Among our WCSU Art Department print collection, there was an etching framed with an inscription to Ernest Roth. Great, right? Not really. We couldn’t read the signature on the piece. It was Donald M. K… something. Well, that’s how it’s been for the last decade. Using a bit of AI (Google image search), we were able to nail down that the etching might be of the Louvre in Paris. We confirmed it was. Great. But AI couldn’t match the piece of art to anything. Well, who the heck was Ernest Roth, then? I mean, we couldn’t find a Donald M. K… Ernest Roth turns out to be a highly regarded artist who specialized in etching. Well, that was something. We were trying to identify an etching and here was one inscribed to a great etcher. It had to be him (we hoped). The great etcher’s full name was Ernest David Roth. So, back to Google with the search: “Ernest David Roth” etching artist “Donald M.”
Guess what? A site came up that mentioned Ernest David Roth and a promising etching artist Donald Morris Kirkpatrick. A gallery selling his work had a piece with Kirkpatrick’s signature (which doesn’t look much like Kirkpatrick) – and they matched! Through a bit more digging, we could gather that the etching was probably created in the 1930s.
See https://lushergallery.com/kirkpatrick-donald-morris-biography for more info on Kirkpatrick and https://archives.library.wcsu.edu/omeka/items/show/1823 for a look at WCSU’s etching by the artist.