Charles Lennox Wright II At about this time Davidson urged his stick-at-it confreres to request of A. W. Drake the courtesy of a legend ("Engraved by" so and so) to be placed under such halftones as they had retouched. While this credit was technically accurate, it was very misleading to the public who had come to regard these relief etchings as "engravings" or "photoengravings" (as they are still erroneously designated) and so thought the engraver named in the legend had made the plates which, if not made by Wright himself, had been made by Wright's process. C. L. Wright was born in 185 2 at New York in the neighborhood of Grand Street, then a residential section. He received his education at No. 4 Primary School on Chrystie Street near Delancey, and later in Chelsea Village, when his parents had removed to that locality. At. the age of sixteen he was already studying the art of drawing upon the gypsum-coated wood blocks with pencil and wash, as was the custom of illustrators including even the great Gustave Dore. A year later, 1869, his father, Charles Washington Wright, who had been a medal engraver and later a wood engraver for Harper's and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, died from illness and wounds received in the Mexican and Civil Wars. The full support of his mother necessitated a more remunerative occupation. Frank Leslie offered him an opportunity to learn "wet-plate" photography in his studio "Gallery." There portraits of celebrities and reductions and enlargements to be traced or copied by artists on wood were made. Shortly thereafter photographing directly upon the wood blocks was employed by "the Pioneer" for Leslie's Weekly. In six months young Wright had become so proficient at photography that Frank Leslie placed him in charge of the department. About two years later, due to interference with the routine and schedules of work by Leslie's sons, Wright resigned. This was an unfortunate time. The post-Civil War decline and unemployment, which was to endure for a score of years, had already begun. However, he soon became associated with Edward Bier- stadt, a printer at 932 Broadway and at 58 Reade Street, New York. From 1870 to 1874 Bierstadt had been interestedin de- 201