Sydney Z Lucas and the Paris Etching Society

Thought i would share this information. there are literally thousands of these etchings around. Very decorative but not really worth anything.

In 1928 Sidney Zoltan Lucas founded "Camilla Lucas," which encompassed a wholesale art publishing house and a retail art gallery. This business was both wholesale and retail and dealt in reproductions of antique, modern and contemporary prints. It also sold original art including etchings, lithographs and paintings.
This enterprise is now known as the Phyllis Lucas Gallery Old Print Center and is named after Sidney Lucas' wife, who died in 1995. The business is now run by their son, Michael Lucas, who kindly supplied the above information.
Starting in the 1930s and continuing into the 1950s, Sidney Lucas traveled to Europe periodically and contracted with French artists to publish their work under the banner of the "Paris Etching Society." Pieces published by Lucas are marked with a triangle with Lucas' initials inside and sometimes "PES" for the Paris Etching Society.
The various artists assigned names to the their images.
The history of a number of the artists used by Lucas is hard to trace. However, the most important artist Lucas worked with was Salvador Dali. In fact, the Old Print Gallery was the first North American publisher of Dali's works, and the relationship continued with Phyllis Lucas after Sidney's death in the 1960.
As is noted on the label on the back, this piece is an etching, which means that it was created either by cutting lines into a metal plate with some sort of stylus or by using acid to corrode the metal plate in certain areas to form a design. After this was done, the plate was inked and pressed against a sheet of paper in a hand press.
These etchings were originally done in black, but color was added later either by hand painting with watercolors or by overlaying color in a second printing. How many actual prints of these were made is unknown to us, but generally numbers ran in the 350 to 500 range.
French etchings such as this one are not particularly rare and they are considered by most serious collectors to be decoration rather than fine art. The piece in today's question is probably circa 1940, and we have found them priced on the Internet for as little as $85. But $250 seems to be the more prevalent figure that online retailers are seeking for this type of etching.

Here is the one i have.12" x 14"

 

Thanks for sharing this information!

 

The prices quoted in that article are very exaggerated. The same etching i have in a smaller size sold on ebay recently for 15.00