1

The first meeting of the New York Etching Club was convened on 2 May 1877 at the studio of James David Smillie. About twenty artists were present, half of whom had never etched before. The centerpiece of the evening was therefore a practical demonstration. Smillie laid a ground onto a small etching plate, on which an Algerian landscape was drawn with an etching needle by Robert Swain Gifford, the image was bitten into the plate by immersion in a tray of mordant, and then the plate was printed by the physician and amateur etcher Leroy Milton Yale. James D. Smillie remembered the occasion in a note in the first illustrated catalogue issued by the club: "The smear of thick, pasty ink was deftly rubbed into the lines just corroded, and as deftly cleansed from the polished surface; the damped sheet of thin, silky Japan paper was spread upon the gently warmed plate; the heavy steel roller of the printing press, with its triple facing of thick, soft blanket, was slowly rolled over it, an

Mezzotint is a method of creating a tonal intaglio image; the name means "half-tint" in Italian. The French term, mani�re noire ("black manner") expresses the particular nature of this printmaking method more clearly. The special quality of mezzotints is the the subtlety with which they graduate from purest black to white. For this reason the method is especially suited to muted and mysterious subjects, murky twilights and forbidden shadows. English readers will be familiar with the supernatural powers lurking in such a picture in M. R. James's classic ghost story "The Mezzotint". Rapha�l Drouart, Hermaphrodite et Salmacis Mezzotint, 1922 Rapha�l Drouart's mezzotint Hermaphrodite et Salmacis depicts just such a twilight moment. The story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, though it is older than that. The fifteen-year-old Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, has left Mount Ida, and chanced upon the nymph Salmacis. For her, it is love

The Proven�al painter and printmaker Armand Coussens was born in Saint-Ambroix (Gard) in 1881. He studied at the Beaux-Arts, N�mes, under Alexis Lahaye. Ambitious for his talented student, Lahaye encouraged Coussens to go to Paris to enter for the Prix de Rome. But the 7 years he spent in Paris from 1900 to 1907 were frustrating for the young artist, who spent his time studying the Impressionists and painting on the quais of the Seine, rather than following the stultifying course at the Beaux-Arts, Paris, which even at that date was still focussed on copying antique casts and intended to produce a new generation of history painters. Driven to despair by this academic approach, Coussens returned to N�mes, to become professor of drawing at the Beaux-Arts there. Armand Coussens, Amateurs d'estampes Etching and aquatint, 1922 The nineteenth-century poet Thomas Hood, who trained as an engraver, wrote that etching "begins in a scratching and ends in a biting!" In this vividly e