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I�ve posted before about Sylvester Rosa Koehler and his role as godfather of the American Etching Revival � the revival that consolidated (in the late 1870s and 1880s) around the New York Etching Club. Now I have a copy of one of his rarest and most sought-after publications, Original Etchings by American Artists , published in 1883 by Cassell and Company. There is no indication that I can see of any limitation, but the print-run must have been quite small, both because the book is so rare now and because it is very large and would have inevitably have been extremely expensive when issued. I say book, but my copy has completely disintegrated, mostly through time, and also because 4 of the 20 original etchings have been previously removed. Luckily, the remaining etchings are all in very good condition, and I also have all of Koehler�s informative if sometimes rather waffly text. The four missing plates are The Inner Harbor, Gloucester by Stephen Parrish; The Ponte Vecchio by Joseph Penn

The painter and etcher Frederick Warren Freer was born in 1849 in Kennicott's Grove, Illinois, now part of Chicago. He studied art in Chicago before attending the Munich Academy under Wagner and Diez. Well-respected in his own day, Freer seems to be largely forgotten now, but I rank him among the most interesting of the New York Etching Club artists. Frederick W. Freer, At Polling Etching, 1888 My only print by Frederick W. Freer is an evocative and tranquil scene in Polling, Bavaria, where Freer joined Frank Duveneck and his students in the summer of 1879. It is executed largely in drypoint, with great subtlety of tone. So far as I can tell Freer's preferred subjects in his paintings were intimate interiors with a mother and child, using his own wife and children as models, but he also painted landscapes. Freer returned to the USA in 1880, living in New York until 1890 when he returned to Chicago to become President of the Chicago Academy of Design. He died in Chicago in 1908.

Today, the best-known figure of the American Painter-Etcher movement is undoubtedly Thomas Moran. Along with his wife Mary Nimmo Moran and brother Peter Moran, Thomas was a towering figure in American art - so much so that he even had a mountain named after him, Mount Moran in Wyoming. Although they were members of the New York Etching Club and its offshoot the American Society of Etchers, the Morans were based in Philadelphia, and stood a little aside from the core coterie of New York etchers. My sole etching by Thomas Moran is one of the most dramatic and striking of all the American etchings of the 1870s/1880s that I have seen. I believe the title of it is The Sounding Sea. Moran's 1884 painting The Much-Resounding Sea is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington; he also made an etching after this painting, which is reproduced as plate 47 in Alicia G. Longwell, First Impressions: Nineteenth-Century American Master Prints. This earlier image of breaking waves is much more

Although the first meeting of the New York Etching Club in 1877 was in the studio of J. D. Smillie, the meetings soon moved their regular venue to the studio of Henry Farrer, one of the club's co-founders and most active members. Etchings were printed on a press built by Farrer himself. Of all the Etching Club artists, I think Farrer is my favourite. Unlike R. Swain Gifford, the subject of my last post, Farrer did not favour a less-is-more economy of line. Instead his moody landscapes and seascapes are intensely worked, deeply bitten, and often almost impenetrably dark with cross-hatched lines. Henry Farrer, On New York Bay Etching, 1879 Henry Farrer, Marine Etching, 1880 Henry Farrer was born in London in 1843. He emigrated to the USA in 1863 at the age of twenty. Farrer was very much a driving force in the American etching revival. Most of his etchings are seascapes or landscapes, though the first, made in 1868, were views of New York buildings. Henry Farrer, The Lighthouse Etchi

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