Exploring the world of the printmaker as artist, Fairfield University’s Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery and Bellarmine Museum of Art present concurrent exhibitions, Reflections and Undercurrents: Ernest Roth and Printmaking in Venice, 1900-1940, at the Walsh Art Gallery, and In the Wake of the Butterfly: James McNeill Whistler and His Circle in Venice, at the Bellarmine Museum of Art, with both shows on view January 23 through April 4, 2014.
Ernest Roth’s work ranges from important views of New York and Paris to exotic images of Istanbul and Segovia. His most important achievements, however, are his prints of Italy, in particular the approximately forty-five views he did of Venice between 1905 and 1941. In the etchings on view in Reflections and Undercurrents: Ernest Roth and Printmaking in Venice, 1900-1940, at the Walsh Art Gallery, Roth employed a supple line and rich tone that capture the essence of Venetian architecture in the clear light of the lagoon. Roth’s Venetian masterworks have never been the subject of an independent exhibition, catalogue, or book. Many have never been reproduced. This exhibition of just over one hundred works brings together thirty-five of Roth’s most important Venetian views, including variant printings of the plates, preparatory drawings, and the plates themselves, with prints by his most important artistic contemporaries.
Reflections & Undercurrents: Ernest Roth and Printmaking in Venice, 1900-1940, features the work of Louis Ernest David Roth (1879–1964), one of the most significant American etchers of the first half of the twentieth century, while In the Wake of the Butterfly: James McNeill Whistler and His Circle in Venice explores the work of Roth’s precursors working in Venice.