Boats and coolies. From: Fourth Indian plates.

Ernest Stephen Lumsden (1883-1948) was a distinguished painter, noted etcher and authority on etching. He studied at Reading Art School under Frank Morley Fletcher and briefly at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1903. In 1908 he accepted an appointment at the Edinburgh College of Art, where he taught for a few years and remained based there for the rest of his life. He travelled several times to India between 1912 and 1927 and is noted for his prints of Benares on the River Ganges. Between 1905 and 1946 Lumsden produced some 350 etchings and always printed his own plates; more than a third of them (approximately 125) are of Indian imagery.

Lumsden was elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers in 1909 and raised to the full membership in 1915. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1923 and a full member in 1933; and he was President of the Society of Artist Printers from 1929 to 1947.

In 1925 Lumsden published what is still regarded as the seminal treatise, The Art of Etching. Here he describes the various techniques of intaglio printing using etching, drypoint, mezzotint and aquatint; he describes the history and development of etching through Rembrandt, Goya and the etching revival; and he reproduced personal, illustrated notes from several eminent etchers of the period on their techniques, including Muirhead Bone, D.Y. Cameron and James McBey.

In his Indian etchings, Lumsden seems to resist much of his predecessors' impulses to romanticise and exoticise. While undeniably enchanted by the country, he nonetheless offers a relatively sober vision, one that suggests an easy, contented interaction with its places and peoples. Lumsden's technical virtuosity includes an economy of line, carefully built compositions, and, above all, a command of India's intense light.

This etching dates from Lumsden's fourth and final visit to India in 1927. Its title is considered politically offensive today - a 'coolie' is an unskilled hired labourer, of whom there are a fair number depicted, unloading boats on the river bank. The river is almost certainly the Ganges near Varanasi (Benares), a favourite source of subject matter for Lumsden. All the more reason, perhaps, to admire Lumsden's delicate yet precise handling of detail, while the almost abstract horizontal line in the far distance, denoting the other river bank, shows a definite sense of modernism, with the likely impact of his fellow Scottish contemporary James McBey being evident.

See:  

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 'Light and Line: E. S. Lumsden's Visions of India', https://www.vmfa.museum/exhibitions/exhibitions/light-and-line-e-s-lumsdens-visions-of-india/

Wikipedia, 'Ernest Stephen Lumsden', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Stephen_Lumsden

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   June 2018