“First Impressions,” on view at the UBS Art Gallery, is the kind of exhibition that is usually ignored by the majority of gallery-goers. This exhibition is not an urgent art-world event, and many of the prints on view are sentimental, overly academic, or downright boring. But the works reward a closer look, and not simply because some of them are strange and poetic, intimate, tactile experiences. The real treat is in knowing that looking at these prints means witnessing the birth of the graphic arts in America.

A renewed interest in artistic printmaking spread throughout Europe in the early 1840s, fueled by the Barbizon artists in France, particularly Jean-Baptise-Camille Corot and Charles-Francois Daubigny. In the 1870s, American artists – distinguishing themselves as “painter-etchers” – began to experiment with non-commercial printmaking, invigorated by the medium’s ability to fluidly traverse the ground between drawing and painting.

The possibility of creating affordable multiples of an original work provided ordinary citizens the chance to own art. Out of this movement came the New York Etching Club, founded in 1877, and the American Art Review, a shortlived publication that introduced serialized art to the general public, including many of the prints in this exhibition.

The 80 etchings on view – including landscapes, maritime views, and genre scenes – are cleverly installed as several small rooms, which allows groupings of like-themed prints to be viewed at one time.This also facilitates the upclose inspection encouraged by an etching’s intricate network of silky hatch-marks.

Standout work is by members of the Moran clan: Thomas (1837-1926); his wife, Mary Nimmo (1842-99), and his youngest brother, Peter (1841-1914). The Morans had a relationship to nature at times alien our 21st-century sensibilities: slow, innocently awestruck before the elements, in communion with what lay before them. There is no shred of ironic yearning for something lost, no existential wail at modern man’s inability to reconcile his relationship with nature.

This bracing, direct approach to the environment is summed up in the glances of cattle in Peter Moran’s “Summer Time” (c. 1887), which is reminiscent of Rosa Bonheur’s animal scenes. Caught mid-graze, the cows’ large eyes confront the viewer’s presence with a mix of surprise and disinterest. Moran centers this encounter between the waters of a placid creek – its glassy sheen wrought from hundreds of tiny marks – and a flurry of trees and sky. These details coalesce into a metaphor for the cattle’s emotional state.

Many of the prints on display have a miniature drawing, or remarque, printed in the lower margin just below the main image. Related to medieval grotesques – all buttocks and noses glaring out from behind giant ornate letters – remarques function like a poetic subtext, a theatrical aside designed to enrich interpretation of the subject matter. A device rarely used in contemporary printmaking, these fun Lilliputian moments are worth the trip alone.

The remarque in Mary Nimmo Moran’s “Where Through the Willows Creaking Loud,Is Heard the Busy Mill” (1886), is a single, mysterious, sepiatoned dragonfly hovering below a writhing, densely worked black-andwhite landscape. Is this passive witness – about to verge radically from one pictorial space to another – the artist projecting herself into the scenario?

John Austin Sands Monks’s “The Patriarch” (c. 1885) is reminiscent of the act of repeating a word until meaning is bled out, leaving only a meditative, abstract mantra. In this peculiar image, the bust of a large Merino ram stares blissfully into space, surrounded by the radiance of myriad tiny sheepheads – presumably his brood. The palpable wetness of his self-satisfied eyes telegraphs a job well done.

One of the wonderful by-products of aesthetic snobbery is the opportunity to acquire interesting works of art for relatively little money. The market for most of the prints in “First Impressions”is devalued: A quick eBay search displayed ongoing auctions for prints by all the Morans, as well as many of the other artists in the exhibition, all for three-figure sums. The knowledge that historically important artwork can be hung on your wall is startlingly powerful.And although “First Impressions” will not change your life, it is always comforting to know that surprises still exist.

Until August 11 (1285 Sixth Avenue, between 51st and 52nd Streets, 212-713-2885).