Lineage of Corot · English · 1818 to 1910

Sir Francis Seymour Haden

A surgeon who etched rivers and trees straight from nature, and founded the etching revival to prove it could be done.

Haden, Whistler's brother-in-law, was a London surgeon who etched landscape directly on the plate out of doors, and whose Shere Mill Pond, Sunset in Ireland and Egham are the founding plates of the British etching revival. He founded the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers in 1880 and wrote polemics on the superiority of the autographic etched line.

His subjects are Corot's: a river, a bank of trees, a sky, drawn in a line that is fast and botanically truthful at once. For the Mass side of this program his plates show how a tree is a mass with a few branches drawn into it, and how a reflection is a softer repeat of what stands above it.

Cleveland Museum of Art

Seymour Haden, Kidwelly Castle, 1859. etching.

The Cleveland Museum of Art · In memory of Ralph King, gift of Mrs. Ralph King; Ralph T. Woods, Charles G. King; and Frances King Schafer

What to steal

1Draw the tree as a mass of direction, then a few branches that follow its logic.
2The sky is paper. Do not touch it until everything else is done.
3Work from nature at speed; the line is better for the hurry.