Easter Lilies

William Seltzer Rice

"Easter Lilies" is an intaglio, a drypoint with sandpaper-ground by American painter/printmaker William Seltzer Rice (1873-1963). This impression is pencil signed and titled in the lower margin. The platemark measures 7-1/8 x 9-1/8 inches and was printed by the artist in about 5 proofs on an ivory wove paper that measures 8-3/4 x 11-1/8 inches. The gallery inventory number for this image is 21471.

William Seltzer Rice is best known for his color woodcuts but also worked in monotype, intaglio and lithography. He bought his etching press in the 1930s and experimented with it for decades. He contributed articles about processes for School Arts and Design magazines. Rice was an amateur botanist and wrote extensively on the subject. The world of botanic compositions remained a source in all of his work throughout his life.

One process he experimented with, as in this image of Easter Lilies, is a combination of sandpaper aquatint and drypoint. He also would use sandpaper to simulate mezzotint. Rice wrote about this method:

"...The first step is to surface your plate, not with a wax ground as one does in regular etching with acid, but by placing a sheet of (unused) fine sandpaper on the plate (sand surface against the plate) and then running it through the etching press...Afterwards the design is drawn on this surface with a pencil and then incised with a drypoint needle...Highlights are scraped out with a tool known as a 'scraper'". William Seltzer Rice was born to Sarah Graeff Seltzer and John Maurer Rice on 23 June 1873 in Manheim, Pennsylvania. He moved to Philadelphia in the fall of 1892 to attend the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art and was awarded a three-year scholarship to the school the following year. In June 1894, Rice received a Certificate in Industrial Drawings and the following June he received a Certificate in Decorative Painting and Applied Design.

After graduating in 1895, Rice was hired as staff artist for the Philadelphia Times but continued taking classes with Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute. In August 1900, Rice moved to California and his friend Frederick H. Meyer offered him a job as Assistant Art Supervisor in the Stockton Public Schools. Rice taught for thirty years in the Alameda and Oakland public schools and, in 1929, he received his BFA degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts. That same year he published his book, Block Printing in the Schools.

William Seltzer Rice died at his home in Oakland, California on 27 August 1963.