CURIOSITIES:MOVING OUT OF home and getting your own place is a right of passage that people mark in different ways, writes Marie-Claire Digby.
Feathering your personal nest usually involves buying a bed, a cooker, maybe a sofa. I bought an etching, and slept on a mattress on the floor for several months. It was a dry-point copper plate etching of a gundog, one of a limited edition, signed by the artist, Henry Wilkinson. I liked its gentle shades and careful, precise lines. Now, almost three decades later, I think in some way it was a reassuring reminder of home, where my father always had a couple of gundogs with those short, "sensible" names they have like Shot, Brownie and Teal.
I bought it in McCambridges on Suffolk Street, Dublin, and although I can't remember the exact price I paid (£120 comes to mind, though), it was enough to keep me on that mattress on the floor for quite a while.
Some years later, the similarity between my prized possession and a smaller, much older picture hanging on the wall in my parents' sittingroom struck me, and on closer inspection it was indeed another Henry Wilkinson, and one of a much smaller edition. It transpired that my dad had bought it in Glasgow in 1964, the year I was born. It cost him £5, a quarter of his monthly salary as a trainee accountant, and my mother wasn't a bit impressed, or so I am told.
Later, when my mortgage didn't seem so daunting, I bought some more Wilkinson etchings in a smart print shop in Chelsea, and another for my parents as a wedding anniversary gift. So, between us we have quite a collection of these things, not valuable, but much loved.
It is said that Wilkinson first learned the craft of engraving by watching gunsmiths decorating the metalwork on handmade firearms - having climbed out of a window unbeknownst to his family, to work at the gunmakers, Hammond of Winchester, while in his teens. He later studied at the Royal College of Art, and produces his limited edition etchings entirely single-handedly, from engraving his metal plates to printing and hand-finishing with printing inks that he makes himself.