Excerpt from First Annual Year Book of the Painter-Gravers of America, 1917-18: With an Etching by Eugene Higgins and an Introductory Note by Albert Sterner

In other words, great drawing, unhidden or veiled by tonality (even though tone be employed) is the important factor, whether the medium used be Engraving, Etching, or Lithography.

Great drawing is significant drawing. It is the drawing in which the line of the artist is vital, passionate, and spontaneous. Whether he sits before a model or a corner of nature - and is so moved by it as to be able to transfer by the most direct means his impression of it - or whether he has observed and can carry in his memory essential characteristics and give those in a great summary to the spectator, is a matter of individual temperament - but always - the drawing of the great artist bears unmysteriously upon its face the evidence of study and understanding. There are pages and pages of pencil drawings by great artists covered in the margins with drawings of eyes, hands, mouths, still life, which had not been grasped in the main drawing. This earnest search for the seen or remembered truth is one of the chief attributes of great drawing - and allied to this great sincerity will be found the power of conscious abandon, an inevitable mark of mastership in any performance.

Gradually in his desire for individual expression the artist be gan to make use of the means of reproductive processes for self-ex pression. He no longer took as his subject an existing picture or design from which to make a reproduction, but invented his own subject, suitable for expression by any one of the processes known, and created his own Engraving, Etching, or Lithograph.

Possibly Rembrandt's etchings offer the best example of the above statement. The master no doubt felt that his immense Chiaroscuro was well fitted for expression in black and white. His marvelous etchings are spontaneous performances, done with an understandingof his medium which has never been equalled. Millet also used etching for original expression, and a hundred other great artists have worked in various media for reproduction.

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