The Inn, Purfleet

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 movement 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 landscape shows a stretch of the Thames at Purfleet, twelve miles east of London, opposite Eirth. Various vessels are seen on the water, with two fishermen mending nets in the right foreground. Schneiderman's catalogue designates this as state three of eleven, with "the man smoking a pipe in the lower right...shaded with oblique lines." [p. 261]