Intrigued by two etching books her husband had given her, which reminded her of works she’d seen at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, Bertha Jaques began experimenting in the art. Using an old dentist’s drill, she scratched images into copper plate. The first time she tried to make a print she let the acid burn too long and ruined the plate. The second attempt worked.
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Eventually Jaques, who learned her craft mostly through trial and error, began making prints with an etcher’s press–the only one in Chicago–that her husband had made from an old printing press. One of the first American woman etchers, she would create nearly 500 etchings, drypoints, and aquatints, often of plants and landscapes she saw during vacations around the United States, and in Europe and Asia.
In 1929 Lawrence College, in Appleton, Wisconsin, awarded her an honorary doctorate in fine arts. In 1939 one of her works, Jimson Weed, was the print the CSE presented to new members. During an exhibition of her work in New York in 1940, the year before she died, a reviewer for the New York Times wrote, “A real and deep appreciation of oriental stilllife prints is implicit in this work, and her arrangements are carried out with taste and sureness.”
