Man met lans in een doorgang 1827

Carl August Lebschee made this etching, *Man met lans in een doorgang*, sometime in the first three-quarters of the 19th century. It’s printed on paper, a common enough material, but the etching process itself deserves our attention. The artist would have coated a metal plate with wax, then scratched an image into it. Immersing the plate in acid would bite away the exposed lines. Then the plate would be inked, the surface wiped clean, and the image transferred to paper under great pressure. The resulting image has a unique crispness, a product of the way the lines are physically impressed into the paper. This was a relatively efficient means of image production, but still required considerable skill. The degree of detail Lebschee achieved speaks to his mastery. Though seemingly worlds apart from the industrial revolution, etching was very much a part of that story: a technique for mass producing images for an increasingly literate public. So next time you see an etching, remember that it is not just an image, but also a record of a specific set of social and technological conditions.