ABSTRACT
One of the key factors in the rise in status of etching as a medium and of etchers as professional artists was the repositioning of etching within the exhibition culture of the late nineteenth century. The attempts of the Etching Club to utilize exhibitions to publicize their work, which I discussed in Chapter 4, was the first step in redefining etching as a medium for exhibition in galleries and for display in the home as opposed to its previous identification with the bookshop and the collector's portfolio. 1 This transformation in the identity of etching was facilitated by the development of a new exhibition and commodity culture in Britain in the aftermath of the Great Exhibition of 1851. 2 As Gordon Fyfe has pointed out in his article on the Royal Academy and exhibition culture in London in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the exhibition was a key site where definitions both of the creativity and status of the art work and the identity of the artist as creator could be established. 3 It was in the latter part of the nineteenth century that a new type of gallery emerged, exemplified by the Fine Art Society and the Dudley Gallery, which promoted the work of contemporary artists in all media, provided exhibition space for artists' societies and individual artists and pioneered developments such as the monographic exhibition. 4 Etchers such as Haden used the new exhibition opportunities offered to them by these galleries to establish the right of etching to be exhibited as an original creative medium along with painting and drawing.
