Cadwallader Washburn

A painter, etcher, and writer, Washburn earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Gallaudet University, the premier institution of higher learning for the deaf, and then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he graduated with a degree in architecture. Like his contemporaries John Taylor Arms, Louis Orr, Louis Conrad Rosenberg, and Ernest David Roth, Washburn unexpectedly decided to pursue a career in the visual arts. In the early 1890s, he enrolled at the Art Students League and studied with renowned Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase as well as American Renaissance painter Henry Siddons Mowbray. Washburn traveled to Paris where he studied etching with Albert Besnard and then worked with Impressionist etcher Joaquin Sorrolla in Spain. Like Samuel Chamberlain, he soon abandoned etching in favor of the drypoint. His quick mastery of the technique earned him great renown and in 1904, "The Chicago Daily News" hired him as a war correspondent to document in visuals and text such contemporary conflicts as the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) and the Madera Revolution in Mexico (1910-12).

Washburn took a keen interest in the drypoint and he executed a series of architectural and portrait subjects between the late 1890s and 1914. In 1915, he exhibited a group of these prints at the Paris Exposition.