Ernest Stephen Lumsden
British painter, printmaker, and author, 1883–1948
By 1908 he had settled in Edinburgh, where he took up a position at the Edinburgh College of Art, but his wanderlust led him the following year to British Columbia in Canada. From there he travelled on to Japan and Korea, and thence to Beijing and on to Burma. It was in India, however, that Lumsden found scenes and subjects that truly captivated him, and he produced a number of etched views of the cities of Benares, Jaipur and Udaipur. He was to make several trips to India, visiting Jodhpur, Kashmir and Ladak and often returning to Benares.
He also spent some time travelling throughout Spain. In 1914 Lumsden was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, and in 1924 he published The Art of Etching, which remains a standard work on the subject. As well as landscapes, Lumsden also etched a number of portraits of friends and fellow artists, among them Frank Brangwyn, Augustus John, Edmund Blampied and James McBey.
With the decline in the market for etchings in the later 1920’s, however, Lumsden began working more as a painter and was elected an associate member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1923, becoming a full member ten years later. Having moved to Sir Henry Raeburn’s old studio in Edinburgh’s Queen Street in 1927, he worked primarily as a portrait painter, and became curator of the Royal Scottish Academy library in 1935. Crippled by arthritis in his later years, Lumsden produced relatively little work in the 1940’s before his death in 1948, at the age of sixty-four.
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
Scottish painter and etcher, 1865–1945
Scottish painter and printmaker, 1859–1921
British painter, etcher, and draftsman, 1886–1966
English draftsman, printmaker, and architect, 1874–1943
Greek artist, 1884–1965, active in the UK and the US
Scottish painter, printmaker, and illustrator, 1880–1969
British painter and printmaker, 1890–1978, active in United States
English painter and etcher, 1893–1962
