Herbert Raine (1875-1951), the most prolific of the three, was an English-born artist who began a career in architecture in 1892, moving to Montreal with his professional partner in 1907. One commission was completed and others were on the horizon when the Great War broke out and he had to look for another livelihood. Drawing was naturally an important part of architectural training, and Raine had additionally spent five years taking evening art courses at the Royal Academy Schools in London. He turned to making not oil paintings but drawings, water colours and etchings, establishing a printing workshop in downtown Montreal. He quickly achieved recognition for his views of Old Montreal done chiefly from ca. 1915 to 1920. His gift as an architectural draughtsman gave his depictions great accuracy, providing reliable documentation of Quebec as it appeared at the time without any loss of animation and lightness of touch. An increasing mastery of drypoint allowed him to capture more fleeting scenes, such as Chinese Café, Sorel, probably the earliest representation of a Chinatown in Canada. He went on to produce over 250 prints, reflecting more rural regions of the province as well as Massachusetts, England and Europe.


Henry Ivan Neilson (1865-1931), born into an old Quebec family with ties to newspaper printing, made the leap from a background in surveying and marine engineering to the study of art when already a mature man, briefly on an assignment in Scotland in 1896. Abandoning his existing career, he enrolled in the Glasgow School of Art during the period when it was being rebuilt by Charles Rennie MacIntosh. After several years of study there and on the Continent, he was accepted as a painter into the artistic colony known commonly as "The Glasgow Boys", based in Kirkcudbright. On the fringe of this circle was the well-known Scottish etcher D.Y. Cameron, who may have introduced Neilson to printmaking, which he pursued further with personal instruction from Ernest Lumsden, later author of an important etching manual, during a winter in Edinburgh. So taken was he with the medium that when he moved back to Quebec in 1909 he brought an etching press with him, an asset of the greatest rarity in the province at the time (Raine’s press being at least five years later). Like Raine he was a pioneer in recognizing a potential market for prints of local scenes rather than of picturesque European sites. His some 73 prints captured the teeming life of the St. Laurence River, the city of Quebec, and the countryside. His style can sometimes be robust, at other times lyrical. He was invited to join the staff of the new École des Beaux-arts de Québec when it opened in 1921 and he was able to offer the first printmaking course of any major art school in the nation.


For Clarence Gagnon (1881-1942), the development of the artist as a printmaker was a bright flare of natural ability that ran its course largely between 1904 and 1910, with one return to the medium in 1917 for his sole Montreal subject. In this short time, however, he achieved astonishing mastery of different etching techniques and matured in his ability to use the medium to expressive effect. His introduction to prints had occurred in Montreal during a brief flowering of exhibitions of the graphic arts and press notices favourable to the medium. He had the chance to try his hand on a small private press around 1902-03; however, it is unlikely he would have pursued these tentative beginnings had he not moved to Paris in 1904 and encountered various other artists, both French and American, caught up in the enthusiasm for etching that swept the wider art world. He was soon singled out for praise in French publications and in 1905 won an honourable mention for his prints in the Salon de la Société des artistes français. The painting excursions he made to picturesque villages in Normandy, Brittany and Picardy, as well as Italy and Spain, gave him material that could also be transferred to the copper plate once back in his Paris studio. Among his best French views are ones in the open countryside saturated with weather. The outstanding En novembre (astonishingly, one of his earliest), and Old Windmill, St-Briac capture the wind and wet of the northern French climate. During his seven-year youthful encounter with printmaking, Gagnon produced forty-six etchings, after which he devoted himself full-time to painting and went on to become one of Quebec’s most important artists.