No Day Without a Line

Using the Archives of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers at the Bankside Gallery, London, this book 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 (they restricted membership to Painters, Sculptors and Architects from its foundation in 1768). The text stresses the international links of the Society from its earliest days in the 1880s to the end of the 1990s, 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.