating the lines on the plate for these was essentially the same as in drawing, and fairly easy for a trained artist to pick up. Sometimes other intaglio printmaking techniques were used: engraving, mezzotint and aquatint, 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 and Goya most etchings were reproductive or illustrative. In England the situation was slightly better, with Samuel Palmer, John Sell Cotman, John Crome and others producing fine original etchings, mostly of landscape subjects, in the early decades of the 19th century. The Etching Club, founded in 1838, continued to maintain the medium, among other things publishing small editions of classic works of English literature illustrated with original etchings by groups of its members.As the century progressed, new technical developments, especially lithography, 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 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. Charles-François Daubigny, Millet and especially Charles Jacque 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.
File:Potato Lifting MET DP861958.jpg|thumb|William Strang, 1882, Potato Lifting, published in The Portfolio.
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. 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 number of rich, burred, impressions could be produced. Francis Seymour Haden 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 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, the printer Auguste Delâtre, and Maxime Lalanne, 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 in Norway, Anders Zorn in Sweden, and Käthe Kollwitz in Germany.
It was Whistler who convinced the artist Alphonse Legros, 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. 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, others achieved fame in the more prestigious medium of paint, and it tends to be forgotten that they were printmakers at all. Degas, Manet and Picasso are examples of this; Whistler perhaps remains known for both.
File:Clevelandart 1941.72.jpg|thumb|Mary Cassatt, The Fitting, 1890, drypoint and aquatint, inked à la poupée by the artist herself, inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e.
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" 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 lithographs, 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, between the 1850s and 1870s.
The fashion for Japonisme from the 1870s gave a particular spur to the movement towards colour, as brightly coloured Japanese ukiyo-e 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 paintings, few of which were seen in Europe. Many printmakers tried their own methods of achieving similar effects, with Mary Cassatt's very complicated prints, including à la poupée inking, among the most effective. The Japanese printmakers used multiple woodblocks, one for each colour, and there was something of a revival in woodcut, 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 presentation that the revival pioneered. Though lithographs are generally more common, an outstanding set using traditional etching is the Vollard Suite of 100 etchings by Pablo Picasso, "undoubtedly the greatest etcher of century", produced from 1930 to 1937 and named after Ambroise Vollard, the art dealer who commissioned them.
Later artists
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 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, 7 woodcuts, a wood engraving and a gypsograph.The subjects have a notably large number of figures compared to earlier decades, and the artists include Whistler, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Renoir, Pissarro, Paul Signac, Odilon Redon, Rodin, Henri Fantin-Latour, Félicien Rops and Puvis de Chavannes. Almost all of Les Nabis contributed: Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Édouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Félix Vallotton, and Paul Sérusier. British artists included William Nicholson, Charles Ricketts, Walter Crane and William Rothenstein, and besides Whistler Joseph Pennell 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, David Young Cameron, and Frank Short. Like others, they "treated a narrow range of subjects with a dour earnestness", according to Antony Griffiths. Myra Kathleen Hughes and William Strang were other leading figures. Many artists turned to illustrating books, usually with lithographs. In America, Stephen Parrish, Otto Bacher, Henry Farrer, and Robert Swain Gifford 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, Frederick Griggs, Malcolm Osborne, James McBey, Ian Strang, and Edmund Blampied in Britain, John Sloan, Martin Lewis, Joseph Pennell and John Taylor Arms 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.