Stanley Arthur Charles Anderson was born on 11 May 1884 at Bristol. He was apprenticed to his father, Alfred Ernest Anderson, for seven years, learning the craft of engraving heraldic symbols on metal tankards and cups. His six-shilling a week wage enabled him to attend evening classes at the Bristol Municipal School of Art, where he learned to etch, developing a style based on careful craftsmanship and great attention to detail. He won a won a British Institute Engraving Scholarship which provided him with £50 a year and sent him to the Royal College of Art, where he studied under Frank Short (1909-11). Short invited him to join the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers as Associate, and he married ex-nurse Lillian Phelps that August. The couple had two sons, Ivan, in 1911, and Maxim, in 1914, who went on to become a highly-regarded documentary film-maker before his death in 1959. Also in 1910, Anderson exhibited the first of 214 pieces he would show across his career at the Royal Academy, ‘a very good shop window’, as he would later observe. Anderson completed his studies at Goldsmiths’ College, New Cross in south London under Lee-Hankey. Despite this expert instruction, Anderson always maintained he was self-educated, largely in the National Gallery and British Museum. Anderson was not fit for active service during the Great War, due to a weak heart and he instead undertook munitions work at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, then the largest establishment of its kind in the world. With the return of peace, he moved his young family to Chelsea, where he produced fashionable, and hence more profitable, topographical portraits and cityscapes. Drury pointed out ‘although many of Anderson’s subjects show his social sympathies, a certain wry, humorous irony creeps in, as in his few oil paintings, which depict ‘types’. Pan in Fulham (1932) depicts a scruffy city-dweller playing the goat-legged Greek god’s mythical pipe, fuses this keen eye for the busy detail of city life with a love of the countryside’s history, myths, and pastimes. Anderson was appointed Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etcher and Engravers in 1923 and commenced teaching at Goldsmiths’ College in 1924, succeeding Malcolm Osborne. There, he would be responsible for reviving line engraving as a mode of original graphic expression, when it had become all but obsolete. His students included Robin Tanner, Paul Drury, Frederick B Taylor and Edward Bouverie Hoyton. Drury remembered Anderson as a man who had ‘no liking for modern art’. In the 1920s considerable quantities of Anderson’s output were exhibited at the Australian Painter-Etcher’s Society at Adelaide in Australia. In 1929 he turned his skills to engraving on a copper plate and today, he is chiefly remembered for his engravings of English rural crafts dating from 1932. Anderson’s line engravings are some of the best work ever created in that medium.  He was fascinated by all sections of society and was particularly drawn to those down on their luck, as may be seen in his engraving, The Fallen Star (1929; Cleveland Museum of Art). However, the1920s British etching revival would be short-lived, as the market for such work collapsed with the arrival of the Great Depression in 1929. Anderson became a member of the engraving faculty of the British School at Rome in 1930. In 1938 he was chosen by the British Council as the sole British representative of line engraving and drypoint at the Venice Biennale. During his career, he won several awards and medals. In 1933 Anderson purchased a cottage at Towersey, near Thame in Buckinghamshire (now in Oxfordshire), which would become his permanent residence, when he was bombed out of London during the Blitz. There, he commenced the project for which he is probably best-known, producing 20-years’ worth of engravings of country crafts. These were produced in editions of 40 to 65 prints and frequently sold out at the Royal Academy exhibitions. Anderson was keen to record dying country crafts and among other themes, his works depict clamping (storing) spuds, sheep dipping, thatching and wood turning. Anderson was elected ARA in 1934 and RA in 1941. Whilst engraving was his preferred medium, he also worked in watercolour and crayon. His watercolours were successful enough for his work to be sought out for Kenneth Clark and Arnold Palmer’s wartime ‘Recording Britain’ series. Anderson was appointed CBE in 1951 and died on 4 March 1966. His Hedgelaying (1945) may be found in the collection of the University of Michigan’s Museum of Art in the USA. Abbott and Holder of London held an exhibition of Anderson’s work in 1995, with another being held at Thame in 2007. Anderson’s etching The Clothes Peg Maker may be seen above.