The etching revival was the re-emergence and invigoration of etching as an original form of printmaking during the period approximately from 1850 to 1930. The main centres were France, Britain and the United States, but other countries, such as the Netherlands, also participated. A strong collector's market developed, with the most sought-after artists achieving very high prices. This came to an abrupt end after the 1929 Wall Street crash wrecked what had become a very strong market among collectors, at a time when the typical style of the movement, still based on 19th-century developments, was becoming outdated.

According to Bamber Gascoigne, the "most visible characteristic of [the movement]... was an obsession with surface tone", created by deliberately not wiping all the ink off the surface of the printing plate, so that parts of the image have a light tone from the film of ink left. This and other characteristics reflected the influence of Rembrandt, whose reputation had by this point reached its full height.

Although some artists owned their own printing presses, the movement created the new figure of the star printer, who worked closely with artists to exploit all the possibilities of the etching technique, with variable inking, surface tone and retroussage, and the use of different papers. Societies and magazines were also important, publishing albums of varied original prints by different artists in fixed editions.

The most common subjects were landscapes and townscapes, portraits, and genre scenes of ordinary people. The mythological and historical subjects still very prominent in contemporary painting rarely feature. Etching was the dominant technique, but many plates combined this with drypoint in particular; the basic action of creating the lines on the plate for these was essentially the same as in drawing, and fairly easy for a trained artist to pick up. Sometimes other intaglio printmaking techniques were used: engraving, mezzotint and aquatint, all of which used more specialized actions on the plate. Artists then had to learn the mysteries of "biting" the plate with acid; this was not needed with pure drypoint, which was one of its attractions.

During the century after Rembrandt's death the techniques of etching and drypoint brought to their highest point by him gradually declined. By the late eighteenth century, with brilliant exceptions like Piranesi, Tiepolo and Goya most etchings were reproductive or illustrative. In England the situation was slightly better, with Samuel Palmer, John Sell Cotman, John Crome and others producing fine original etchings, mostly of landscape subjects, in the early decades of the 19th century. The Etching Club, founded in 1838, continued to maintain the medium, among other things publishing small editions of classic works of English literature illustrated with original etchings by groups of its members.

As the century progressed, new technical developments, especially lithography, which was gradually able to print successfully in colour, further depressed the use of etching. The style typical of the Etching Revival really begins in France with the prints of the Barbizon School in the 1840s and 50s. A number of artists, mainly painters, produced some landscape etchings which seemed to recapture some of the spirit of the Old Master print. Charles-François Daubigny, Millet and especially Charles Jacque produced etchings that were different from those heavily worked reproductive plates of the previous century. The dark, grand and often vertical format townscapes of Charles Meryon, also mostly from the 1850s, provided models for a very different type of subject and style which was to remain in use until the end of the revival, though more in Britain than France.

The steel-facing of plates was a technical development patented in 1857 which "immediately revolutionized the print business." It allowed a very thin coating of iron to be added to a copper plate by electroplating. This made the lines on the plates much more durable, and in particular the fragile "burr" thrown up by the drypoint process lasted much better than with copper alone, and so a greater (if still small) number of rich, burred, impressions could be produced. Francis Seymour Haden and his brother-in-law, the American James McNeill Whistler were among the first to exploit this, and drypoint became a more popular technique than it had been since the 15th century, still often combined with conventional etching. However, steel-facing could lead to a loss of quality. It is not to be confused with steel engraving on wholly iron plates, popular in the same period but almost always for mezzotints and commercial printing.

Several people were of special importance to the French Etching Revival. The publisher Alfred Cadart, the printer Auguste Delâtre, and Maxime Lalanne, an etcher who wrote a popular textbook of etching in 1866, established the broad contours of the movement. Cadart founded the Société des Aquafortistes in 1862, reviving the awareness of the beautiful, original etching in the minds of the collecting public. Charles Meryon was an early inspiration, and close collaborator with Delâtre, laying out the various possible techniques of modern etching and producing works that would be ranked with Rembrandt and Dürer.