46. Charles Maurice Detmold (1883-1908)
and Edward Julius Detmold (1883-1957)

Long-Eared Bat

(click on image to print)
Detmold, Long-Eared Bat

Long-Eared Bat

Etching, 1897, 125 x 142 mm., Dodgson 9 only state. A fine, clear impression of this meticulously drawn and etched plate, on imperial japan with large margins, initialed in pencil by both artists and signed in full by Edward; old creases in the upper margin, one just crossing the right corner of the plate. The Detmold brothers would have been a phenomenon at any time in history. Identical twins, young (they were fourteen when they began this print) and extraordinarily talented, they worked together in such a way that it was almost impossible to tell where one left off and the other began. The particular explication of this plate is that the drawing was by Edward, it was then etched by Maurice and the plate bitten by Edward. But that arrangement was not always the case. The brothers were fascinated by natural history and their work concentrated on that, in etchings, watercolors and book illustrations -- until the death of Charles Maurice by suicide at the age of twenty-five. After 1908, Edward’s work drifted toward a sort of fairy tale orientalism. Among the early etchings, Campbell Dodgson considered this print "in technical execution the finest and most wonderful of all."