page_title: Bertha Jaques
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Bertha Jaques / Work
caption_attribution_description: English: Bittersweet, 1920, hand-colored etching by Bertha Jaques
context_page_description: Bertha Evelyn Jaques was an American etcher and cyanotype photographer. Jaques helped found the Chicago Society of Etchers, an organization that would become internationally significant for promoting etching as a popular printmaking technique. She is best known for her hand-colored botanical prints and scenes from her foreign and domestic travels.
context_section_description: Throughout her career as a printmaker she continued to write poems, her first creative outlet.  She combined these passions in Christmas cards and self-published books of poems.  Her personality comes through most clearly in her poems, where her strong-will, wit, and practicality are evident.  Her images of botanically accurate plants and uncommon scenes of the alleys, docks, and markets of foreign cities demonstrate her significance among artists of the early 20th century.
  Jaques kept precise records of her experiments with printing throughout her career. She experimented with many aspects of etching, particularly surface tone and acid biting. As one of the early etchers during the American resurgence of the medium her process demonstrates an artist exploring the medium to its fullest.  Perhaps more than other artists, it is worthwhile to study the different states of each image she produced.  Each state represents the artist's advancement in composition or technical prowess at a time when Jaques was among the first to rediscover such techniques.
  Her choice of subject included botanical prints and landscapes.  Both were typical for female artists of the time who had limited or no access to the subjects of their male counterparts.  Jaques, however, approached both subjects atypically.  Her botanical prints are scientifically precise and removed from context or background.  Her landscapes have a focus on urban, industrial settings.  Docks, coal barges, foreign markets, narrow alleys, and backyards are not common subjects for female artists to depict in such cities as Chicago, Cairo, Venice, and London.  Jaques, however, showed the working areas of a city in a picturesque way that is just as captivating as her images of tourist-friendly scenes.
  Her works are in private collections and sold occasionally through auction.  The world's largest public collection of the work of Bertha Jaques is owned by the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.  The museum owns more than 400 unique prints in addition to multiple states of many images.  In honor of her 150th birthday, the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art presented a year-long retrospective of her work in 2013.
caption: Bittersweet, 1920, hand-colored etching by Bertha Jaques, from the collection of the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art
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