The Etcher

Etched by Robert Blum in 1882 and held in the Cleveland Museum of Art (1920.1304), The Etcher is a small self-conscious print in which Blum depicts a fellow printmaker at work at his press — a subject Blum returned to repeatedly in the late 1870s and 1880s as part of his commitment to the etching revival that drove so much of American printmaking in the decade following Whistler's return from Venice in 1879. The etching shows the figure of the etcher seated at his bench with his back to the viewer, the press visible in the right of the composition and the working materials of plate and ink-roller laid out around him; the line is sharp and economical in the manner that Blum had developed from his early Cincinnati training and his close study of the Whistler Venetian set.

The Cleveland holding of thirteen Blum etchings — gifted by the Print Club of Cleveland in 1920 — is the largest single collection of his prints and the principal source for the study of his etched work. Blum produced approximately fifty etchings in his short career, most concentrated in the years 1879-1886 before his attention turned to oil painting and to the Japan commission; The Etcher belongs to the central group of those prints and is a characteristic statement of the American etching revival of the early 1880s in which Blum, James A. M. Whistler, Joseph Pennell and Otto Bacher all participated as Venice was being established as the international capital of the etcher's art.