The only date is the one he cut himself

Enlarge the bottom right corner of Monroe Street and there it is, cut into the copper in his own hand: D S MacLaughlan · 1931. He did it again on The Cathedral. That signature is the only date anybody wrote down. The museum record has none.

The Smithsonian holds twelve of these sheets. Its catalogue gives an artist, a title, a credit line and an accession number for each — and no date, no medium, no measurements. Not for one of the twelve. The man who made them is the only source there is, and he signed the plate.

A stranger's city

Donald Shaw MacLaughlan was born in Charlottetown, on Prince Edward Island, in 1876. He spent thirty years etching the old world — Rouen, Venice, Paris, Brittany — the cathedrals and the canals and the fishermen. In Chicago he was represented by the Albert Roullier Art Galleries.

In 1931 he made twelve views of Chicago. He was fifty-five, and it was the newest city in the world.

You can see him deciding what to do with it. Half the plates are the canyon: the street closing overhead, the towers going up out of the top edge, a figure on a dome at the far end catching the last light. One plate is almost solid black, a single lit tower burning over the river at night. And two of the twelve are not etchings at all — they are watercolours, and one of them is a night skyline with the windows put in one by one, in ochre and rose against a blue-black sky. Nothing else he made in Chicago looks remotely like it.

Ten plates, and eight of them

The frontispiece is a title page cut into copper. Under an arch, with a young couple on the steps below the skyline, it reads TEN ETCHED PLATES OF CHICAGO.

The Smithsonian has the frontispiece and eight plates. Two are missing. One of them we have found on the market — Animated Avenue, an etching on vellum, the signature printed in the plate. The tenth we have not.

The three remaining sheets in the museum are not part of the portfolio at all: two watercolours and a pencil drawing, catalogued as drawings, kept with the prints because they arrived together in the same gift.

Nobody renewed it

Under the copyright law of the time, a work published in 1931 held its copyright for twenty-eight years and then had to be renewed. If MacLaughlan's Chicago plates had been renewed, they would still be under copyright until the first day of 2027.

We went and looked. The Copyright Office published a catalogue of every renewal it registered, year by year, and the volume covering works of art and prints for 1959 — the year these plates came up — lists eighty names. MacLaughlan is not among them. Neither is his gallery. The list runs Mainardi, Masereel, McCary, Melvill, Modena, Munger; he would sort between the first two, and he is not there.

Nobody filed the paperwork. The portfolio passed into the public domain because it was not worth anyone's trouble to keep, which is how most of what we print gets to us.

What is left

He died in Marrakesh in 1938, seven years after Chicago and a long way from it.

What survives is twelve sheets in a drawer in Washington, cataloged without a date, from a portfolio that says ten and is missing two, whose copyright ran out because nobody claimed it. Almost everything about the set has come loose.

Except the one thing he put there himself, in reverse, in the copper, before the acid: 1931.