Wednesday 9 June 2010Nineteenth-Century American Prints

This richly illustrated volume presents a selection of the Parrish Art Museum’s stunning collection of late 19th-century American etchings; “an unparalleled moment of artistic practice and aesthetic endeavor” (Alicia G. Longwell, First Impressions).

First Impressions features more than 70 works by some of the leading “painter-etchers” of the 1880s including Thomas Moran and Mary Nimmo Moran, William Merritt Chase, Henry Farrer, Stephen Parrish, James D. and George H. Smillie, John Henry Twachtman, and Thomas Waterman Wood. These artists sought to imbue the traditionally rigid line of engraving with the freedom and spontaneity they expressed in their painting.

The book includes some of the etching revival’s most beautiful images, notably the atmospheric landscapes of Long Island’s East End. Many of the prints in the Parrish’s collection are bon à tirer, that is, the first impression that was fully acceptable to the artist and the printer. The quality of these works evokes the moment of complete artistic collaboration shared by artist and printer, when the ‘master’ print was pulled from the press.

An essay by Alicia G. Longwell, the Parrish Art Museum’s Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator, examines the development of the Painter-Etcher movement. Longwell charts the burgeoning interest in the decorative arts on behalf of the growing urban middle-class of the 1870s through to the ‘market saturation’ of the etching craze in the mid-1890s. The book also includes individual catalogue entries, a checklist of plates, and an index.

Author
Alicia G. Longwell is the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator, Art and Education at the Parrish Art Museum, and the author of Photographs from the William Merritt Chase Archives, with Ronald G. Pisano (1992); North Fork / South Fork: East End Art Now (2004); and SAND: Memory, Meaning and Metaphor (2008). She has organized 25 exhibitions for the Parrish since becoming assistant curator in 1997, including solo exhibitions on the work of artists Barbara Bloom, Frederick Kiesler, Charlotte Park, Alan Shields, and Jack Youngerman, among others.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN MASTER PRINTS
RRP US$39.95/UK£24.95
Hardback
ISBN 978-1-904832-75-1
96 pages
250 × 210 mm, (8 ¼ x 10 in.), portrait
75 colour and 11 b & w illustrations
In association with Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York
Publication date: September, 2010
Publisher: D Giles Limited, London

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