Horsley's Cottages

Seymour Haden was the unlikely combination of a surgeon and an etcher. Although he pursued a very successful medical career, he is mostly remembered for his etched work as well as for his writings on etching. He was one of a group of artists, including James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) and Alphonse Legros (1837–1911), whose passionate interest in the medium led to the Etching Revival, a period that lasted well into the twentieth century. The extolling of etching for its inherent spontaneous qualities reached its pinnacle during this time. While the line of the etching needle, Haden wrote, was "free, expressive, full of vivacity," that of the burin was "cold, constrained, uninteresting," and "without identity."
This representation of distant cottages with a cow grazing in a field in the left foreground is called a trial state by Harrington, but Schneiderman's catalogue designates it the fifth state of nine with etched lettering at added at lower left reading, "Cottages behind Horsley's House S. Haden." [p. 209]