Arts and Letters

Ernest David Roth was born in Germany in 1879, came to the United States at the age of five and died here in 1964, in his eighty-fifth year. A student for a time at the National Academy school, he later studied etching with James D. Smillie and produced, in 1905, the first of over three hundred prints. He was elected to the Institute in 1933.

Ernest Roth belonged to a generation of print-makers who worked with grace and subtlety, who touched their plates lightly and who did not believe that deep convictions need necessarily be expressed by shouting and overemphasis. These etchers of the decades immediately preceding and following World War I were predominantly recorders of architectural subjects and were inspired in their work by the villages and streets and churches of Europe. To their great credit and to our everlasting pleasure, they were unashamedly interested in the picturesque and charming byways of the Old World. Like their predecessors, who contributed countless prints to Baron Taylor's mammoth Voyages Pittoresques, they left us an invaluable visual record of a place, and in so doing, they also left a record of their own attitudes. Perhaps they saw the world a little better than it was or perhaps they selected only that which pleased them most. It seems their inspiration was not from tension and revolt, but from acceptance.

It was my good fortune, many years ago, to serve with Ernest Roth on a print jury in Albany. We rode together up along the Hudson on a fine fall day, and some bit of landscape or building that passed by our window recalled to Mr. Roth his years of work and travel in Italy and Spain, and he fell to reminiscing about his life there. While the craft of etching was, no doubt, at the center of his thoughts, the talk was not technical, but rather nostalgic and, yes, romantic. One could sense that whatever followed, those years in Europe were really the heart and inspiration of his whole distinguished career. It was for him a time of intense work but also of unhurried living. From this experience came a whole series of prints, executed well within the fundamental linear character of etching, but more importantly, of lacelike beauty and delicacy. It was his time of supreme achievement.

Later he returned to the towers and bridges of New York for subject matter and also did a number of college buildings, but his stature as an artist, I believe, rests on his Italian and Spanish plates.

Ernest Roth was a product of a particular era. It was a time of leisure. An artist, wandering down some old street in search of a subject, had the time to feel the quality in a weathered façade or a chipped and broken wall or the abstract design in a distant hill town. What couldn't be done now, could be done later. There were many relaxed and satisfying hours.

Roth accepted, without protest, the direction in his work that this environment and tradition fixed upon him. His style grew into him and he perfected it to the honor of American etching. If art must have its propaganda, his was in praise of gentle beauty. Quietly and with sensitiveness, Ernest Roth's prints fill with distinction their place in the endless history of etching.