Christmas

This small etching presents an immediate puzzle: Samuel Gottscho, born in 1875, is best known as one of New York's great architectural and urban photographers, shooting with a camera rather than an etching needle. The Art Institute dates this work to around 1850, which would place it a quarter-century before Gottscho was even born. Attribution is almost certainly confused here, and the work was likely made by a different artist sharing the name or catalogued in error. Worth keeping that caveat in mind as you look at it.

The etching itself is intimate in scale, barely larger than a playing card at the image area. Etchings of domestic and religious subjects titled 'Christmas' were common in the mid-nineteenth century, often drawing on genre traditions of hearth, family gathering, or winter landscape. The format here, a small plate printed on a generous sheet, is typical of printmakers who wanted to allow room for the plate mark to register clearly on the paper, a visible ridge pressed into the sheet that collectors prized as proof of an original print. Look at the edges of the image where the ink trails off into the texture of the paper, and you get a sense of just how much craft went into a composition this miniature.