Miss Blanche Dillaye, printmaker; b 1851Blanche's insight into etching and the print process is amazing to read. Below is an excerpt from the digital library of congress in which she was asked the following question.
What are the essential qualities of etching, which form its essence and differentiate it from other mediums?
[Miss Dillaye's response] First of all, it is born of line; line is by its nature suggestive and not imitative, it deals with selection and omission, not with elaboration and subtle tones. In all arts reserve is strength; selection presupposes knowledge; and tact in omission is the refinement of understanding. The limitations, then, which forbid to etching a diffuse mode of expression add to its power by concentration, and elevate it to the level of poetry by giving to it a measured form, and it becomes to art what the sonnet is to literature."
"Etchers can not rely on an attractive exterior to cover up paucity of thought; [Page 644] flowery additions and superfluous methods they leave to other mediums. They should come at once to the vital truth; they should select the essentials and leave the nonessentials to them; there should be no joy in appearing to do a simple thing in a difficult way; they should prefer simplicity always, for in this simplicity lies the sublimity of their art.
"Large and elaborate plates should be shunned by the painter-etcher, for he can not for months, while his plate is going through stages of undue finish, 'feel vividly some overmastering thought;' nor can he be possessed by 'the heat of a passionate inspiration' while he plods over an unwieldy copper plate and laboriously draws straight lines to fill up numberless square inches of bituminous shadow. Passion does not work that way; it has an ancient and old-time preference for spontaneity.
"It was discovered one day that etching stood as a stamp of culture, and all those who love to masquerade in giant's robes sought to wrap themselves in its ample folds. Etching was taken up by fashion, commerce discovered its golden uses; the demand for etching was instituted and the artist succumbed.
"Step by step the art that has stood the test of the ages, the art of Rembrandt and Claude, abandoned its birthright. One engraver's tool after another crept in, and mechanism took the place of art. The line that once swayed to an impulse began to labor unceasingly with tones and semitones, the spirit and passion took flight, and its noble simplicity, its spontaniety, freedom and strength, its purity, suggestiveness and emphasis were blurred and lost in a verbosity of line. It ceased to be autographic; it became photographic.
"There will always be those to whom it will be a chosen art, a few original minds who find in it an appealing something that other mediums lack. To these it must ever remain dear, and among the many who have plied the needle there will be the survival of the fittest, those who have been true to it, those who have never degraded it, those who have preserved it in its integrity. In their hands it rests to carry it over this period of apparent failure, and when it shall have revived, a century hence if it must be so, it will be its true self that will rise, the mean garbs that have clothed it of late will be stripped from it, and it will shine forth in the simplicity and beauty with which it is endowed by those characteristics which are its prerogative."
