This image of the celebrated hilltop town of Cuenca, Spain, was created by Ernest David Roth, who was born in Stuttgart, Germany, but who grew up in Chicago; and who studied at The Art Institute of Chicago and National Academy in New York. Roth returned to Europe early in the 20th Century to continue his studies and find suitable subjects. He joined the last wave of 19th and 20th Century American artists who swarmed across Europe following the Civil War seeking inspiration and training in the classical canons of fine art. Specializing in architectural and urban subjects, he fell squarely in the tradition of James McNeill Whistler, Herman Armour Webster, and Joseph Pennell, who, like him, lacked formal architectural training.

Roth's choice of subjects tends towards the vernacular. This strange assemblage of peculiar structures, for example, is typical of the views he preferred: lopsided dwellings of common people, battered and bruised by time, perched like cormorants, dangling and precarious, leaning out over a precipice.

Roth did have one thing in common with perhaps the greatest of the architectural etchers, John Taylor Arms, and that was his method of incising lines. Like Arms, he applied acid directly onto his plates using a feather, as opposed to immersing the entire plate in an acid bath. He sought to control the depth and resolution of his drawing, right down to each individual line, and established his tonal values through cross-hatching alone. This is a distinctive characteristic of intaglio printing, an emphasis on line, and yields the deliberate grid of disciplined strokes that characterize his work. At a large scale, the grace and lucidity of his lines forms a seductive pattern independent of the composition as a whole.