From The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Publication Date: September 1999 ISBN. 1 85444 119 1
FORMAT 240 x 165mm
PAGINATION 112pp
ILLUSTRATION: 40 colour and black & white plates.
BINDING: paperback
BINDER: Clifford Press
MATERIAL: 30Ogsm Ivory Silk card
DESIGNER: Andrew Ivett
PRINTER: Clifford Press
PAPER: 130gsm White Silk
PUBLISHED PRICE: £12..95
This the first scholarly account of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers by the
former Curator of Glasgow's Hunterian Art Gallery, uses the Archives of the Society at the
Bankside Gallery, London, and unpublished documents from other repositories. It tells the
story of the struggles of the Society to obtain official recognition for the merits of
original etchers and engravers, who had been treated as an inferior class of the Royal
Academy, which, at its foundation in 1768, restricted membership to Painters, Sculptors
and Architects.
The book stresses the international links of the Society, from its earliest days in the
1880s right up to the present, in particular drawing out the significance of American
printmakers for the Society.
It records the varying achievements of successive Presidents, from the days of the
dictatorial Francis Seymour Haden (1818-1910), brother-in-law and arch-rival of James
McNeill Whistler, to Robert Austin, Paul Drury and Harry Ecclestone in the 1960s and 70s
and more recently Joseph Winkelman, the first American President.
There is an extensive bibliography and a list of all the Society's members and of the
diploma prints presented by each of them on their election, now on deposit at the
Ashmolean Museum. The illustrations, with expanded captions by the author, are drawn from
the diploma collection.
Ashmolean Museum Publications, Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PH
Tel: 01865 278009/10 Fax: 01865 278018
The information resource for printmakers 