While apprenticed to his father, a heraldic trade engraver, Anderson started to take evening classes in etching at Bristol School of Art and in 1908 won a British Institute Scholarship to the Royal College of Art, going on to Goldsmiths College in 1911, the year he made a first sketching trip to France.
After the War, in which he worked in munitions, Anderson made further travels in Europe, producing fine drypoint architectural views, though always filled with street life and people, while also producing sympathetic genre figure subjects.
In 1933, Anderson engraved The Farm Hand, the first of what became a series of meticulous recordings of rural crafts. After 1934 he worked exclusively as a line engraver, and found avid buyers in the R.A. Summer exhibitions.
When his home and studio in London were destroyed by bombing in 1941, Anderson and his wife settled permanently in Oxfordshire. The craft series records people he got to know personally in the area. He feared for the preservation and future of such craftsmanship, which he felt was threatened by modern developments. Though Anderson identified most of the craftsmen he portrayed, only George Hyden was specifically named in the title of the print.
This original line engraving is signed and annotated in pencil, on cream wove, faintly mount-stained in the margins. It was exhibited at the R.A. in 1947 and the R.E. In 1948.