Old Jail, from the series Etchings of Glasgow

Etchings of Glasgow was Bone's first series of etchings and is indicative of his reliance on the work of the eighteenth-century Italian printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and more recent predecessors Charles Meryon and J.A.M. Whistler. Old Jail is the second scene from the series of six. With its diminutive rag pickers and muck rakers in the foreground and the looming prison as a backdrop, Bone, like Meryon before him, shows us the sinister underbelly of modern society. Alphonse Legros thought it so successful that he presented it to the Musée du Luxembourg, the museum of contemporary art in Paris, for their collection.