Peking City Wall. From: Far Eastern plates.

Ernest Stephen Lumsden (1883-1948) was a distinguished painter, noted etcher and authority on etching. He studied at Reading Art School under Frank Morley Fletcher and briefly at the Academie Julian in Paris in 1903. In 1908 he accepted an appointment at the Edinburgh College of Art, where he taught for a few years and remained based there for the rest of his life. He travelled several times to India between 1912 and 1927 and is noted for his prints of Benares on the River Ganges. Between 1905 and 1946 Lumsden produced some 350 etchings and always printed his own plates; more than a third of them (approximately 125) are of Indian imagery.

Lumsden was elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers in 1909 and raised to the full membership in 1915. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1923 and a full member in 1933; and he was President of the Society of Artist Printers from 1929 to 1947.

In 1925 the publishers Seeley Service issued what is still regarded as the seminal treatise on the subject of etching authored by Lumsden, called The Art of Etching. In the book he describes the various techniques of intaglio printing using etching, drypoint, mezzotint and aquatint; he describes the history and development of etching through Rembrandt, Goya and the etching revival; and he reproduced personal, illustrated notes from several eminent etchers of the period on their techniques, including Muirhead Bone, D.Y. Cameron and James McBey.

Lumsden was still in his twenties when he made this etching, and India would replace China as his first love. The subject matter is deliberately nondescript - a stretch of the city wall of today's Beijing, with pigtailed pedestrians and an assortment of human propelled vehicles and carts. Emphasis is on chiaroscuro, the shadow of the wall contrasting with the brightness of the road and sky.

See:

Wikipedia, 'Ernest Stephen Lumsden', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Stephen_Lumsden

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   June 2018