Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes 1938

This is Walter Tittle’s portrait of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, done as an etching. Look at the way the marks build to create a likeness, the cross-hatching almost like a tightly knit fabric. You can feel the pressure of the artist’s hand and the scratch of the needle on the plate. I imagine Tittle hunched over the plate, squinting, thinking about Holmes’s sharp intellect and determined gaze. The image emerges from a constellation of tiny lines, a process of layering and refining. It reminds me a bit of how Chuck Close builds a face from a grid. There's a real sense of the artist wrestling with the material, coaxing an image out of the metal. It's a conversation, almost a collaboration between artist and medium. Etchings like this are part of a long conversation between artists across time, where each one builds on the work of those who came before, transforming the language of art, one line at a time.