The Saut buckets, Edinburgh

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.

The Saut Buckets is one of Lumsden's greatest prints. A drypoint, it depicts St Ninian's Row, near the top of Leith Walk in Edinburgh. Nothing could be a greater contrast to the enchanting Indian light of <em>Ragged Sails</em> (1952-0003-20) or <em>The river craft, Benares</em> (1952-0003-21).

Lumsden confronts the viewer with the claustrophobic tenements of Edinburgh, with men loading salt containers (saut buckets) onto a horse-drawn cart in the foreground: it is a scene that could easily have occurred a century or two earlier, but appears from another world today. A masterpiece of drypoint technique, every part of this plate contains some beautifully observed detail. Just to the right of the cart, with only a few strokes of the drypoint needle, Lumsden has given the impression of two small girls, one bending to stroke a dog; at the left of the image, a man stands in a doorway, a cat nearby on the pavement. Every reflection and every varied tone of the buildings' facades is captured with remarkable ingenuity. Though she was very different stylistically and a generation younger, another great Anglo-Scottish artist, Joan Eardley (1921-63), would have surely admired Lumsden's lyrical yet gritty realism. 

See:  

Campbell Fine Art, 'Ernest Stephen Lumsden', http://www.campbell-fine-art.com/items.php?id=142

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

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   June 2018