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 thin coating that acid cannot get through, draws through it with a needle, and lowers the plate into an acid bath. The acid eats into the metal wherever the needle has laid it bare, and the grooves it leaves are filled with ink and printed on paper.
Etch entered English in the 1630s from the Dutch etsen, which comes from the German ätzen, a verb whose oldest meaning is to make something eat. The name fits the process, since in an etching it is the acid that eats the metal.
Because the needle only has to scratch through a soft coating, the artist can move it across the plate as freely as a pen across paper. That freedom made etching the print technique closest to drawing, and it is why painters such as Rembrandt and Francisco Goya took it up.
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The print above, Rembrandt's most celebrated sheet, is not entirely an etching, and its name is probably wrong. The Hundred Guilder Print shows Christ surrounded by the sick, with mothers bringing their children to him. Museums describe it as etching, engraving and drypoint. The acid made some of its lines, but Rembrandt cut others by hand and scratched others straight into the bare copper.
The name comes from an old story that Rembrandt paid a hundred guilders to buy back a copy, a fortune for a sheet of paper. The story is dubious. Auction catalogues of his own time did list the sheet as the 100 guilder print, but nobody has confirmed that a copy ever sold for that sum.
What You'll Discover
The armor workshops where etching began.
How acid turns a drawing into a plate.
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.