Yung-Tingmen, Peking

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.

Yongdingmen or, as originally called in Lumsden's time, Yung-Ting Gate, was the former front gate of the outer city of Beijing's old city wall. Originally built in 1553 during the Ming Dynasty, it was torn down in the 1950s to make way for the new road system in Beijing. In 2005, the Yongdingmen was reconstructed at the site of the old city gate. This new gate is disconnected from the original road leading towards the gate and into the city, so though the structure is familiar, the approach via an old bridge as depicted by Lumsden looks very different today. Lumsden was still in his twenties when he made this etching, and India would replace China as his first love. Stylistically, the deliberately unworked foreground reflects Lumsden's intelligent appreciation of the etching style of James McNeill Whistler. Another etching dating from the same trip is <em>Peking City Wall</em> (Te Papa 1968-0001-30).

See:

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

Wikipedia, 'Yongdingmen', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongdingmen

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   June 2018