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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.

The painter, printmaker, and photographer Ferdinand Schmutzer is little-known today, yet his work, which focuses on moments of quiet thought and reflection, has a rare intimacy. Ferdinand Schmutzer, Tagesneuigkeiten (The Day's News) Etching, 1908 Even when he depicts a crowd scene, as in his etching of poor citizens of Vienna crowding in a soup line outside a monastery or convent, there is no sense of jostling or hubbub; instead one senses the silent resignation of people too tired to make much noise. This etching, the smaller of two versions of the same scene, is my favourite among the five etchings I possess by Ferdinand Schmutzer. It shows him able to tackle a really complex composition with great finesse, and it also beautifully demonstrates Schmutzer's mastery of light effects. I can't put it better than Clive, who writes in his Art and the Aesthete post on Schmutzer, "He has unusual skill in balancing the plain darks and lights with delicately fretted greys.&quo

Felix Meseck was born in Danzig in 1883, and died in Holzminden in 1955. Meseck studied at the Fine Art Academies in Berlin and K�nigsberg, studying painting under Ludwig Dettmann and printmaking with Heinrich Wolff. In 1926 he was appointed professor at the Weimar Academy, a post from which he was forced out by the Nazis. Before WWI, in which he served at the front as an ordinary soldier, Meseck concentrated on painting; after the war he turned to printmaking, becoming especially known for his etchings and drypoints. Meseck was a member of the Berlin Secession, and contributed to leading journals such as Ganymed , as well as illustrating works by Shakespeare, Goethe, Novalis, and Brentano. Much of Felix Meseck's work was destroyed in the Red Army attack on Danzig in 1945. Felix Meseck, Landschaft Etching, 1920s Felix Meseck's art is a curious blend of Expressionism, Romanticism and Symbolism, with a forlorn, desolate quality at its heart. His spiky, unsettling line is the oppo

When I wrote my post A walk along High Street, I was aware that three of Eric Ravilious's evocative lithographs of shop fronts for High Street had first been published in the journal Signature: A Quadrimestrial of Typography and Graphic Arts , with an appreciation by John Piper. This short article, entitled "Lithographs by Eric Ravilious of Shop Fronts", was published in March 1937, while the book did not appear until the following year. What I had not realised was that the three plates in Signature varied significantly from those in the book. When I first noticed this, I thought it was merely a matter of variant colourways, but the more I look at these day tradings beautiful prints the more variations I see. I won't spoil the fun of this spot-the-difference game by pointing out every detail, but will simply put the two versions next to each other. All were printed by the Curwen Press, where the lithographs were executed directly onto the lithographic stones. Eric

"Say something, Edith." This catchphrase in my wife's family, spoken whenever anyone is feeling too tired or bored to amuse themselves, took my fancy long before I knew anything about the man who coined it, Claude Flight, or the wonderful group of linocut artists he inspired, the Grosvenor School. The Grosvenor School artists include Cyril Power, Sybil Andrews, Eileen Mayo, Lill Tschudi , Ethel Spowers, Dorrit Black, and Eveline Symes, as well as Claude Flight himself, and his life-partner Edith Lawrence. Flight founded the Grosvenor School of Modern Art with Iain MacNab, Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews, and taught there from 1926-1930. After that, he taught informally at summer schools in his neolithic chalk cave at Chantemesle on the banks of the Seine, which he had bought while serving in France in WWI. The Grosvenor School of Modern Art was located in London, at 33, Warwick Square. William Kermode, At 33, Warwick Square Woodcut, 1930 Born in 1881, Walter Claude Flight w

It seems fair to say that Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) would scarcely have been a significant poet without Apollinaire, or novelist without Radiguet, or filmmaker without Bunuel. Certainly, he would not have made much contribution to the visual arts without the spur of his friendship and collaboration with Picasso. Almost all my lithographs by Jean Cocteau were conceived as illustrations to his own plays. They were printed by Mourlot in 1957. These rapidly-sketched works would not convince anyone that Cocteau was a great artist, but they do show, I think, how thoroughly he absorbed Picasso's intent playfulness of line. I like them very much - more so than the Picasso-esque bullfighter he contributed to Prints from the Mourlot Press in 1964. Actually, my favourite work of art by Jean Cocteau would be unreproducible on this blog. It is his painted fishermen's chapel in Villefranche-sur-Mer, just across from the Hotel Welcome where Cocteau lived for long periods. The walls of this tin

I first came across the work of the etcher Eug�ne V�der in issue 17 of the art revue Byblis (Spring 1926), which published his etching La rue Saint-Denis. I thought it a lovely piece of work, and was intrigued to find out more about its creator - especially as my copy was hand-signed by the artist. I think V�der probably signed every copy of this print. Usually in Byblis there were 105 hand-signed and 500 unsigned impressions, but in this case there seem to have been 105 in colour and 500 in black-and-white, all signed. Eug�ne V�der, La rue Saint-Denis Etching, 1926 Byblis was published by the art publisher Albert Moranc�. Moranc� was evidently equally struck by V�der's work, because the Winter 1926 issue of Byblis carries a full-page advertisement for a work to appear the following June from �ditions Albert Moranc�: Paris: 50 Eaux-Fortes originales en couleurs d'Eug�ne V�der, r�unies en un portefeuille d'amateur . There were to be 100 copies on Japon imp�rial at a subscrib