Etching is a way of making prints in which acid, not the artist's hand, cuts the lines into a metal plate. The artist covers the plate with a coating acid cannot eat through, then draws on it with a needle.
The needle only scratches away the coating, without cutting the metal. In a bath, the acid then eats into the copper along those bared lines, and the grooves it leaves are filled with ink and pressed onto paper.
The print shown above, The Hundred Guilder Print, is the most celebrated sheet by Rembrandt, the seventeenth-century Dutch painter. It shows Christ surrounded by the sick, with mothers bringing their children to him.
Yet even this famous sheet is not purely an etching. Only some of its lines were bitten by acid. Rembrandt cut others by hand with a steel tool borrowed from engravers, and scratched others straight into the bare copper, with no acid at all.
Its nickname goes back to an old story. Rembrandt is said to have paid a hundred guilders to buy back one copy, a fortune for a sheet of paper, though nobody has ever confirmed that a copy sold for that sum.
The technique's English name also comes from Rembrandt's language. Etching goes back to the Dutch etsen, itself taken from the German ätzen, a verb that once meant to make something eat, which is exactly what the acid does. English borrowed the word in the 1630s.
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Armor makers in Augsburg
That German root points to where the technique began, and it was not on paper. In Augsburg, a city of armor makers in southern Germany, craftsmen were already using acid to decorate steel armor, like the breastplate, or cuirass, pictured above. One of them was about to carry the trick to the printing press.
What You'll Discover
How acid turns a drawing into a plate.
How etching differs from engraving.
Callot's needle with a slanting tip.
Rembrandt and the ink left on the copper.
What Goya added to the dark.
A society of etchers in 1860s Paris.