Engravers and Etchers Six Lectures Delivered on the Scammon Foundation at the Art Institute of Chicago, March 1916

About this book

This volume collects the sixth and final series of the Scammon Lectures, a public‑speaking program founded by the 1901 bequest of Mrs. Maria Sheldon Scammon to the Art Institute of Chicago. Delivered in March 1916 by Fitz Roy Carrington, a Boston Museum of Fine Arts specialist, the six talks trace the development of engraving and etching from their earliest surviving examples through the work of masters such as Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Dürer and later landscape etchers. The book opens with a formal statement of the lecture series’ purpose, followed by a detailed contents list that groups the material into German and Italian engraving histories, portrait masters, and a concluding survey of landscape etching. Illustrations accompany each lecture, and bibliographies prepared by the museum’s print department round out the scholarly apparatus.

Carrington’s voice is that of an early‑twentieth‑century educator: clear, modest, and intent on sharing the pleasure he finds in historic prints rather than constructing a definitive textbook. The prose is dense with art‑historical terminology, yet it remains accessible thanks to the author’s frequent references to specific plates and visual details. Readers with a keen interest in the technical evolution of printmaking, collectors of old master engravings, or students of Renaissance art will appreciate the careful blend of description, illustration, and contextual commentary that characterises these lectures.