Andrew Geddes’s interest in etching, a medium then almost totally ignored by artists, was probably sparked by his father’s print collection, but it was his friend John Clerk (son of the early Scottish etcher John Clerk of Eldin) who encouraged him to take up printmaking. Although primarily a portrait painter, Geddes etched from the late 1800s until the early 1830s and is often regarded as the herald for the etching revival some forty years later. This portrait print shows the painter William Allan (1782 – 1850) dressed in Circassian armour which he brought back from a visit to Russia in 1814. He stands, the romantic hero, against an imagined battle-scene.