Excerpt from Catalogue of the Work of the Women Etchers of America: On Exhibition April Twelfth to Twenty-First<br><br>The collection was formed in the first instance by Mr. S. R. Koehler whose services to the cause of etching in America should never be mentioned without at least a passing word of gratitude for exhibition by the print department of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Catalogue which Mr. Koehler then carefully compiled has served as the basis for this. But earnest eflorts have been made to enlarge the collection, and they have resulted in making it a practically complete exposition of what the women of this country have accomplished with the needle. Several artists are now represented who were not represented in Boston, and the number of plates has been increased by more than a hundred. flirty-five names now appear in the Catalogue, signing about five hundred plates. It is pleasant to note that no artist who was appealed to failed to answer as desired.<br><br>The list of women etchers begins, as Mr. Koehler tells us, with Anna Maria Shurmann, born in 1607, and Elisabetta Sirani, born in 1638. Neither of these artists made a lasting name for herself; nor can more be said for the considerable number who during the seventeenth and eight eenth centuries experimented with needle and acid. Most of them were but dilettanti in the feeblest meaning of the word, whether they were professed artists in other branches or merely art loving great ladies like Madame de Pompadour and Queen Christina of Sweden. Even Angelica Kaufmann perhaps the best of them all would not be remembered to-day had she not worked with other artistic processes more successfully than with this. Dur ing the present century women have continued to etch in Europe but even in France, where they have done so well with the brush, their success with the needle has not been frequent or conspicuous. So far as I remember, no woman's name appears in any of the popular treatises on etching which have so frequently been written of late years in foreign lands.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.