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The English Impressionist/Symbolist Frederick Francis Foottet was born in Yorkshire in 1850. Foottet made his debut at the Royal Academy in 1873, and continued to exhibit up to the 1930s. As a printmaker, Foottet made etchings from 1890, and colour lithographs from 1900. F. F. Foottet's first painting accepted by the Royal Academy was entitled December. Ruskin praised it, but added, "Yes, the artist is painting trees, but is he sure that he can draw a leaf?" Foottet then spent several months of intensive study of fruit and leaves under Ruskin's personal instruction. After this, Foottet left London to settle in Derby. Frederick Francis Foottet, Waterfall by moonlight Lithograph, 1900 This evocative colour lithograph by Foottet was published by The Studio, whose correspondent praised Foottet's "subtle and imaginative landscape work in lithography". Exposure to the work of the Impressionists and Symbolists had freed Foottet from the constrictions of Ruskin&

The sculptor and wood engraver Ren� Quillivic (1879-1969) was born into a humble family in the village of Plouhinec in the department of Finist�re in Brittany. He attended the night classes at the �cole Boulle in Paris, studying sculpture under Marius Jean Antonin Merci�. Although he exhibited at various Paris Salons - des Artistes Fran�ais, de la Soci�t� Nationale des Beaux-Arts, des Ind�pendants, d'Automne - the art of Ren� Quillivic remained rooted in his native Brittany. He left his heart-rending mark on its landscape in the form of many war memorials to the fallen of the First World War. Many of these are in the Pays Bigouden, the area of Finist�re made famous by P�r-Jakez Helias in his marvellous book The Horse of Pride . Ren� Quillivic, Marine bretonne Woodcut, 1922 Besides his sculptures, Ren� Quillivic was noted for his woodcuts. He exhibited his prints in both Paris and London, and was a member of the Soci�t� de la Gravure sur Bois Originale. As a sculptor, Quillivic pref

The story of etching in France could be told simply in terms of French etchers' passionate engagement with the work of Rembrandt - as Alison McQueen has effectively done in her brilliant book The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt: Re-inventing an Old Master in Nineteenth-Century France , which is available in full here . Rembrandt was not just the etchers' guru, as I described Maxime Lalanne in a recent post, but the etchers' god. Those who taught etching to hundreds, such as Charles Waltner or Alphonse Legros, held Rembrandt up as the most brilliant etcher of all time, and their students - such as Legros's star pupil William Strang - learned to gauge their own success or failure by comparison with the work of the Dutch master. Even Impressionist etchers such as Norbert Goeneutte and Henri Gu�rard started by copying Rembrandts. The result is that, besides the two original Rembrandt etchings that will be the main focus of this post, I have many etchings after Rembrandt by a

Otto Eckmann was one of the most important figures in the Judgendstil (German Art Nouveau) art movement. Born in Hamburg in 1865, Otto Eckmann studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg, and then in Nuremberg, before entering the Munich Academy of Fine Art in 1885. In the end it was to be the arts and crafts element of his training that predominated. After initial success as a painter in the Symbolist style, in 1894 Otto Eckmann renounced oil painting and auctioned off his canvases. From this point he concentrated on graphics (particularly woodcuts) and on the design of tapestries, stained glass, furniture, fabrics, and ceramics. Otto Eckmann was also a pioneering typographer and type designer, and his Jugendstil typefaces Eckmann and Fette Eckmann are still in use today. Eckmann's type design was influenced by Japanese script, just as his woodcuts show the strong influence of Japanese art. Otto Eckmann was a major contributor to the two most important Art Nouveau revues publishe