Easter Lilies

William Seltzer Rice

William Seltzer Rice is best known for his color woodcuts but also worked in monotype, intaglio and lithography. He bought his etching press in the 1930s and experimented with it for decades. He contributed articles about processes for School Arts and Design magazines. Rice was an amateur botanist and wrote extensively on the subject. The world of botanic compositions remained a source in all of his work throughout his life.

One process he experimented with, as in this image of Easter Lilies, is a combination of sandpaper aquatint and drypoint. He also would use sandpaper to simulate mezzotint. Rice wrote about this method:

"...The first step is to surface your plate, not with a wax ground as one does in regular etching with acid, but by placing a sheet of (unused) fine sandpaper on the plate (sand surface against the plate) and then running it through the etching press...Afterwards the design is drawn on this surface with a pencil and then incised with a drypoint needle...Highlights are scraped out with a tool known as a "scraper".