Stephen Parrish, a remarkable etcher.

Stephen Parrish was born in Philadelphia in 1846 to a distinguished Quaker family. In 1867 at the age of twenty-one he spent two months in Europe. He was especially ecstatic about Paris, where he visited the Exposition Universelle. After his first exposure to its art displays, he wrote in his travel diary: Well, if the Exposition is a "failure" (as I heard it was in America) I wouldn't want to see a "success" for it might kill me. Of course I shall ... spend two or three whole days.... I never knew that the art of Painting was such a vast and splendid profession.... The Exposition is a huge success and worth coming across the Ocean to see. (1)

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As a schoolboy Parrish had a few painting lessons from a local artist, but in 1864, after graduating from high school, he worked for a coal business. In 1869 he married his longtime sweetheart, Elizabeth (Bess) Bancroft (1849-1926), and a year later, Frederick Maxfield (later better-known as the artist Maxfield Parrish; 1870-1966) was born. Parrish then purchased a stationery store. But apparently he had started painting seriously after the European trip, since his fourth painting was accepted for exhibition in 1877 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. (2) Encouraged by this success, he decided to risk becoming a full-time artist. Years later he wrote to Sylvester Rosa Koehler (1837-1900), the editor of the American Art Review, of his regret that he "threw away thirteen years of his best life in business to wake up in middle life to the consciousness that there was something better in him." (3)

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In 1878 Parrish read Etching and Etchers (1868) by Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1834-1894), a leading English critic and a persuasive apostle for etching. A year earlier the New York Etching Club had been founded in the wake of the revival of etching in the 1840s and 1850s in France and England. (4) On November 28, 1879, Parrish made his first etching (Fig. 2) after a single lesson four days earlier from Peter Moran (1841-1914), an experienced Philadelphia painter-etcher and brother of the painter Thomas Moran (1837-1926). An alluring feature of etching was that it allowed greater artistic freedom than any of the other graphic mediums of the day. It was also perceived as a way to reach a wide audience through its multiple copies. Intense personal involvement, with the artist performing every stage of the work, from preparing the plate to pulling the prints, was the ideal (not always achieved) of the etching movement in both the United States and Europe.