He studied at Reading Art School from 1889 under
Frank Morley Fletcher and briefly at the
Académie Julian in
Paris in 1903. In 1908 he accepted an appointment at the
Edinburgh College of Art, where he taught for a few years. He traveled several times to
India between 1912 and 1927 and is noted for his prints of
Benares on the
River Ganges. Between 1905 and 1946 E.S. Lumsden produced some 350 etchings most of which are represented in a collection held in the
Burnaby Art Gallery, British Columbia, Canada. He always printed his own plates. He was elected an Associate of the
Royal Scottish Academy in 1923 and a full member in 1933; and he was President of the Society of Artist Printers from 1929 to 1947. In 1925 the publishers Seeley Service issued what is still regarded as the seminal treatise on the subject of etching, called
The Art of Etching. In the book Lumsden describes the various techniques of
intaglio printing using
etching,
drypoint,
mezzotint and
aquatint; he describes the history and development of etching through
Rembrandt,
Goya and the
etching revival; and he reproduced personal, illustrated notes from several eminent etchers of the period on their techniques including:
Marius Bauer,
Frank Benson,
Muirhead Bone,
George Clausen,
David Young Cameron,
Frank Short,
Augustus John,
Frank Brangwyn,
James McBey,
Edmund Blampied,
Percy Smith,
Christopher Nevinson,
Laura Knight, and
John Everett. The book was published as a trade edition, which is still in print, and as a limited edition of 150 copies containing four original etchings by Lumsden. In 1913 Lumsden married
Mabel Allington Royds, a noted artist in woodcuts. They had a daughter. ==References==