House of the Salmon, Chartres 1925

Louis Conrad Rosenberg made this etching, "House of the Salmon, Chartres," sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. I can imagine Rosenberg carefully preparing his metal plate, coating it with a waxy ground, and then, with focused concentration, using a sharp needle to scratch away the ground. The architecture emerges from a dense network of fine lines, each one precise, building up tone and texture. I see him pausing, considering how each mark contributes to the whole, the light catching the building's surfaces. Maybe the needle slips and slides a little, pulled in a direction he didn’t anticipate. That’s the beauty of printmaking, the way it can hold the intentional and the accidental. Like a conversation between the artist and the material. Artists build on each other, responding to what came before. I wonder who Rosenberg was looking at, what conversations he was having with the artists of his time.