Kerr Eby

The beauties of nature and the horrors of war are central preoccupations of the etchings of Harold Kerr Eby. The artist was born to Canadian Methodist missionaries in Japan, but grew up in Canada in locales as far-flung as Vancouver and Toronto. In 1907, Eby went to New York and studied at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute while working for a lithographic publisher. He taught himself the etching process, his preferred medium. Impoverished, Eby left New York and spent a year working as a surveyor in the wilderness of northern Ontario. In 1910 he resumed his art studies with painter George Bellows and Canadian artist George Bridgman (1865–1943) at the Art Students League in New York. He became an illustrator for Harper's Monthly Magazine, Life and Scribner's Monthly, but continued for several years to rely partly on surveying work for support.

Between 1913 and 1917, Eby summered at the art colony at Cos Cob, Connecticut, a setting that had nurtured the development of impressionism, with its focus on fleeting light effects; direct, on-site painting methods; and everyday subject matter. In this picturesque setting, he pursued painting and drawing outdoors and associated closely with prominent impressionist painter Childe Hassam, who benefited from Eby's expertise in etching. Eby's prints of New England scenery were regularly included in exhibitions sponsored by the New York Society of Etchers, in addition to the etching societies of Brooklyn, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

During World War I, Eby served in army combat zones in northeastern France. Under the influence of wartime experience, Eby's art changed dramatically. In 1919, he translated his drawings of war's harsh realities into prints. His printmaking career was launched when these works were shown in 1920 at his first solo exhibition, at the New York gallery of his uncle, Frederick Keppel. Travels to Europe and North Africa inspired Eby to create landscapes marked by dramatic passages of light and dark, an approach he also used in his prints of the snow-covered countryside near his Connecticut home, landscapes in coastal Maine, and nocturnal scenes.

In 1932, after the death of his first wife, Eby donated all his prints, including proof impressions, to the New York Public Library in her memory. Two years later, he was elected a member of the venerable National Academy of Design in New York. Following his remarriage in 1935, Eby created new prints of landscapes and scenes evoking the tragedies of war. During World War II, he worked as a pharmaceutical company artist documenting wartime use of medicines and plasma. In October 1943, he recorded marine combat; the resulting "Marines in Action" series of drawings, which includes scenes showing medical treatment of wounded soldiers, toured America the following year. A lingering tropical illness contracted during his work in the Pacific war theater contributed to Eby's death at the age of fifty-seven, after a career in which he produced more than two hundred prints and earned the admiration of his peers.