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Title: Fine prints
New and enlarged edition, with fifteen illustrations
Author: Frederick Wedmore
Release Date: May 5, 2023 [eBook #70701]
Language: English
Produced by: Charlene Taylor, Carla Foust and the Online Distributed
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FINE PRINTS ***
Collector Series
FINE PRINTS
[Illustration:
The Collector Series
FINE
PRINTS
BY
FREDERICK
WEDMORE
EDINBURGH
JOHN GRANT
1905
AUTOGRAPHS AND MANUSCRIPTS
ENGLISH WATER-COLOURS
STAMPS
TAPESTRY LACE AND EMBROIDERY
MINIATURES
COINS
ENGLISH
BOOK PLATES
VIOLINS
PICTURES
PORCELAIN
OLD BIBLES
ANCIENT GLASS
]
FINE PRINTS
BY
FREDERICK WEDMORE
HONORARY FELLOW OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF PAINTER-ETCHERS
_New and Enlarged Edition, with Fifteen Illustrations_
Edinburgh
JOHN GRANT
1905
PREFATORY NOTE FOR THE EDITION OF 1905
In this New Edition of a book which is supposed to have played some
little part in increasing the taste for Print Collecting here in
England, the few alterations I have made, in the text, are chiefly
verbal ones. I did not want to interfere, more than was absolutely
needful, with a piece of writing that, done at one time, possessed,
probably, along with all its faults and its deficiencies, some unity.
But it seemed good that certain additions, hardly outside the lines
on which the book had been planned--and which the passing of years,
more than anything else, had suggested--should be made, and grouped
together in a short, separate Chapter--“Postscript: 1905.” That has
been accomplished. And this “Postscript” deals very briefly with a few
artists, new or not noticed before--deals too with certain changes in
money value, as to which no indication can be more than approximate.
It has been necessary to extend, to a small extent, the Bibliography.
And it has been convenient to suppress certain of the Illustrations
that appeared in the Original Edition, and to supply others in the
place of them.
F. W.
LONDON: _September, 1905_.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
PREFATORY NOTE FOR THE EDITION OF 1905 3
INTRODUCTION 9
I. THE TASK OF THE COLLECTOR 23
II. CLAUDE, VANDYKE, OSTADE, HOLLAR 35
III. REMBRANDT 48
IV. FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING 66
V. WHISTLER AND HADEN 100
VI. LATER ENGLISH ETCHERS 122
VII. DÜRER: THE “LITTLE MASTERS” 139
VIII. ITALIAN LINE ENGRAVERS 158
IX. FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PRINTS 169
X. TURNER PRINTS 188
XI. MEZZOTINTS 209
XII. LITHOGRAPHS 221
APPENDIX: CERTAIN WOODCUTS 241
POSTSCRIPT FOR THE EDITION OF 1905 245
BIBLIOGRAPHY 250
INDEX 255
ILLUSTRATIONS
_The Landscape with the Obelisk_ _To face page_ 54
From REMBRANDT’S Etching.
_Lutma: the Goldsmith_ _To face page_ 60
From REMBRANDT’S Etching.
_Clément de Jonghe_ _To face page_ 62
From REMBRANDT’S Etching.
_La Morgue_ _To face page_ 82
From MÉRYON’S Etching.
_The Little White Horse_ _To face page_ 140
From DÜRER’S Engraving.
_Coat of Arms with the Cock_ _To face page_ 146
From DÜRER’S Engraving.
_Adam and Eve_ _To face page_ 154
From SEBALD BEHAM’S Engraving.
_Panel of Ornament_ _To face page_ 156
From Engraving by LUCAS VAN LEYDEN.
_Dance of Damsels_ _To face page_ 164
From ZOAN ANDREA’S Print after MANTEGNA’S design.
_Saint Cecilia_ _To face page_ 166
From MARC ANTONIO’S Engraving after RAPHAEL.
_Le Jeu de l’Oye_ _To face page_ 178
From the Engraving after CHARDIN.
_La Toilette_ _To face page_ 184
From the Engraving after BAUDOUIN.
_The Straw Yard_ _To face page_ 192
From TURNER’S “Liber Studiorum.”
_Spring_ _To face page_ 210
From LUCAS’S Mezzotint after CONSTABLE.
_Miss Oliver_ _To face page_ 218
From MARCHI’S Mezzotint after REYNOLDS.
FINE PRINTS
INTRODUCTION
In the collecting of Prints--of prints which must be fine and may most
probably be rare--there is an ample recompense for the labour of the
diligent, and room for the exercise of the most various tastes. Certain
of the objects on which the modern collector sets his hands have, it
may be, hardly any other virtue than the doubtful one of scarcity;
but fine prints, whatever School they may belong to, and whatever may
be the money value that happens to be affixed to them by the fashion
of the time, have always the fascination of beauty and the interest
of historical association. Then, considered as collections of works
of art, there is the practical convenience of their compactness. The
print-collector carries a museum in a portfolio, or packs away a
picture gallery, neatly, within the compass of one solander-box.
Again, the print-collector, if he will but occupy himself with
intelligent industry, may, even to-day, have a collection of fine
things without paying overmuch, or even very much, for them. All will
depend upon the School or master that he particularly affects. Has he
at his disposal only a few bank-notes, or only a few sovereigns even,
every year?--he may yet surround himself with excellent possessions,
of which he will not speedily exhaust the charm. Has he the fortune
of an Astor or a Vanderbilt?--he may instruct the greatest dealers
in the trade to struggle in the auction-room, on his behalf, with
the representatives of the Berlin Museum. And it may be his triumph,
then, to have paid the princely ransom of the very rarest “state”
of the rarest Rembrandt. And, all the time, whether he be rich man
or poor--but especially, I think, if he be poor--he will have been
educating himself to the finer perception of a masculine yet lovely
art, and, over and above indulging the “fad” of the collector, he will
find that his possessions rouse within him an especial interest in some
period of Art History, teach him a real and delicate discrimination
of an artist’s qualities, and so, indeed, enlarge his vista that his
enjoyment of life itself, and his appreciation of it, is quickened and
sustained. For great Art of any kind, whether it be the painter’s, the
engraver’s, the sculptor’s, or the writer’s, is not--it cannot be too
often insisted--a mere craft or sleight-of-hand, to be practised from
the wrist downwards. It is the expression of the man himself. It is,
therefore, with great and new personalities that the study of an art,
the contemplation of it--not the mere bungling amateur performance of
it;--brings you into contact. And there is no way of studying an art
that is so complete and satisfactory as the collecting of examples of
it.
And then again, to go back to the material part of the business, how
economical it is to be a collector, if only you are wise and prudent!
Of pleasant vices this is surely the least costly. Nay, more; the
bank-note cast upon the waters may come back after many days.
The study of engravings, ancient and modern--of woodcuts, line
engravings, etchings, mezzotints--has become by this time extremely
elaborate and immensely complicated. Most people know nothing of it,
and do not even realise that behind all their ignorance there is a
world of learning and of pleasure, some part of which at least might be
theirs if they would but enter on the land and seek to possess it. Few
men, even of those who address themselves to the task, acquire swiftly
any substantial knowledge of more than one or two departments of the
study; though the ideal collector, and I would even say the reasonable
one, whatever he may actually own, is able, sooner or later, to take
a survey of the larger ground--his eye may range intelligently over
fields he has no thought of annexing.
From this it will be concluded--and concluded rightly--that the
print-collector must be a specialist, more or less. More or less, at
least at the beginning, must he address himself with particular care
to one branch of the study. And which is it to be? The number of fine
Schools of Etching and Engraving is really so considerable that the
choice may well be his own. This or that master, this or that period,
this or that method, he may select with freedom, and will scarcely go
wrong. But the mention of it brings one, naturally, to the divisions of
the subject, and the collector, we shall find, is face to face, first
of all, with this question: “Are the prints I am to bring together to
be the work of an artist who originates, or of an artist who mainly
translates?”
Well, of course, in a discussion of the matter, the great original
Schools must have the first place, whatever it may be eventually
decided shall be the subject of your collection. You may buy, by all
means, the noble mezzotints which the engravers of the Eighteenth
Century wrought after Reynolds, Romney, and George Morland, but suffer
us to say a little first about the great creative artists, and then,
when the possible collector has read about them--and has made himself
familiar, at the British Museum Print-room say, with some portion of
their work--it may be that though he finds that they are nearly all,
however different in themselves, less decorative on a wall than the
great masters of rich mezzotint, he will find a charm and spell he
cannot wish to banish in the evidence of their originality, in the fact
that they are the creations of an individual impulse, whether they are
slight or whether they are elaborate.
The Schools of early line-engravers, Italian, Flemish, German, are
almost entirely Schools of original production. I say “almost,” for
as early as the days of Raphael, the interpreter, the translator,
the copyist, if you will, came into the matter, and the designs of
the Urbinate were multiplied by the burin of Marc Antonio and his
followers. And charming prints they are, these Marc Antonios, so little
bought to-day. Economical of line they are, and exquisite of contour,
and likely, one would suppose, to be valued in the Future more than
they are valued just now, when the rhyme of Mr. Browning, about the
collector of his early period, is true no longer--
“The debt of wonder my crony owes
Is paid to my Marc Antonios.”
That in the main the earlier work is original, is not a thing to be
surprised at, any more than it is a thing to lament. The narrow world
of buyers in that primitive day was not likely to afford scope for
the business of the translator; the time had not yet come when there
was any need for the creations of an artist to be largely multiplied.
That time came first, perhaps, in the Seventeenth Century, when the
immediately accepted genius of Rubens gave ground for the employment
of the interpreting talent of Bolswert, Pontius, and Vosterman. Again,
there was Edelinck, Nanteuil, and the Drevets.
It need scarcely be said that extreme rarity is a characteristic of the
early Schools. The prints of two of the most masculine of the Italians,
for instance, Andrea Mantegna and Jacopo de’ Barbarj, are not to be got
by ordering them. They have, of course, to be watched for, and waited
for, and the opportunity taken at the moment at which it arises. In
some measure there will be experienced the same engaging and preventive
difficulty in possessing yourself of the prints of the great Germans
and of the one great Flemish master, Lucas of Leyden. And if these,
in certain states at least, in certain conditions, are not quite as
hard to come upon as the works of those masters who have been mentioned
just before them, and of their compatriots of the same period, that
is but an extra inducement for the search, since there is, of course,
a degree of difficulty that is actually discouraging--a sensible man
does not long aim at the practically impossible. Now, in regard to the
early Flemish master with whom Dürer himself not unwillingly--nay,
very graciously--exchanged productions, there are yet no insuperable
obstacles to the collector gathering together a representative array
of his work; it is possible upon occasion even to add one or two of
his scarce and beautiful and spirited ornaments to the group, such
as it may be, of subjects based on scriptural or on classic themes.
To be a specialist in Lucas van Leyden would be to be unusual, but
not perhaps to be unwise; yet a greater sagacity would, no doubt, be
manifested by concentration upon that which is upon the whole the finer
work of Albert Dürer. Of late years, Martin Schöngauer too, with the
delicacy of his burin, his tenderness of sentiment, and his scarcely
less pronounced quaintness, has been a favourite, greatly sought for;
but, amongst the Germans, the work that best upon the whole repays the
trouble undertaken in amassing it, is that of the great Albert himself,
and that of the best of the Little Masters.
And who, then, were the Little Masters? a beginner wants to know.
They were seven artists, some of them Dürer’s direct pupils, all of
them his direct successors; getting the name that is common to them
not from any insignificance in their themes, but from the scale on
which it pleased them to execute their always deliberate, always
highly-wrought work. There is not one who has not about his labour
some measure of individual interest, but the three greatest of the
seven are the two brothers Beham--Barthel and Sebald--and that Prince
of little ornamentists, Heinrich Aldegrever. Nowhere was the German
Renaissance greater than in its ornament, and the Behams, along with
subjects of Allegory, History, and Genre, addressed themselves not
seldom to subjects of pure and self-contained design. Rich and fine
in their fancy, their characteristic yet not too obvious symmetry has
an attraction that lasts. Barthel was the less prolific of the twain,
but perhaps the more vigorous in invention. Sebald, certainly not
at a loss himself for motives for design, yet chose to fall back on
occasion--as in the exquisite little print of the _Adam and Eve_--upon
the inventions of his brother. There is not now, there never has been,
very much collecting here in England of the German Little Masters.
Three pounds or four suffices, now and again, to buy at Sotheby’s,
or at a dealer’s, a good Beham, a good Aldegrever. In their own land
they are rated a little more highly--are at least more eagerly sought
for--but with research and pains (and remembering resolutely in this,
as in every other case, to reject a bad impression), it is possible,
for a most moderate sum, to have quite a substantial bevy of these
treasures; and though large indeed in their design, their real art
quality, they are, in a material sense, as small almost as gems. Mr
Loftie, who made a specialty of Sebald Behams, was able, I believe, to
carry a collection of them safely housed in his waistcoat-pocket.
If we pass on from the Sixteenth to the Seventeenth Century, we have
the opportunity, if we so choose, of leaving Line Engraving, and of
studying and acquiring here and there examples of the noblest Etching
that has been done in the world. For the Seventeenth Century is the
period of Rembrandt--the period, too, of that meaner but yet most
skilful craftsman, Adrian van Ostade, and the period of the serene
artist of classic Landscape and Architecture, who wrought some twenty
plates in _aquafortis_--I mean Claude. In an introductory chapter to
a volume like the present, there is time and space to consider only
Rembrandt. And it cannot be asserted too decisively that in the study
and collection of Rembrandt, lies, as a rule--and must, one thinks, for
ever lie--the print-collector’s highest and most legitimate pleasure.
And even a poor man may have a few good Rembrandts, though only quite
a rich man can have them in great numbers and of the rarest. Rembrandt
is a superb tonic for people who have courted too much the infection of
a weakly and a morbid art. Not occupied indeed in his representations
of humanity with visions of formal beauty, his variety is unsurpassed,
his vigour unequalled; he has the great traditions of Style, yet is as
modern and as unconventional as Mr Whistler. Of the different classes
of Rembrandt’s compositions, the sacred subjects perhaps--at least some
minor examples of them--are the least uncommon; and in their intimate
and homely study of humanity, and often too in their _technique_, the
sacred subjects prove themselves desirable. Never, however, should
they be collected to the exclusion of the rarer Portraiture or of
the rarest Landscape. A _Lutma_, a _De Jonghe_, in a fine state and
fine condition, a _Cottage with a Dutch Haybarn_, a _Landscape with
a Tower_, attain the summit of the etcher’s art, and, both in noble
conception and magical execution, are absolutely perfect. Why, such
impressions of the Rembrandt landscapes as were dispersed but two or
three years since, when the cabinet of Mr Holford passed under the
hammer, appeal to the trained eye with a potency not a whit less great
than can any masterpiece of Painting; and, to speak in very soberest
English, no sum of money that it could ever enter into the heart of the
enthusiast to pay for them would be, in truth, a too extravagant, a too
unreasonable, ransom.
In the Eighteenth Century original Etching falls into the background,
and the skill of the engraver, in those lands where, in the Eighteenth
Century, it was chiefly exercised--in France, that is, and England--is
devoted in the main to no spontaneous creation, but to the translation
of the work of painters. In two mediums, thoroughly opposed or
thoroughly contrasted, yet each with its own value, the engraver’s
labour is executed; there flourished, side by side, the delicate School
of Line Engraving and the noble School of Mezzotint. Reproductive or
interpretive Line Engraving had done great things a generation or so
earlier, and even Mezzotint was not the invention of the Eighteenth
Century, though it was then that the art discovered by Von Siegen, and
practised with a singular directness by Prince Rupert, was brought to
its perfection. But the Eighteenth Century--even the latter half of
it--was certainly the period at which both arts were busiest; and not
so much the professed collector as the intelligent _bourgeois_ of the
time gathered these things together--in England chiefly Mezzotints,
in France chiefly Line Engravings--and a very few shillings paid for
the M‘Ardell or the Watson after Reynolds, and later for the Raphael
Smith or the William Ward after George Morland. Often the engraver was
a publisher of his own and other people’s prints. That was the case in
Paris as much as in London; and in Paris, in the third quarter of the
Eighteenth Century, the line engravers issued for a couple of francs
or so--and the _Mercure de France_ was apt, like newspapers in our own
day, to notice the publication--those admirable, and still in England,
too little known prints which record the dignified observation, the
sober, just suggested comedy of Chardin.
There were exceptions, of course, to the common rule that in the period
of our first Georges, and of Louis the Fifteenth, engraver’s work was
translation. Hogarth, in the first half of the century--about the time
when the French line engravers were occupied with their quite exquisite
translations of the grace of Watteau, Lancret, and Pater--wrought out
on copper with rough vigour his original conceptions of the Rake’s
and of the Harlot’s _Progress_, and not a few of his minor themes; but
when it came to the rendering into black and white of those masterly
canvases of _Marriage à la Mode_, professional engravers, such as
Ravenet and Scotin, were employed to admirable purpose, and a little
later the very colours of the canvas seemed to live, the painter’s very
touch seemed to be reproduced, in the noble mezzotints of Earlom. And
the immense successes of this reproductive engraving, with the art of
Hogarth, brings us back to the truth of our earlier proposition; the
period was a period of interpretation, not of original work, with the
engraver. The whole French Eighteenth Century School, from Watteau down
to Lavreince, is to be studied, and collected, too, in Line Engraving.
The School is not invariably discreet in subject: Lavreince has his
suggestiveness, though rarely does he go beyond legitimate comedy,
and Baudouin, François Boucher’s son-in-law, has his audacities; but
against these is to be set the dignified idyl of the great master of
Valenciennes; the work of Watteau’s pupils, too; the works of Boucher;
Massard’s consummate rendering, in finest or most finished line, of
this or that seductive vision of Greuze; the stately comedy of Moreau
le jeune; and, as I have said already, the excellent interpretations of
the homely, natural, so desirable art of Chardin.
Mezzotint really did for all the English painters of importance of the
Eighteenth Century, and in a measure for certain earlier Dutchmen,
all that Line Engraving accomplished for the French. “By these men I
shall be immortalised,” Sir Joshua said, when the work of M‘Ardell
and his fellows came under his view. Gainsborough, it is true, was not
interpreted quite so much or quite so successfully. But Romney has as
much justice done to him in later English Mezzotint as the luxurious
art of Lely and Kneller obtained from one of the earlier practitioners
of the craft--John Smith. Morland’s continued and justified popularity
in our own time is due to nothing half as much as to the mezzotints
by Raphael Smith, and Ward, and Young, and others of that troop of
brethren. And it was mezzotint, in combination with the bitten line
for leading features of the composition, that Turner, early in our own
century--in 1807--decided to employ in the production of those seventy
plates of _Liber Studiorum_ upon which, already even, so much of his
fame rests.
_Liber Studiorum_ occupies an interesting and a peculiar position
between work upon the copper wholly original and work wholly
reproductive. Turner etched the leading lines himself. In several
cases he completed, with his own hand, in mezzotint, the whole of
the engraved picture; but generally he gave the “scraping” to a
professional engraver, whose efforts he minutely supervised and most
elaborately corrected. In recent years, almost as much, though not
quite as much sought for as the _Liber_ plates of Turner, are certain
rather smaller mezzotints which record the art of Constable; but
Constable himself did nothing on these plates, though he supervised
their production by David Lucas. Turner’s connection with professional
engravers was not confined to the priceless and admirable prints of
the _Liber_. He trained a school of line engravers, welcoming at first
the assistance of John Pye and of George and William Cooke. These two
brothers were the engravers mainly of his _Southern Coast_, and nothing
has been more manly than that; but the work of William Miller, in
the _Clovelly_ of that _Southern Coast_, and in a subsequent series,
interpreted with quite peculiar exquisiteness those refinements of
light which in Turner’s middle and later time so much engaged his
effort.
With Turner’s death, or with the death of the artists who translated
him, fine Line Engraving almost vanished. It had all but disappeared
when, nearly fifty years ago, there began in France and England that
Revival of Etching with which the amateur of to-day is so rightly
concerned. A few etchings by Bracquemond--of still-life chiefly--a
larger number by Jules Jacquemart, of fine objects in porcelain,
jewellery, bronze, and noble stones, are amongst the more precious
products of the earlier part of the Revival of Etching, and they are so
treated that they are inventions indeed, and of an originality that is
exquisite. But the greatest event of the earlier years of the Revival
was the appearance, as long ago as 1850, of the genius of Méryon, who,
during but a few years, wrought a series of _chefs-d’œuvre_--inspired
visions of Paris--and died, neglected and ignored, in the great city to
which it is he who has raised, in those few prints of his, the noblest
of all monuments.
Two other men of very different genius and of unsurpassed energy we
associate with this revival of Etching. Both are yet with us in the
fulness of their years; and both will occupy the collector who is wise
in his generation, and will be, one may make bold to say, the delight
of the far Future as well as of the Present. I mean Sir Seymour Haden
and Mr. James Whistler. The prints of Seymour Haden shame no cabinet;
the best of Whistler’s scarcely suffer at all when placed beside
the master-work of Rembrandt. But it is dangerous treating much of
contemporaries when one’s task is chiefly with the dead; and though
I might mention many other not unworthy men, of whom some subsequent
historian must take count--nay, who may even be referred to at a later
stage of this volume--I will confine myself here, in this introductory
chapter, to just the intimation that Legros and Helleu are, next after
the etchers I have already named, those probably who should engage
attention.
CHAPTER I
The use and object of this book, and necessary limitations of its
service--Monographs for the specialist--The point of view of the
individual--The vastness of the Print-collector’s field--Fashions and
silly fads--Bartolozzi best in his “Tickets”--The Exaltation of the
coloured print--Its general triviality--The task of the
Collector--The fine impression--Brilliance--Condition--The
conservation of prints.
A little Guide to Print Collecting such as the present one, even
if written on very personal lines, not in the least concealing the
writer’s own prepossessions, and giving therefore, quite possibly,
what may seem disproportionate notice of certain masters, cannot,
of course, hope to entirely suffice for the special student of any
particular man. The special student will not, if he is reasonable,
find that the little book falls short of its aim, and fails to do its
proper work, because it does not and cannot possibly supply within its
limited volume all the information of which the accomplished student is
himself possessed, and which he feels to be more or less indispensable
even to the beginner who desires to be thorough. He will know--and
will scarcely need that I should here remind him--that not one book,
nor even a hundred books, can make an expert, can turn the tyro into
a practical connoisseur. What the tyro wants is experience, all that
is learnt by loss and gain, and by brushing shoulder to shoulder with
dealers and brother-collectors and the auctioneer in the auction-room.
He wants that, to become a practical collector at all, and to become
a specialist he wants that and something more. He wants access to
and acquaintance with a large and considerable branch of what is now
unquestionably an immense literature. There are larger books than
this of mine on the general theme of Print Collecting, and they have
been written at different times, with different prepossessions, with
different prejudices, from different points of view. But over and above
these larger books there is a library of monographs on particular
masters, works which are nearly always _Catalogues raisonnés_, and
often treatises to boot; and while no one of these monographs can be
altogether neglected by the would-be student of the artist with whom
it is concerned, some of them must be among the most cherished of his
companions, among the voiceless but instructive friends whose society
is education. No little book then, like the present one, can take the
place of experience and of the study of many books; and least of all
perhaps can a book which does not affect to be the abstract and brief
chronicle of what has been done before, but which prefers rather to
approach its large subject from the point of view of an individual
collector, who yet, it must be said, while cultivating specialties, has
not been inaccessible to the charm of much that lies beyond the limits
of any fields of his own.
So much by way of explanation--by way, too, of disarming the kind of
criticism which would judge a general endeavour only by the success
with which it seemed to meet the needs of a particular case. A
Bibliography of the subject, which will be found on later pages, and
which must itself be a selection, comparatively brief, from the mass of
material that bears upon the theme, will suffice to set the student of
the special school or master upon the desirable track; and meanwhile
one thing may be done, nor, as I hope, that one thing only: the
would-be tiller of the particular plot may be reminded of the vastness
of the land. Even of print collecting it is true, sometimes, that the
trees prevent you from seeing the forest.
I have said just now, in the print-collector’s world, how vast is the
land! Time, of course, tends to extend it--would extend it inevitably,
by reason of new production, did not Fashion sometimes intervene, and,
while opening to the explorer some new tract, taboo a district over
which he had aforetime been accustomed to wander. The fashions of the
wise are not wholly without reason, but the fashions of the foolish
have also to be reckoned with. As an instance, the very generation that
has seen the most just appraisement of original Etching has witnessed
too the exaltation of Bartolozzi and of his nerveless School, a decline
of interest in Marc Antonio, even to some extent in Albert Dürer, and
a silly rage for the coloured print which fifty years since was the
appropriate ornament of scrapbook and nursery.
I have spoken harshly of two classes of things which within the last
few years have found eager purchasers, and it is incumbent upon
me that I justify my harshness and warn the beginner all the more
effectually thereby. The Bartolozzis, then, which have been puffed so
absurdly--what is their real place? To begin with, they are--and in
this one respect they resemble Marc Antonios indeed, and the justly
extolled mezzotints which translate Sir Joshua--they are the work of an
engraver who interpreted the theme of another, and not of an engraver
who invented his own. But this it is evident that they may be, and yet
by no means be criminal. Wherein, it may be asked fairly, lies their
greater offence? It lies in this. That the Humanity they depict is
generally without character--that in no austere and in no captivating,
overwhelming beauty, but in its feeble grace, lies its chief virtue.
Bartolozzi was a good draughtsman. He was no doubt correct habitually,
and he was habitually elegant. Academic he was, though competent. But
again, how terribly monotonous was the order of his beauty, and how
weakly sentimental the design of those--Cipriani and Angelica Kaufmann
principal amongst them--to whose conceptions he lent at least a
measure of support! Of Bartolozzi’s works, the best for the collector
are the “Tickets.” They are on a small scale--dainty little engraved
invitations or announcements to the public of their day, giving the
opportunity to hear Giardini or Madame Banti, or some other singer of
songs or maker of excellent music. Delightful little compositions
they undoubtedly are, with the nude drawn charmingly. Half-a-dozen of
them I would possess with satisfaction. But all the rest!--all those
Bartolozzis which, as they increase in size, get (just as photographs
do) increasingly meaningless! The reasonable collector, if his instinct
be fine or his taste educated, will not desire these, even at prices
that may be comparatively insignificant, whilst Rembrandts, Dürers,
Claudes, Hogarths, Watteaus, Méryons, Whistlers, exist to delight the
world.
The coloured print--for it is time to make some brief allusion to
it--is often very “taking.” To the novice who does not think, it may
even appear to be entirely desirable. But, like the average Bartolozzi,
it is trivial at best. A pretty enough decoration for the wall of a
room in which artistic taste is neither accomplished nor severe, it
has at least to be recognised that its art is hybrid. The weight and
value of the light and shade of the engraving are apt to be minimised
or discounted by the application of colour; and the colour, though put
on with ingenuity, has little of the gradation and the subtle blending,
and nothing whatever of the “touch,” in which the art of the painter
in some measure consists. That is why a set of Wheatley’s “Cries of
London,” printed in bistre, is far better than a set which has the
superficial gaiety of many hues. A coloured Morland is a Morland
murdered. More tolerant may we be of the coloured prints of France; the
lighter art of a Taunay or of a Debucourt according not so ill with the
application of a process which boasts no other charm than the charm of
the _à peu près_. But even where the coloured print is least offensive
or least inadequate, no one can affect to discover in it the more
serious qualities of Art. Often, experts inform us, the colour was only
applied when the original work upon the plate was half worn out--when
the plate could yield no longer an impression that was satisfactory.
Then it was, at least in some cases, that the aid of colour--or some
approximation to the colour that a painter might have sought to
realise--was called in, and so the opportunity prepared for the foolish
rich of our period to pay great prices for an engaging _pis-aller_.
Uninstructed acquaintances, ill-judged dealers, and the habit of an
indolent world to regard old prints as humble examples of decorative
furniture--all these combine to make it possible for the beginner,
and even for the man of many winters who is outside Art, to spend his
time in accumulating objects no one of which is of the first order.
Even certain print-sellers, who ought to do much better, but who
possess, we must suppose, more of technical knowledge than of sure
and well-established taste, lend themselves to the diffusion of the
love of the second-rate. There are several high-class dealers now in
London, people of probity and of accomplishment, some of them young
men, too--a circumstance which bodes well for the future. But those
were safer days when the world of the collector lay within narrower
limits, and when the close contact that there was wont to be between a
few learned salesmen and a few scarcely less learned purchasers, who
bought, of course, gradually, who never bought things _en bloc_--who
studied and enjoyed, in fine, instead of merely possessed--made it
an unlikely matter that any quarter would be shown to the unworthy
productions of a vague and indifferent art. But the beginner of to-day
must take things as he finds them. If the root of the matter be in
him, his mistakes need not be serious. The opportunities for sagacious
choice in collecting yet remain frequent. If he collects fine things,
he will not, of course, succeed in acquiring so extensive a cabinet as
that which rejoiced the heart of his forerunner when prices were much
lower--when a Rembrandt, now worth a hundred guineas, was sold for a
ten-pound note. He must recognise, too, that a very large number of the
finest impressions--and it is upon fine impressions only that his mind
should be set--have come to be cloistered in National, in University,
even in some cases in Municipal institutions. But yet the field that
is open to him is a wide one, and, as was said in the Introduction, it
is possible for diligence and intelligence to accomplish much, even if
unaccompanied by a purse that is big and deep.
It has been customary in books on Collecting to say something about
the qualities that are desirable in a print--the qualities, I mean,
that, in their combination constitute, not a fine subject--that is
a different matter altogether--but a fine impression, an impression
such as the collector should wish to possess. And though, no doubt,
for certain readers, the treatise of Maberly, and the later and ampler
treatise of Dr Willshire, may be without difficulty accessible, the
expert will hold me blameless for not forgetting here the interests of
the beginner, and for therefore going, though it shall be rapidly, over
ground that, to the connoisseur, must needs be familiar.
The first and most indispensable requisite, then, for a fine impression
of a print, ancient or modern, is that the plate betray no signs of
wear, so that the scheme of the artist in line and light and shade
shall be presented still with virgin intactness. It may be a high
ideal to aim at, but it is not unattainable; and practically it is as
necessary in a Dürer three hundred years old as in a Whistler which
may have been wrought only twelve years ago. Very different qualities
of surface are, of course, sought for in prints of different kinds,
devoted to different effects. The perfection of one plate may be
attained when it is “brilliant”; the perfection of another when it is
“rich.” But in all, the signs of wear, and, in nearly all, the signs of
re-touching, are to be avoided. Wear is indicated perhaps most easily
by the absence of clearness in lines designed to be distinct, and by
an acquired evenness and monotony in passages which obviously were
never meant to be monotonous and even. Re-touching is a more subtle
matter. It is generally resorted to to repair the wear; and sometimes
the re-touching is the work of the original artist, and sometimes it is
the work of a later craftsman, concerned in the interests of publisher
or dealer, or it may be in his own, if it is he who has become the
possessor of the plate.
But an impression originally rich or brilliant, or brilliant and rich
at once, may, by ill-usage, or even by the absence of a delicate care,
have lost the qualities that commended it to its first possessor. The
beginner in print collecting must assure himself not only that the
work is still good, but that the surface is clean and fair. Then he
must look at the back of the print, must assure himself, by careful
examination there, that it has not been “backed,” or patched, or
mended: at all events, that all the mending it has required has been
slight and neatly executed. Damp is a deadly enemy of prints. They
pine for dry warm air as much as a soldier sent from out of Provence
into the chilliness of French Flanders. “_Il parait que ça grelottait
là-bas_,” said a Provençal once, to me, at Cannes. Many a print is as
sensitive to dampish cold as is an American consumptive. The collector
then must diagnose well--must satisfy himself as far as possible that
the seeds of disease are not in the print already--and if he buys the
print, he must see to its health carefully.
Let me here hasten, though, to assure him nothing more than reasonable
care is required, and I will tell him at once in what it consists. If
he frames his print, he had better order that the thickness of some
moderate mount--an eighth or twelfth of an inch is fully enough for the
purpose--intervenes between the surface of the print and the glass.
The glass may “sweat” from time to time, and obviously its moisture
must not be deposited upon the very object it exists to guard. If a
print has great money value, or if from any cause the collector sets
much store by it, it should not remain in any frame for more than a
few years without at least a careful re-examination. Fresh air will do
it good; and, moreover, it is good for the collector’s own eye (whose
delicacy ought to be cultivated by all possible means) that account be
taken of a print’s appearance not only when it is under glass. If the
collector, instead of framing his print, puts it in a portfolio, he
must see at least that it is so handled and managed that its surface is
not rubbed by the backs of other prints, or the backs of their mounts.
Where one print follows another in a portfolio or solander-box, the
mounts of all should be smooth. The portfolio must keep dust out as
well as it can. The solander-box will keep dust out much better. And
whether the print is in folio or box, or laid naked in the drawer or
shelf of a cabinet, it should be from time to time looked at, given,
so to put it, a “bath of air” on a sunny and dry day. A country-house,
unless the walls are very thick and the rooms kept very carefully, is
not the best place for a collection of prints, which (in England at
least) flourish most in the atmosphere of cities. It is in cities that
they require the least solicitude. I know very well, when I say this,
that it will be news to some people that prints require any solicitude
at all. I have pointed out that they do, but also that their possession
does not involve any overwhelming responsibility.
There is one other point as to the condition of a print--as to that
which it is desirable to find in it before we purchase it--that
should be touched upon before this chapter ends. That is the question
of margin. It may be that some worthy people are almost as sharply
divided upon the question of margin as are New York _gourmets_ upon
the question of how many minutes it takes to roast to perfection a
canvas-back duck. But the majority of collectors are advocates of
margins: they “take curious pleasure” in them, Mr Whistler remarks. A
margin undoubtedly has much to recommend it. While a print is mounted,
and even after it is mounted--on those occasions, I mean, when, under
examination, it passes from hand to hand--the margin helps to protect
it. Yet it is evident that a margin has no artistic merit, and that
therefore to establish a very great difference in money value between
the print with a margin and the print with none, is to be rather
absurd. Of course a print three hundred years old, which has conserved
its margin to some extent, is a yet greater rarity than a print which
has not; and as rarity--rarity of condition even--is paid for as well
as beauty, there is some just market-value in margin, no doubt.
But, unlike that fine condition of surface on which I have so much
insisted, the possession of margin is by no means strictly necessary.
It is sometimes an added grace, but never, at least in the case of a
print that is ancient, and that has been subjected probably to many
vicissitudes--never in such a case is it an indispensable virtue.
Rarely does the ample margin go back beyond the Eighteenth Century. In
your etching by Méryon or Haden--done fifty or thirty years ago--you
may expect some margin, fairly. In your noble line-engraving after
Chardin or Watteau, you may be glad of some, and may be grateful and
surprised if you find much. In your Rembrandt, a little enhances the
value. In your Dürer, an eighth of an inch, how precious and how rare!
In regard to the loss of a margin, while in the case of a very old
print it is due probably to gradual ravages and various little
accidents, in the case of engravings less old, and especially in the
case of engravings which (mezzotints, for example) have always been
held most decorative on a wall, it is due simply to the process of
framing. When the mezzotint--or whatever it is--was prepared for the
frame, the knife removed the margin at a stroke, and with it there
perished, for the future collector, some chance of exultation and not
inhuman boasting.
CHAPTER II
The old-world Etchers, and their due place in the collector’s
estimation--Claude--Dumesnil’s list of his etched work--Principal
pieces--The money value of Claude’s etchings--Vandyke’s etched
portraits--Ostade--Richard Fisher’s Ostades--Their
prices--Wenceslaus Hollar--The immense volume of his work--Its
character--Its appreciation by Heywood and Seymour Haden--Prices of
Hollars in the print-market.
As I think that, speaking generally, the wisest collector is the
collector who devotes himself to original work, we will begin the study
of some various departments of the collector’s pursuit by a group of
chapters on work that is wholly original. And among work that is wholly
original, what is there that--since chronological order cannot require
to be strictly observed--deserves to take precedence of the art of
Etching? Not only is the art up to a certain point popular to-day--that
is a consideration which need not affect the wise collector very
much--but it is, of all the arts of Black and White, the one which
lends itself most readily to the expression of a mood--therefore to
the expression of a personality. In Line-Engraving, of which the
finest examples cannot, on many grounds, be esteemed too highly, the
_chef-d’œuvre_ is slow of accomplishment. In Etching, the hour may
produce the masterpiece, though indeed many a masterpiece has involved
something more than the labour of a day.
Of old-world etchers whose plates should occupy the collector
seriously--of old-world etchers between whom he may take his choice,
or, if he prefer it, divide his attention--there are, after all, but a
few. To have named Claude, Vandyke, Rembrandt, Ostade, and Hollar, is
to have named the chief. Other Dutch _genre_ painters than Ostade of
course etched cleverly: only one with his perfection--his perfection,
I mean, when he was at his best--Bega. Behind Rembrandt was a group
of men, some of whom simply imitated, others of whom followed in ways
more nearly their own. Other Dutchmen, again, like Backhuysen and
Adrian Van de Velde and Zeeman--whom, nearly two centuries afterwards,
Méryon worshipped--did work that need not be put aside. Latterly it has
not been put aside; for in a recent _Portfolio_ Mr Binyon made it the
subject of special study. But still the greater men are the few who
were named first.
Of these great men, it was Claude, Vandyke, and Ostade who wrought
the fewest plates. As for Vandyke, not only was his work not vast in
quantity--his labour upon each particular plate stopped at an early
stage. To the copper’s detriment, as many think, others continued it,
and Vandyke’s etchings are only entirely his own in that first Stage
which is the stage of the sketch. Yet are they far indeed from being
worthless afterwards. A background is added. The record of character
remains pretty much the same.
It was not quite thus with Claude. He, like other great masters,
and like some small ones, suffers by the mischief of “re-touching”;
but nothing done upon his plates, or upon any imitations of them,
carries the work much further than Claude himself had carried it.
With all the free and easy handling of the point, there is an obvious
completeness--a completeness not only for the initiated--in some of
the very best of his work. In tone, in delicacy of chiaroscuro, the
plate of the _Bouvier_--the masterpiece for atmospheric effect--is
carried as far as it could have been carried by line-engraving. It has
indeed quite as much atmosphere, though not quite as much delicacy
of contour, as the marvellous plates done on about the same scale by
the translators of Turner, whom Turner in a measure trained--I mean
especially the men who wrought upon the _Southern Coast_ series: George
Cooke with _Margate_, Horsburgh with _Whitstable_, the incomparable
William Miller with _Portsmouth_ and _Clovelly_. Claude’s _Campo
Vaccino_, again, is equally finished to the corners; and so, of course,
in its perhaps subtler fashion, is the famous _Sunset_ (Dumesnil, No.
15). _Cattle Going Home in Stormy Weather_ has the appearance of more
summary labour, a freedom more convincing, and more appropriate to that
effect of atmosphere, which, together with the movement of beasts and
herdsmen, the plate is devoted to recording. Again, complete tonality
is not sought for--at all events is not obtained--in _Shepherd and
Shepherdess Conversing_, which yet, in the rare First State of it,
which alone is entirely worthy, is full from end to end of Claude’s
happiest and freest, and--dare one say?--most playful work in the
draughtsmanship of foliage. In the Second State one tall tree is
deprived of its height and grace. The picture is spoilt, or, if not
spoilt, marred.
It is now four-and-twenty years since, at the Burlington Fine Arts
Club, there was held a well-chosen and perhaps the first and last
important exhibition of the etchings of Claude. Dumesnil’s list of
all Claude’s work in _aquafortis_ includes forty-two prints--some of
them unimportant; and of the forty-two, the Burlington Club, with
access to the best collections everywhere (whatever modest things may
have been said on this occasion to the contrary), managed to show
twenty-six. Besides the plates mentioned in the preceding paragraph,
the _Dance by the Waterside_, the _Dance under the Trees_, and the
_Wooden Bridge_ are amongst the things one would covet. In the _Wooden
Bridge_ there is the whole spirit of the broad Italian land. A fine
Second State, from the cabinet of some good collector--my own is from
John Barnard’s--represents the plate perfectly. Of the _Bouvier_
you are lucky if you can get a Second State. Sir Seymour Haden, who
would never tolerate a bad impression, long contented himself with a
Third, though some years before he parted with his things he managed
to acquire a First. That delightful collector, Richard Fisher, had a
First State of the _Cattle Going Home in Stormy Weather_, and a noble
little print it was. Mr Julian Marshall, who bought rare things in his
youth, and keenly appreciates them (though, while in his youth still,
he sold many), had, and doubtless retains, a First State of the _Rape
of Europa_, which, in an impression like his own--“early, undescribed,
before the plate was cleaned,” says the Burlington Club Catalogue--is
indeed most desirable.
As to the money value of Claude’s etchings, in the “States” and the
conditions in which they are alone desirable, the prices that were
reached at the Seymour Haden sale in 1891 are as good an indication as
one can well obtain. Sir Seymour’s beautiful and silvery First State of
_Le Bouvier_ was knocked down at £42; his _Dance under the Trees_--a
First State too--at £10; his _Sunrise_ (but it was a Fourth State) at
£5, 12s. 6d.; his _Shepherd and Shepherdess Conversing_, in the First
State, at £7 (and this was cheap); his _Campo Vaccino_, in the First
State, at £6, 6s. He had no _Wooden Bridge_. At Richard Fisher’s sale,
in 1892, the _Bouvier_, in a Second or Third State, fetched £15, and a
good impression of the _Dance under the Trees_, £12. It will be seen
that, rare though Claude’s etchings are, in good condition, they do
not, in England at least, when they appear in the auction-room, command
prices that can be called excessive.
The etchings of Vandyke, at all events the best of them, have fetched
more. It must be that their rarity, in the most desired condition,
is even greater. Sir Seymour Haden had a few superb ones. Vandyke’s
own portrait (Dutuit, No. 3) sold in the Haden sale for £60; the
pure etching of the _Snyders_ for £44; the _Suttermans_ for £30; the
_Lucas Vosterman_, £50; the masterly _De Wael_--which, even in an
early, well-chosen impression of a later State, one finds an enviable
possession--£17, 10s. The touch of Vandyke has nothing that is
comparable with Rembrandt’s subtlety, yet is it decisive and immediate,
and so far excellent. And Vandyke, however inclined he may have been
to undue elegance--an elegance _trop voulue_--in certain painted
portraits, seized firmly and nobly in his etched portraits of men (and
practically his etchings are only portraits of men) the masculine
character and the marked individuality of his models.
Of the etchings of Adrian van Ostade, Mr Fisher had what was
practically a complete collection--he had fifty plates; and as he
was a great admirer of this unquestioned master of _technique_, this
penetrating even if pessimistic observer of Life, he had taken care to
have impressions of good character: in some cases, as good as it is
ever possible to get. Inequality of course there was; and whilst here
and there an indifferent impression fell for a few shillings, sums as
important as have been paid for Ostades were realised for the rarest
and the best chosen things. We will consider the prices of the most
desirable. For a First State of the _Man and Woman Conversing_, £13 was
the ransom. £14 was paid for even the Fourth State of that rarity, _The
Empty Pitcher_. Herr Meder gave £63 for the Second State of a piece
which some call spirited and some call savage, _The Quarrel with Drawn
Knives_, and £26, 10s. for the First State of _A Woman Sitting on a
Doorstep_. £80 was paid by the same buyer for the First State of the
_Woman Singing_, and Mr Gutekunst gave £37 for a Fourth State of _The
Painter_. Could I become the owner of two masterpieces of Ostade, the
pieces which I should think worthy to be dignified with that name, and
which I should consequently proceed to possess, would be _The Family_
and the _Peasant Paying his Reckoning_. The first--not less excellent
than any other in _technique_--is full of homely piety and truth to
common things. It is one of Ostade’s larger pieces; and at the Fisher
sale, the First State, which had been in the Hawkins collection, passed
into the hands of Mr Deprez for £23. The _Peasant Paying his Reckoning_
is one of the smaller plates. As the title goes far to imply, it
represents a tavern visitor making ready to leave the cosy interior;
the landlady looking out with keenness for the sum that is due. The
piece teems with delicate observation, not only of character, but of
picturesque detail, and with light and airy touch. It was a wonderful
Fourth State that was in the Fisher collection; and £42 was the price
that Herr Meder, the most enterprising buyer of Ostades that day, had
to pay to call it his. An excellent connoisseur tells us that the
earliest impressions of Ostades are generally light in tone--that good
impressions are also often printed in a brownish ink, and that they are
without the thick line which invariably surrounds the later ones.
Wenceslaus Hollar, born at Prague in 1607, and working a long while in
London, under the patronage of Charles the First’s Lord Arundel, and
dying here amongst us, in Gardiner Street, Westminster, in 1677, was
a far more prolific etcher than either Claude, Vandyke, or Adrian Van
Ostade. In fact, that is not the way to put it at all; for whilst the
plates of each of these are to be counted at the most by scores, the
plates of Hollar mount to the number of two thousand seven hundred.
He was a craftsman of great variety and ingenuity of method. But it
has, of course, to be remembered of him that in certain figure-pieces
and mythological subjects at least, he was interpreter and populariser
of the inventions of another, and that in most of his interesting
little views he was a dainty but unmoved chronicler of pure fact. An
individual note--a wholly individual note--scarcely belongs to his
rendering of landscape or to his vision of the town. Yet he is a most
sterling artist--not a mere monument of industry--and his quaintness,
only a part of which he derives from his theme, is undoubtedly
attractive. The collector who collects his work has what is a faithful
record of some of the individuals and of many of the types of Hollar’s
time, and a fair vision of the ordinary aspect of the outward world of
Hollar’s day. The man’s industry was, as we have seen, colossal, and
even at the best he was but ill-rewarded. Fourpence per hour was, says
Mr Heywood, the price paid to him by the booksellers.
At present it may be that there is keener relish for his work in
Germany than here with us in England; but one great connoisseur, as
well as fine practitioner of Etching, of a generation not yet wholly
vanished, has extolled and collected him, praising him lately, it is
true, in terms more measured than those he had at first employed; and
another connoisseur, not born in earlier years than Sir Seymour Haden,
but earlier cut off, not living indeed to be old--I mean the Rev. J. J.
Heywood, who has been named already--was a devoted student of Hollar’s
endless labours. He prepared in great degree the Burlington Club’s
Exhibition of a large fine representative collection of Hollar’s works,
in 1875, and wrote the sympathetic preface to the Catalogue. On Hollar,
Parthey has long been the chief German authority; and with Parthey Mr
Heywood was familiar. But his own loving observation of the unremitting
work of the great Bohemian engraver of the Seventeenth Century--a
wanderer in Antwerp and in Strasburg, as well as a long resident in
London--furnished him with some material of his own, and the Burlington
Club Catalogue of such portion as was exhibited of Hollar’s great
volume of production, should be, wherever it is possible, in the hands
of the Hollar collector. It will acquaint him with very many of the
most desirable pieces, and will tell him, in a form more compact and
serviceable than Parthey’s, much about the recent resting-places of
the rarer Hollar prints. There are a few of these, of course, which
cannot pass into the hands of any private person. Of the large plate of
_Edinburgh_, for example, a thing Parthey had never seen, and which
was wrought in Hollar’s later time (in 1670), there exist in all the
world but two impressions. One is at Windsor, the other at the British
Museum.
When, however, the collector has got more than two thousand plates to
choose from, and to watch and wait for, he need not, save in sheer
“cussedness,” and because Humanity is built that way, trouble very
much about what is for ever inaccessible. I do not think that even a
colonial millionaire will set himself the task of collecting Hollar _en
masse_. Life is not long enough. The task would fall more properly to
a German student, since patience would be wanted yet more than money;
but, after half a century of work, the student would pass from us
with his self-set task still uncompleted. No: the sensible collector
wants of Hollar a compact selection. Such a group as Sir Seymour Haden
exhibited at the Fine Art Society’s--along with many other plates,
representing the masters of original etching--would form a nucleus,
at all events. Divided into classes in the following way--Topography,
Portraiture, Costume, Natural History, and History, that small
exhibited group included the _Antwerp Cathedral_, the _Royal Exchange_,
the _Nave of St George’s Chapel_, _Charles the First_, _Charles the
Second_, one of the plates of the _Muffs_--I trust it was the wonderful
study of five muffs alone, with the wearer’s wrists and arms just
lightly indicated--and two of the rare set of _Shells_, which are as
wonderful as the muffs for texture, but somehow a little drier. Of the
plate of the _Nave of St George’s Chapel_, Sir Seymour says that it
is the most amazing piece of “biting” that he knows, as to gradation
and _finesse_. Along with these plates--if he is fortunate enough
to get them--or even in place of some of them, as his taste prompts
him, let the collector appropriate the sets of the _Seasons_ and the
_Butterflies_, the little Islington set, known sometimes as _Six
Views in the North of London_, and the exquisite single plate (these
topographical plates that I am recommending are all small ones) known
as _London from the Top of Arundel House_. Of the “simple probity” of
Hollar’s work, and of its rightful charm, there will then be ample
evidence.
The prices of good Hollars have not of late years risen much: certainly
not much in comparison with those of other prints holding positions of
about the like honour. Much of his work, therefore, is quite within the
reach of modest and intelligent buyers. The latest really remarkable
collection sold was that of Seymour Haden, who had long possessed many
more of Hollar’s prints than he found room to exhibit, with other men’s
work in Bond Street. His greatest rarities--perhaps even his best
impressions--fetched good prices, but they were never sensational:
indeed, in several instances they did not substantially exceed those
realised twenty-three years earlier (in 1868), at Julian Marshall’s
sale. Thus, at the Julian Marshall sale, the _Long View of Greenwich_
passed under the hammer at £1, 15s., and at the Haden sale it sold
for £2, 5s. _London from the Top of Arundel House_, an impression of
singular excellence, fetched £6 in the Marshall sale; it fetched at the
Seymour Haden £9 12s.; but in this case there is reason to suppose that
Sir Seymour’s impression, though certainly good, was not equal to Mr
Marshall’s. _Sir Thomas Challoner_ (after Holbein) fetched £31, 10s.
at the Marshall sale, and I am not sure that it was not the very same
impression that afterwards, at Sir Seymour’s, fetched only £20. Each is
described as a “First State,” and each had belonged in the last century
to one of the greatest collectors of his time, John Barnard, whose
initials, written in a slow round hand, “J. B.,” delight the collector,
often, at the back of a fine print. The two impressions of _Sir Thomas
Challoner_ were surely really one. The portrait of _Hollar_, holding
his portrait of St Catherine, reached £6 at the Marshall sale; only
£5 at the Haden. On the other hand, the _Chalice_, which is said,
generally, to be from a design by Mantegna, was sold for £3, 10s. with
Mr Marshall’s things; for £5, 5s. with Sir Seymour’s. We need not make
further comparisons; but it will be well to end these comments upon
Hollar’s money value by some little additional quotation from the
priced catalogues of the later and larger sale of his prints. _The
Rake’s Lament_ fetched in 1891 £22; the _Antwerp Cathedral_, in the
First State, £8; that neat little set of six _Views about Islington_,
£2, 10s. (which, if the impressions were all good, was unquestionably
cheap); the _Royal Exchange_, in the First State, £16; _The Winter
Habit of an English Gentleman_, £8, 10s.; the set of _Sea Shells_,
or, rather, thirty-four out of the thirty-eight numbers that the
set contains, £67. Hollar, with such a mass of work to choose from,
and with the interest and excellence of much of it, appeals to the
collector who can dispense, at times, with vehemence and passion, and
who finds in quaintness and exactness, in steady technical achievement,
some compensation for the absence of a vision of exalted beauty.
CHAPTER III
Rembrandt Catalogues--The extent of Rembrandt’s etched work--The
careful buyer: how may he represent Rembrandt not
unworthily?--Amongst landscape etchings, the indisputable
pre-eminence of Rembrandt’s landscapes--Their influence on the most
modern Art--The landscapes’ rarity--The most desirable and
attainable--Prices--The landscapes in the Holford Sale--Rembrandt’s
portraits--Portraits of himself--The best portraits of others--Recent
prices of the portraits--Those fine ones that are cheap
essentially--Sacred subjects just touched on--The Nude--The methods
of Rembrandt--Etching and dry-point--Simplicity of the means
Rembrandt employed.
That great old connoisseur of Rouen, Eugène Dutuit, in his two portly
tomes, the _Œuvre Complet de Rembrandt_ (produced in 1883), catalogues
for the convenience of the collector three hundred and sixty-three
pieces, though, from his long and careful Introduction, it is evident
that he is not altogether uninfluenced by modern views, and is willing
to discard some few out of that great array of prints. Wilson, the
first important English cataloguer, working in 1836, had catalogued
three hundred and sixty-nine. Charles Blanc, about a score of years
later, had reduced the number to three hundred and fifty-three. Again,
in 1879, the Rev. C. H. Middleton-Wake had brought the number down to
three hundred and twenty-nine. It is hardly likely that before the
present chapter is completed--a chapter that must be devoted mainly to
the more fascinating works of the greatest mind that ever expressed
itself in Etching--I shall have said anything of value on what is,
for the student, an important question--the question of how much of
Rembrandt’s long-accepted work the master really executed. For not in
a part only of a single chapter of a volume on Fine Prints could it
be possible to deal satisfactorily with the arguments for and against
certain etchings, the authenticity of which modern Criticism disputes
or doubts about. The matter would require not paragraphs, but a volume.
Furthermore, for anything approaching a final settlement, it would
need such opportunities for comparison as absolutely no one has yet
been able to possess. Sir Seymour Haden, whose views upon the subject
are more defined than most people’s--if likewise it happens that they
are more revolutionary--has been pleading for a large exhibition and
a committee of experts to settle the matter, and, at this time of
writing, the exhibition has not been held nor the committee formed. In
regard to its decision, I anticipate as likely to be delivered somewhat
earlier, and perhaps with more of unanimity, the utterance of Rome
upon that question of “Anglican Orders,” which now either vexes or
sympathetically engages her.
But if the moment of connoisseurs’ agreement upon the question of
the precise number of Rembrandt’s true etchings seems yet remote,
the beginner in the study of the prints of Rembrandt’s may note with
benefit two things: first, that there does exist the reasonable and
long-sustained doubt in regard principally to the “Beggar” and a few
of the Sacred Subjects (for certain landscapes were discarded long
ago), and that thus a question has arisen into which the student
may inquire cautiously, and, after much preliminary study, exercise
his own mind upon; and, second (and here comes in immediate comfort
for the collector), that the doubts thrown on two or three score of
prints still leave untouched the plates in which intelligent Criticism
has recognised masterpieces. Again, and for his further joy, if the
collector be but a beginner, or with a purse not deep, he may note
that the masterpieces of Rembrandt are of the most various degrees of
rarity; that accordingly they differ inexpressibly as to the money
value that attaches to them; and that therefore, even nowadays, though
the complete or comprehensive collector of Rembrandt will have to be
a rich man, a poor man may yet buy, two or three times in every year,
some Rembrandt etching, noble in conception, exquisite in workmanship.
A volume like the present is not concerned primarily with the
acquisitions of the millionaire, though it has, of course, to take
account of them. Let us therefore, just at this stage, ask ourselves
what the careful, modestly-equipped buyer does well to do, so that
in his portfolios so great a master as Rembrandt shall not be
altogether unrepresented, and shall not be represented unworthily?
Ought the beginner to confine himself at first to making a selection
from one or two groups only, out of the number of groups into which,
unless chronological order is to over-ride everything, the prints
of Rembrandt not unnaturally divide themselves? Or ought he to be
guided in his choice by some ascertained facts of Rembrandt’s history,
and by the help of dated plates--or by accepting as fixed and final
the conjectures as to date which have proceeded from the newer
connoisseurship--seek some representation of the art of Rembrandt at
different times of his career? Or ought he, instead of either confining
himself to one or two groups or classes of subject, or seeking to trace
at all, by the few prints of which he may possess himself, the course
of Rembrandt’s progress, the changes in his method, see rather that in
his portfolios all classes of subject shall have something to represent
them, so that at least in this manner the range of the master--which is
one of the most marked of his characteristics--shall be suggested?
The chronological plan, though it has reason on its side and great
advantages, and naturally commends itself to the advanced student
who is far already on the road to be himself an expert, is scarcely
good for the beginner; and this not only because the proper basis of
knowledge--the date that is not a shrewd guess, but a quite certain
fact--is often wanting; but also because the master’s methods in
etching, as in painting, were so many, and in a measure at least (even
the most varied of them) were contemporaneously exercised, that the
attempt to represent periods and manners in a collection numerically
insignificant becomes Quixotic or Academic. Perhaps, then, the wisest
thing is to take one or two great typical groups. For my own part, I
should take Portraiture and Landscape; not of course cramping oneself
with such ridiculous limitations as “Portraits of Men,” “Portraits of
Women”--as if the two, save for convenience of reference, should not
invariably be considered together.
I have said, for one of my two groups, Landscape. I justify it by the
indisputable pre-eminence which Rembrandt’s etched landscapes enjoy.
Even in the dignified and tasteful work of Claude there are only two
or three pieces which hold their own in fascination when the memory is
charged with the achievements of the Dutchman--a magical effect won out
of material intractable, or at the best simple; for that, at most, was
Rembrandt’s scenery. The landscape etchings of Rembrandt’s compatriots,
when they come to be measured by his own, assert only topographical
accuracy, or faithful persevering study, or, it may be, a little manual
dexterity, or their possession of a sense of prettiness which they
share even with the work of the amateur. Most of the finest landscape
etching of later days not only bears some signs of Rembrandt’s
influence, but would have been essentially other than it now is if
Rembrandt’s had not existed. The Dutchman’s mark is laid, strong and
indelible, even upon individualities so potent and distinguished as
Seymour Haden and Andrew Geddes. Whistler, exquisite and peculiar as
his genius is, with the figure, and with Thames-side London subjects
and subjects of Venice, would, had he treated landscape proper, have
either reminded us of Rembrandt, or have etched in some wrong way. He
would not have etched in some wrong way--we may take that for granted;
he would have reminded us of Rembrandt, with a little of himself
besides.
I have shown, I think, how clearly, from the artistic point of view,
the new collector is led to love and seek for Rembrandt landscapes.
But there is one objection, though it is perhaps not a fatal one, to
concentrating his attention upon them. Little of Rembrandt’s work,
except a few oddities of crazy value, like the First State of the
_Hundred Guilder_, is rarer or more costly than his landscapes. Or,
to be more explicit, more absolutely and literally correct, it is
rather in this way: that, while for a good example of Rembrandt in
any other department of his labours, it is possible of course to be
obliged to give much, but likewise (Heaven be praised!) quite possible
not to be obliged to give much, you will _never_ without an outlay
of a certain importance be possessed of any one of his landscapes
in desirable condition. An outlay of £30 may conceivably endow you
with a good impression of one of the most desirable of the minor
landscapes. That sum may get you, and without your having to wait a
quite indefinite time for the acquisition, a _View of Amsterdam_ or a
_Cottage with White Palings_. It may even get you a rarer, finer thing,
the _Landscape with the Obelisk_, or that much slighter landscape
piece--that summary, though of course in its own way very learned,
little performance known as _Six’s Bridge_; the plate which tradition
says (probably not untruly) was etched by Rembrandt while the servant
of his friend, Jan Six, who had forgotten the mustard, went (somewhere
beyond the pantry, however; I should even think that it was outside the
house) in rapid search of that condiment.
[Illustration:
REMBRANDT: _Landscape, with the Obelisk_.
]
But there, as far as Landscape is concerned, if £30 or thereabouts is
to be the limit of your disbursement upon a single piece, there your
collecting stops. If you want a _Cottage with Dutch Hay-Barn_--very
fine indeed, but not of extreme rarity--sixty, eighty, or a hundred
pounds, or more, must be the ransom of it. You want a _Landscape with
a Ruined Tower_--the print which, for well-considered breadth and
maintained unity of effect (not so much for dainty finish) is the “last
word” of landscape art, the perfect splendid phrase which nothing can
appropriately follow, after which there is of necessity declension,
if not collapse--it will be a mere accident if fifty guineas gets it
for you. It may cost you a couple of hundred. And when? Why, only
when a fine collection comes into the market: such a collection as Mr
Holford’s, three or four years ago, or one at least not at all points
inferior to it. And that happens not many times in the life of any
one of us. Again, there is the _Goldweigher’s Field_, a bird’s-eye
view of a plain near the Zuyder Zee; a summary, learned memorandum
of the estate and country-house, with all its appurtenances, of
Uytenbogaert, the Receiver-General, of whom there is a representation
amongst the Rembrandt portraits. If you can afford it, and if fortune
smiles upon you by bestowing opportunity of acquisition, you will
want not only the less costly portrait of the _Goldweigher_, but the
landscape of the _Goldweigher’s Field_. There are rarer things than
that in Rembrandt’s work--not much that is more desirable. £44 was
paid for an impression, probably not quite of the first order, at
the Firmin-Didot sale, £54 at the Liphart, £72 at the Holford. The
landscapes yet more difficult to find, command, of course, even higher
prices, and this somewhat independently of their artistic interest,
which only in a very few cases--and then with very exceptional
impressions--equals that of the prints I have already named.
Of these yet rarer landscapes, as well as the other ones, Mr Holford’s
collection was certainly the finest dispersed in recent times. His sale
took place at Christie’s in July 1893; and at it, for the _View of
Omval_--an exceptionally splendid impression of a somewhat favourite
yet not extraordinarily rare subject--£320 was paid by M. Bouillon. The
subject, though in impressions of very different quality, had been sold
in the Sir Abraham Hume sale for £47, and in the Duke of Buccleuch’s
for £44. £170 was paid for the _Three Trees_, the one Rembrandt
landscape which has a touch of the sensational, which adds to its
real merit the obvious and immediate attractiveness of the dramatic
effect. Herr Meder, the dealer of Berlin, bought the First State of
_The Three Cottages_ for £275. The sum of £210 was the ransom of the
First State of the slightly arched print _A Village with the Square
Tower_. The impression, which was from the Aylesford collection, was
of unparalleled brilliance, and the State is of extraordinary rarity,
though M. Dutuit notes its presence at Amsterdam and at the British
Museum. To M. Bouillon was knocked down for £260 a faultless impression
of _The Canal_, a print which at the Galichon sale had passed under the
hammer for £80, and even at the Buccleuch for £120. Messrs Colnaghi
bought for £145 a most sparkling impression of the rare First State
of the broadly treated _Landscape with a Ruined Tower_, more properly
called by the French cataloguers _Paysage à la Tour_, for in this
First State there is no sign of “ruin.” Doubtless when the title by
which it is known in England was first applied to it, the amateur was
unfamiliar with this rarest State, in which the dome of the tower is
intact. In the Second State it has disappeared, and in the Third there
are other minor changes. The reader will remember that already, two
or three pages back, I have referred to this print as a masterpiece,
than which none is more desirable or more representative. A perfect
impression of the _Landscape with a Flock of Sheep_ (from the John
Barnard collection) sold for £245; the First State of the _Landscape
with an Obelisk_ for £185; an _Orchard with a Barn_ (the early State,
before the plate was cut at either end) for £170; and the First State
of the _Landscape with a Boat_--an impression extraordinarily full of
“bur”--for £200. Altogether, the Rembrandts in the Holford sale--and
I shall have to refer to some of them again before I finish the
chapter--sold for £16,000. Richard Fisher’s Rembrandts had fetched
about £1500; Sir Abraham Hume’s, £4000; Sir Seymour Haden’s, £4700; the
Duke of Buccleuch’s, something over £10,000. The last is a figure which
was never expected to be surpassed--hardly, perhaps, to be equalled.
Yet it was surpassed very much.
But now it is high time I said a little about the desirableness
of Rembrandt portraits and about their money value. No engraved
portraiture in all the world, not even the mezzotints after Sir Joshua,
present with so much power so great a range of varied character. For an
artistic treatment of Humanity equally sterling and austere, you must
go back to Holbein’s drawings. For a variety as engaging, a vividness
and flexibility as sure of their effect, only the pastels by La Tour
in the Museum of St Quentin rival these Rembrandt records of Jew and
Gentile, old and young, and rich and poor in Amsterdam.
As in painting, so in etching, Rembrandt was himself one of his best
models. In no less than thirty-four of his prints--according to the
Catalogue of Wilson--do we find he has portrayed, at different ages,
his homely, striking, penetrating face. Sometimes he is a youth;
sometimes the burden of experience is visibly laid on him; sometimes
he is engrossed with work, as in the superb _Rembrandt Drawing_;
sometimes, as in the _Rembrandt with a Sabre_, masquerading; sometimes
he is depicted with great fulness of record; sometimes, as in the
admirable little rarity, Wilson 364 (not catalogued amongst the
Rembrandt portraits, because the plate has other heads as well), a few
lines, chosen with the alacrity and certainty of genius, bring him
before us, sturdy, sagacious, and with mind bent upon a problem he is
sure to solve. The _Rembrandt with a Sabre_, at the Holford sale--a
thing almost unique--fell to the bid of M. Deprez of £2000, and has
joined now the other extraordinary possessions of Baron Edmond De
Rothschild. At the Holford sale, the _Rembrandt with a Turned-up Hat
and Embroidered Mantle_--an almost unique First State, drawn on by
Rembrandt, but none the better on that account--fetched £420. Of the
_Rembrandt Drawing_ there were two impressions. One of them, which
Mr Middleton-Wake assures us is the First, and which Wilson justly
describes as at all events “the finest,” sold for £280 to Herr Meder.
The impression was of unmatched brilliancy and vigour, the whole thing
as spontaneous and impulsive as anything in Rembrandt’s work. The
second impression sold--an impression to which the honours of a true
Second State are now assigned--fetched £82, and was borne away by Mr
Gutekunst of Stuttgart.
That famous Holford sale, in which, as I have said already, the
_Rembrandt with the Sabre_ sold for a couple of thousand, and in which
the “Hundred Guilder” (_Christ Healing the Sick_) beat at least its
own record, and was sold for £1750, contained among the portraits
an impression of the elaborate _Ephraim Bonus_, “with the black
ring,” the only one with this singular and somewhat petty distinction
which could ever come into the market; the remaining impressions
being tied up permanently at the British Museum and the Bibliothèque
Nationale. M. Danlos took it across the Channel, having paid £1950
for the opportunity of doing so. The _Burgomaster Six_, an almost
mezzotint-like portrait in general effect--highly wrought, and with
an obvious delicacy--always fetches a high price. At the Holford
sale an impression called “Second State” fell to Colnaghi’s bid of
£380. At the Seymour Haden, one called a “Third”--a very exquisite
impression--reached £390. It came from the collection of Sir Abraham
Hume, and Sir Seymour, in the Preface to his sale catalogue, properly
pointed out that with the _Six_, as with the _Ephraim Bonus_, what are
practically trial-proofs have been erected into “States.” The Third
State of the _Old Haaring_, a portrait of a venerable, kindly, perhaps
ceremonious gentleman, who practised the profession of an auctioneer,
is scarcely less rare than the rest. When found among the Holford
treasures, it sold for £190.
For nearly the same price the benign portrait of _John Lutma_, the
goldsmith--an impression in the First State, however, “before the
window and the bottle”--passed into the hands of the same buyer. That
plate--one of the most admirable in the work of Rembrandt--affords,
in its First State, an instance of the artificial advantage of mere
rarity. Because certain collectors are accustomed to see it more or
less worn, with the window and the bottle behind the seated figure,
they will never give for it, even when it is not worn--if the window
and the bottle happen to be there--one-third the sum that they pay
willingly when those objects are absent, which Rembrandt knew were
wanted to complete the composition. Now, in the case of the _Great
Jewish Bride_--a portrait really of Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia, with
flowing hair--the background is a loss, clearly, the earlier State
being invariably the finer and the more spontaneous. With the _Lutma_
it is not so. There is no doubt that the additions add charm, add
luminousness, to the general effect; but the fine eye is wanted, the
eye of the real expert, to see to it that the impression which contains
these is yet an impression in which deterioration is not visible--that
it is, in fact, one of the very earliest impressions after the
additions had been made.
[Illustration:
REMBRANDT: _Lutma_.
]
To make an end of the record of great prices fetched by the portraits
in the Holford sale, let it be said that the _Cornelius Sylvius_--the
impression Wilson pronounced to be the finest--sold for £450; that
a Second State of the rare, and on that account, as I suppose, the
favourite portrait of the Advocate _Van Tolling_, fetched £530; whilst
an exceedingly effective impression of the big portrait of _Coppenol_,
the writing-master, realised no less than £1350.
But without touching any one of these great rarities, modest
collectors, whose modesty yet does not go the length of making them
satisfied with second-rate Art, may still have noble portraits. Six
or seven guineas--I mean, of course, when opportunity arises--secures
you the quite exquisite and delicately modelled _croquis_ (but is it
not, after all, something more than a _croquis_?) called _Portrait
of a Woman, lightly etched_. Rembrandt was very young when he did
that, yet his art was mature, his point unspeakably vivacious. It is
a portrait of his mother. So again, the _Mère de Rembrandt au voile
noir_--the lady sitting, somewhat austere this time, with set mouth,
and the old full-veined hands folded in rest--never, I think, in its
happiest impression costs more than £20--may very likely cost you a
good deal less. Ten guineas will very likely be the ransom of that
charming portrait of a boy-child in profile, which was once thought to
record the features of Titus, Rembrandt’s son, and then those of the
little Prince of Orange. It is a delightful vision of youth, demure and
chubby, and in its dainty drawing of light and silky hair, does even
Whistler’s _Fanny Leyland_ rival it? Are you disposed to venture £30,
£40, £50? Then may you, in due time, add to your group a First State
of the most subtle portrait of that meditative print-seller, _Clément
de Jonghe_. It is treated with singular breadth and luminousness,
and of character it is a profound revelation. By the time the Third
State is reached--and a good Third State may be worth fifteen or
twenty pounds--the thing has changed. Indeed, it has changed already
a little in the Second. But in the Third, further work has endowed
the personage with the air of a more visible romance; and in the two
succeeding States this is preserved, though the wear of course becomes
perceptible. It is well, by way of contrast, to possess yourself of
this more sentimental record--the Third, if possible, in preference
to the Fourth or Fifth State--besides, of course, that subtler and
far finer vision of the personage which is ensured by the First State
alone. The time may soon be upon us when a First State of _Clément
de Jonghe_ will be worth, not thirty or forty, but sixty or eighty
guineas. It has always been appreciated, but it has not yet been
appreciated at its true worth. Nothing in all the great etched work of
Rembrandt is in craftsmanship more unobtrusively magnificent, and in
its suggestion of complex character nothing is more subtle.
[Illustration:
REMBRANDT: _Clément de Jonghe_.
]
It was well, perhaps, to insist particularly on the desirableness, for
study and possession, of these two great branches of the etched work of
Rembrandt, the Landscapes and the Portraits. It would be ridiculous to
attack the authenticity of any piece that I have mentioned. No one, so
far as I am aware, has ever thought of doing so; so that with these,
at all events, as well as with many others, the collector is safe. But
my insistence on the things I have selected will not deter explorers
from adventures that interest them. The unction, the vividness, and the
essential dignity even of those Sacred Subjects from which he is at
first repelled by the presence there so abundantly of the ungainly and
the common, will in the end attract the collector. He will recognise
that there was pathos in the life Rembrandt imagined, as well as
in the life that he observed. And in the Academical studies, the
representations of the Nude, he will recognise that there is Style
constantly, and beauty now and then. One or two of these, at least, he
will like to have, if he can. Two of them seem to me better and more
desirable than the rest. One is that study of a recumbent woman--_Naked
Woman seen from behind_--which the French sometimes call _Négresse
couchée_; but she is not “Negress” at all, but only a stripped woman
beheld in deepish shadow. This is one of the least rare. Five or six
pounds will often buy it. The other is the _Woman with the Arrow_. A
slimmer, lighter, younger woman than is usual with Rembrandt, sits,
with figure turned prettily, on the edge of a bed. The drawing is
not academically perfect, but the picture is at least living flesh,
graceful of pose, and seen in an admirable arrangement of shadow and of
light. This _Woman with the Arrow_ fetched, in the Kalle sale, £26; in
the Knowles sale, £32.
The so-called “Free Subjects” are few, and the rudest of them,
_Ledikant_, which has yet a touch of comedy in it (for Rembrandt was an
observer always), is fortunately of extreme rarity. With not a single
one of these ought the collector to be concerned. Some French artists
have known how to make their choice of such subjects pardonable by
treating them with grace; but the eroticism of Rembrandt--happily most
occasional--is, in the very grossness of its obvious comedy, reeking
with offence.
In regard to the arrangement of the prints by the master who is the
head and front of the Dutch school, and the consummate practitioner
of Etching--I mean, the arrangement in the student’s mind, and not
only the arrangement in the solander-box--the question of the artist’s
method of execution plays a not unimportant part. Are you to classify
your possessions in order of date, or in accordance with subject, or
with reference to style and manner of work? That third method, however,
would be found in its result not very different from the arrangement
by date. Broadly speaking, it would have affinity with that. For, as
Sir Seymour Haden tells us in an interesting Lecture called “Rembrandt
True and False,” which the Macmillans issued in 1895, the Burlington
Club Exhibition was itself sufficient “to disclose the interesting
fact that, dividing the thirty years of Rembrandt’s etching career
into three parts or decades, his plates during the first of these
decades were for the most part etched--‘bitten in,’ that is, by a
mordant--in the second, that after having been so bitten in, their
effect was enhanced by the addition of ‘dry-point’; and in the third,
that, discarding altogether the colder chemical process, the artist had
generally depended on the more painter-like employment of ‘dry-point’
alone.” And in regard to methods of work, Sir Seymour in this Lecture
discredited the statement that Rembrandt was full of mysterious
contrivances, and that his success as an etcher owed much to these.
“All the great painter-engravers, in common with all great artists,
worked simply and with the simplest tools. It is only the mechanical
engraver and copyist who depends for what he calls his ‘quality’ on
a multiplicity of instrumental aids which, in fact, do the work for
him--the object of the whole of them being to make that work as easy to
an assistant as to the engraver himself, and its inevitable effect, to
reduce that which was once an art to the level of a _métier_.”
CHAPTER IV
Geddes, a link between Rembrandt and the French Revival--The Etchings
of Millet--Charles Méryon’s work--The best, accomplished in but few
years--His “Paris”--The Méryons the Collector wants--The prices of
some masterpieces--Papers--Méryon Collectors--Bracquemond’s few noble
things--Maxime Lalanne--Jules Jacquemart’s Etchings--His still-life
pieces practically original--Jacquemart interpreter, not copyist, of
his subject--The “Porcelaine”--The “Gemmes et Joyaux”--The dry-points
of Paul Helleu.
Between the period of the work of Rembrandt and the middle of the
Eighteenth Century very little fine work was done in Etching. The
practitioners of the art, such as they were, seemed to lose sight
of its greater principles. What they lacked in learning and in
mastery, they made up for--so they probably thought--by elaboration
and prettiness. Only here and there did such a man as our English
Geddes--our Scottish Geddes, if the word is liked better--and he not
later than the second and third decades of our own century--produce
either portrait or landscape in the true method, with seeming
spontaneity, with means economised. It was in landscape chiefly--most
particularly in _On Peckham Rye_ and _Halliford-on-Thames_--that
Geddes most successfully asserted himself, as, in his smaller way,
Rembrandt’s true follower, though in his few portraits (his mother’s,
perhaps, most notably) the right decisiveness, simplicity, and energy
of manner may not be overlooked. In some measure, it may be supposed,
Geddes influenced David Wilkie, who was his friend, and Wilkie, amongst
several etchings which were inferior at least to the dry-points of his
fellow-workman (for his small portfolio is not, on the whole, worth
much), produced one or two memorable things: a perfect little _genre_
piece, called _The Receipt_--an old-world gentleman searching in a
bureau, while a messenger waits respectfully at his side--being by far
the best, and obviously a desirable possession.
But the middle of our century had to be reached before the true revival
of the art of Etching, anywhere. Before it, Ingres, in a single
plate, practised the art in the spirit of the line-engraver. Just as
it approached, Delacroix and Paul Huet and Théodore Rousseau showed,
in a few plates, some appreciation of the fact that etching is often
serviceable chiefly as the medium for a sketch. But the middle of the
century had actually to arrive before the world was in possession
of the best performances of Millet, Méryon, Bracquemond, and Jules
Jacquemart.
Jean François Millet executed but one-and-twenty etchings, according to
the Catalogue of Monsieur Lebrun, the friend and relative of Sensier,
Millet’s biographer. Of M. Lebrun’s Catalogue--originally issued as an
Appendix to the Paris edition of Sensier’s _Life_ of the artist--Mr
Frederick Keppel, of New York, has published a translation, with some
additional facts which are of interest to the precise student. The
etchings of Millet are, at the very least, masterly notes of motives
for his painted pictures. But they are often much more than that. Often
they are entirely satisfactory and final and elucidatory dealings
with the themes they choose to tackle. They are then, quite as much
as the pictures themselves, records of peasant life, as the artist
observed it intimately, and at the same time vivid and expressive
suggestions of atmosphere and light and shade. In effect they are large
and simple. In Etching, Millet was scarcely concerned to display a
skill that was very obvious, a sleight-of-hand, an acrobatic triumph
over technical difficulties. Etching was to him a vehicle for the
expression of exactly the same things as those to which he addressed
himself in mediums more habitual. And so we have his _Glaneuses_ and
his _Bêcheurs_, his _Départ pour le Travail_--worth perhaps, each one
of them, in good state, a very few pounds each. In America Millet has
of late years been particularly appreciated. I should dare to say even
that he has been overrated, owing to a skilfully-worked craze about his
painted pictures, ending with the immense, ridiculous sensation of the
sale of the _Angelus_. But in France--which, in the appreciation of
all work of art, is certainly not less enlightened, but is cooler and
more questioning--Millet is also appreciated; nor, in England, in 1891,
was there substantial difficulty in borrowing for the Burlington Club
Exhibition of the French Revival of Etching, the eleven prints, lent
by Mr Justice Day, Sir Hickman Bacon, Mr H. S. Theobald, and Mr Alfred
Higgins, which were deemed a sufficient representation of Millet’s work
with the needle.
In that Exhibition the representation of the great work of Méryon
was confined to twenty-five prints. It practically included all his
masterpieces; but it would have been made more extensive had not the
Burlington Club, soon after I published the first edition of my little
book upon this master--and when Burty’s Memoir was yet fresh--organised
a splendid gathering of the prints we owe to Méryon’s high imagination,
keen sensitiveness, and unstinted labour.
I am not concerned to deal here at any length with the story of
Méryon’s life, or with the analysis of his poetic temperament.
The question asked about him by the reader of this present book
is a comparatively simple one, but I shall have to answer it with
fulness--which to possess of the “sombre epics,” and lovely lyrics,
wrought during the time in which his spirit was most brilliant and his
hand firmest?
Méryon’s fame rests on the achievements of a very few years. The
period comprised between 1850 and 1854 saw the production, not indeed
of everything he did which may deserve to live, but of all that
is sufficient to ensure life for the rest. Many of his pretty and
carefully planned drawings were made earlier than 1850, and several
of the more engaging of his etchings were made after 1854; but the
four years between these dates were the years in which he conceived
and executed his “Paris,” which was something more than a collection
of etched views--it was a poem and a satirical commentary on the
life he recorded. Moreover, Méryon is quite pre-eminently the etcher
of one great theme. Among richly endowed artists who have looked at
Life broadly, it is rare and difficult to discover one whose work has
evidenced such faithful concentration. It is rare enough to find that
concentration even in the labour of such artists as are comparatively
unimaginative, of such as are content to confine themselves to the
patient record of the thing that actually is--of such an engraver,
say, as Hollar. It is doubly rare to find an imaginative artist of
wide outlook and of deep experience so much the recorder of one set
of facts, one series of visions. He will generally have been anxious
to give form to very different impressions that came to him at
various times and under changing circumstances. Now it may have been
Landscape that interested him, and now Portraiture, and now again ideal
composition or traditional romance. And in each he may have fairly
succeeded. But Méryon, though stress of circumstance obliged him to
do work beyond the limits of his choice, did such work, generally
speaking, with only too little of promptings from within, to lighten
the dulness of the task. There are, of course, exceptions--one or
two in his Landscape, if there are none in his Portraiture. But the
beginning and the end of his art, as far as the world can be asked to
be seriously concerned with it, lay in the imaginative record, now
faithfully simple, now transfigured and nobly visionary, of the city
which requited him but ill for his devotion to its most poetic and its
most prosaic features. It is the etchings of Paris, then, that the
collector will naturally first seek.
Nearly all the etchings of Paris are included in what is sometimes
known as “the published set.” Not that the twelve major and the
eleven minor pieces comprised in that were ever really published
by fashionable print-sellers to an inquiring and eager public. But
they were at least so arranged and put together that this might
have happened had Méryon’s star been a lucky one. In Méryon’s mind
they constituted a “work,” to which the few other Parisian subjects
afterwards came as a not unsuitable addition. Like the plates of “Liber
Studiorum,” they were to be looked at “together.” Together, the plates
of “Liber” represented, as we shall see better in another chapter, the
range of Turner’s art. Together, the etchings “sur Paris”--“on” and not
“of” Paris, let it be noted--represented Méryon’s vision of the town,
and of its deeper life.
In beginning a collection of Méryon’s, I imagine it to be important
not only to begin with one of the “Paris,” but with a very significant
example of it--a typical, important etching. The twelve views--the
twelve “pictures,” I should prefer to call them--Méryon himself
numbered, when, rather late in life, he issued the last impressions
of them. These numbered impressions, being, as I say, the very last
States, are not the impressions to cherish; but these are the
subjects of them (and the subjects, in finer impressions, will all
be wanted)--the _Stryge_, the _Petit Pont_, the _Arche du Pont
Nôtre-Dame_, the _Galérie de Nôtre-Dame_, the _Tour de l’Horloge_,
the _Tourelle, Rue de la Tixéranderie_, the _St Etienne-du-Mont_,
the _Pompe Nôtre-Dame_, the _Pont Neuf_, the _Pont-au-Change_, the
_Morgue_, and, lastly, the _Abside de Nôtre-Dame_. Before these,
between them, and again at the end of them, are certain minor designs,
not to be confused with that “Minor Work,” chiefly copies and dull
Portraiture, described but briefly in my little book on Méryon, which
is devoted more particularly to the work of genius with which it is
worth while to be concerned. Those minor designs which are associated
with the “Paris” are an essential part of it, doing humble, but, as
I am certain Méryon thought, most necessary service. In a sense they
may be called head-pieces and tail-pieces to the greater subjects of
which the list lies above. Sometimes they are ornament, but always
significant, symbolic ornament; sometimes they are direct, written
commentary. Either way, they bear upon the whole, but yet are less
important than those twelve pieces already named. So it was, at all
events, in Méryon’s mind; but of one or two of them it is true also
that they have a beauty and perfection within their limited scheme,
lacking to one or two of the more important, to which they serve
humbly as page or outrider. The one lyric note of the _Rue des Mauvais
Garçons_, for instance, is in its own way as complete a thing as is
the magnificent epic of _Abside or Morgue_--it is greater far than
the _Pompe Nôtre-Dame_, or, it may be, than the _Petit Pont_. The late
Mr P. G. Hamerton--an admirable specialist in Etching, but a writer
making no claim to the narrower speciality of minute acquaintance with
Méryon--has praised the _Pompe Nôtre-Dame_. He has praised it for
merits which exist, and it is only relatively that the praise is, as
it seems to me, undeserved. The plate is really a wonderful victory
over technical difficulties; but, in the ugly lines of it, its realism
is realism of too bold an order. The _Petit Pont_ is a fine piece of
architectural draughtsmanship, and an impressive conception to boot;
but, like Rembrandt’s wonderfully wrought _Mill_, it is one-sided--it
wants symmetry of composition.
The _Abside_ is accounted the masterpiece of Méryon, in right of its
solemn and austere beauty. A rich and delicate impression of this print
is, then, the crown of any Méryon collection. It must be obtained in
a State before the dainty detail of the apse of the cathedral, and
the yet daintier and more magically delicate workmanship of its roof,
in soft and radiant light, have suffered deterioration through wear.
It must be richly printed. The First State is practically not to be
found. I suppose that there are scarcely in existence seven or eight
impressions of it. It is at the British Museum, and in the collections
of Mr B. B. Macgeorge, Mr Avery, Mr Mansfield, Mr R. C. Fisher, and Mr
Pyke Thompson. For the last that changed hands, fully 125 guineas was
paid. Méryon had received for it--and gratefully, in his depression
and poverty--one shilling and threepence. I have seen his receipt.
But money now will not acquire it. A Second State is therefore the
one to aim at; and, just because there were so very few impressions
taken of the First, that I ought, in my Catalogue, to have described
them as proofs--more especially as there was no change whatever in the
work, but only in the lettering--it stands to reason that the earliest
and best impressions of the Second (I mean these only) are, in their
exquisite quality, all that good judges can desire. These are on thin
and wiry paper--old Dutch or French--often a little cockled. The green,
or greenish, paper Méryon was fond of, he never used for the _Abside_.
The poorer impressions of the Second State are on thick modern paper.
After the Second State, which, when carefully chosen, is apt to be
so beautiful--and is worth, then, forty or fifty guineas--there
comes a Third, a Fourth, a Fifth: none, fortunately, common; and
deteriorations, all of them; downward steps in the passage from noble
Art to the miserable issue of a thing which can rejoice the soul no
longer, nor evidence the triumph of the hand.
Not much more need be said in detail here as to the larger prints of
the great “Paris,” but there is still a little. In the shape and size
of the plate, and by its breadth of distant view, the _Pont-au-Change_
is the companion to the _Abside_. There are some impressions on the
greenish paper, and some on the thin Dutch that yields the best of
the _Absides_. The impression of the First State in the De Salicis
Sale sold for £33. The _Pont-au-Change_ is one of those prints which
have submitted to the most serious alterations. A wild flight of giant
birds against the rolling sky is the first innovation--it occurs in the
Second State--and though it removes from the picture all its early calm
and half its sanity, it has, as many think, a charm of its own, a weird
suggestiveness. A good impression, in this State, is worth, it may be,
£6 or £7. The next change--when the flight of birds gives place to a
flight of small balloons (unlike the large balloon which, in the First
State, sails nobly through the sky, before ever the dark birds get
there)--the next change, I say, is a more pronounced mistake. The _Tour
de l’Horloge_--of which a First State fetched in the Wasset Sale £10,
and in the De Salicis £22--has also submitted to change, but scarcely
in a State in which it need occupy the careful collector. In certain
late impressions, Méryon, convinced, in the restlessness of mental
ill-health, that one side of the tall Palais de Justice was left in his
picture monotonous and dull, shot great shafts of light across it, and
these became the things that caught the eye. He had forgotten, then,
the earlier wisdom and more consummate art by which, when first he
wrought the plate, he had placed the quiet space of shadowed building
as a foil to the many-paned window by the side of it. The change is an
instructive and pathetic commentary on the ease with which artistic
conceptions slip away, they themselves forgotten, and the excellence
that they had beautifully achieved ignored even by the mind that gave
them birth.
The _St Etienne-du-Mont_ is one of those etchings which possess the
abiding charm of perfect things. In it a subject entirely beautiful
and dignified is treated with force and with refinement of spirit,
and with faultless exactitude of hand. It shows--nothing can better
show--the characteristic of Méryon, the union of the courage of realism
and the sentiment of poetry; in other words, its realism, like the
realism of the finest Fiction, has to be poetic. You have the builder’s
scaffolding, the workmen’s figures, for modern life and labour; the
Gothic stones of the Collège de Montaigu, the shadow of the narrow
street, the closely-draped women hurrying on their way, for old-world
sentiment and the mystery of the town. But I suppose a chapter might be
written upon its excellent beauty. I mention it here, partly because
it too submits to change, though change less important than that in
the _Pont-au-Change_, and less destructive than that in the _Tour de
l’Horloge_. Not to speak of sundry inscriptions, sundry “posters,”
which Méryon, in mere restlessness, was minded to alter, he could never
quite satisfy himself about the attitude of one of the workmen on the
scaffolding. Three States represent as many changes in this figure,
and all these--as a matter, at all events, of minor interest--it is
pleasant to collect. Here, in the _St Etienne_, as so often in the
etchings of Méryon, the First State (£16 in the De Salicis Sale) is the
one of which the impressions are the most numerous, though even in
this piece of writing, which does not take the place of a catalogue, I
have had occasion to note one instance out of some in which it is not
so. But generally it is so. And so the Méryon collector has to be even
more careful than the collector of “Liber” about the impression which
he buys. He must have an early State, but it is not enough to have an
early State. He must most diligently teach himself to perceive what is
really a fine example of it. He must not fall into the commonest vice
of the unintelligent purchaser--be captivated by the mere word, forego
his own judgment, and buy First States with dull determination.
Presently the collector of the “Paris” will legitimately want the
smaller pieces, some of which I have called “tail-pieces”: all are
commentaries and connecting-links. Some are beautiful, complete, and
significant, as has already been said, but generally the significance
is more remarkable than the beauty. They bind together, almost as an
appropriate text itself might bind together, what might otherwise be
detached pictures. They complete the thought of Méryon in regard to his
“Paris,” and make its expression clear. Thus, the etched cover for the
Paris Set bears the title, “Eaux Fortes sur Paris,” on a representation
of a slab of fossiliferous limestone, suggesting the material which
made it possible to build the city on the spot where it stands. Then,
there is a set of etched verses wholly without other ornament than
may be found in their prettily-fantastic form, verses that bewail the
life of Paris. Again, lines to accompany the _Pont-au-Change_ and its
great balloon. These things recall William Blake--the method by which
the “Songs of Innocence” first found their limited public. Again, the
_Tombeau de Molière_--Méryon thinks there must be place in his Paris
for the one representative French writer of imaginative Literature,
the cynic, analyst, comedian. And to name one other little print, but
not to exhaust the list, there is a graceful embodiment of wayward
fancy to accompany the _Pompe Nôtre-Dame_. It is called the _Petite
Pompe_--represents the Pompe in small; gives us verses regretting half
playfully, half affectionately, the removal of so familiar a landmark,
and surrounds all with a flowing border of rare elegance and simple
invention.
But a few other brilliant and poetical records of Paris lie, it has
been said already, outside the published Set, claim a place almost
with the greater illustrations I have spoken of earlier, and must
surely be sought. The _Tourelle, dite “de Marat”_ is one of these,
and it is Méryon’s record of the place where Charlotte Corday did the
deed by which we remember her. Except for the interest of observing
a change, due, I may suppose, to the dulled imagination of a fairly
shrewd tradesman--a change by which all symbolism and significance
passed out of this wonderful little print--it is useless to have this
little etching in any State after the First published one. For, after
the First published one, the picture and the poem became merely a
view: there is nothing to connect the place with Marat’s tragedy, and
Méryon has been permitted to represent, not the Tourelle, _dite_ “de
Marat,” but “No. 22, Street of the School of Medicine.” And the First
State is already rare. There were very few impressions of it. It was
too imaginative for the public. But here is an instance in which Trial
Proofs, generally to be avoided, may fairly be sought for, along with
the First State. Distributed among different collectors is a little
succession of Trial Proofs with different dates of May and June written
by Méryon in pencil on the margin. The first and second belong to Mr
Macgeorge; the third was Seymour Haden’s; the fourth belongs to Sir
James Knowles; the eighth--which is the last--belongs to me (I got it,
if I recollect, for £8, 10s. and a commission, at the Wasset Sale).
Even at the beginning of this little sequence of proofs the work is not
ineffective; and at the end it is complete.
Also outside the published Set of “Paris” are two little etchings which
are particularly noteworthy, and which, by reason of the extreme, even
astounding, delicacy of some of their work, it is, I think, well to
secure in the early state of Trial Proof--when one can get the chance.
These are the _Pont-au-Change vers_ 1784--which no one can possibly
confuse with the larger _Pont-au-Change_--and _Le Pont Neuf et la
Samaritaine_. Unlike most of Méryon’s Parisian work, both are, not
indeed transcripts from, but idealisations of, drawings by another.
The first dry draughtsman, in the present case, was one Nicolle. As
far as the practical presentation of all the subject is concerned, the
Trial Proofs of these prints, which have been sold under the hammer
for about £10 each, are all that can be wanted, and they possess,
moreover, an exquisite refinement of light, of which the published, and
especially the later published, examples give no hint. All impressions
of these two little plates are worthy of respect, for these plates were
never worked down to the wrecks and skeletons of some of the others;
but, nevertheless, it is only in the earliest impressions that we can
fully see the lovely lines and light and shade of the background in
the _Pont-au-Change vers 1784_--it must be had “before the great dark
rope”--and the sunlit house-fronts (Van der Heyden-like, almost) of the
_Pont Neuf et la Samaritaine_.
Of the Bourges etchings, which are good, though none are of the first
importance--and they are but few in all--the best is the _Rue des
Toiles_. It is a varied picture, admirably finished. The rest are
engaging sketches.
Amongst the remaining etchings by which Méryon commends himself to
those who study and reflect upon his work, it is enough, perhaps,
here, to speak of three. _Océanie: Pêche aux Palmes_ is almost the
only quite satisfactory record of that acquaintance that he made
with the antipodes. The Second State--with the title--is not scarce
at all, and can never be costly. You may pay, perhaps, one or two
pounds for it, and for the first, say, four or five. The _Entrée du
Couvent des Capucins Français à Athènes_--a print devoted in reality
to the Choragic Monument of Lysierates--is the single and the very
noble plate which a visit to Athens, when he was a sailor, inspired
Méryon to produce. This rare plate was done for a book that is itself
now rare--Count Léon de Laborde’s “Athènes au XV^{me}, XVI^{me}, et
XVII^{me} Siècles.” Even in the Second State the _Entrée du Couvent_
has fetched about £12, in more sales than one. _Rochoux’s Address
Card_, albeit not particularly rare, is curious and worth study. It
was executed for the only dealer who substantially encouraged Méryon;
and Méryon contrived to press into his little plate much of what he
had already found and shown to be suggestive in the features of Paris.
Symbolical figures of the Seine and Marne recline at the top of the
design. Then there are introduced bits from the _Arms of Paris_, from
the _Bain Froid Chevrier_ (the statue of Henri Quatre), from _Le
Pont Neuf_, and from _La Petite Pompe_. No one, of course, can ask
us to consider _Rochoux’s Address Card_ very beautiful or grandly
imaginative; but it is ingenious, and, like _La Petite Pompe_, though
in more limited measure, it is good as a piece of decorative design.
The impressions of Méryon’s etchings are printed on papers of very
different sorts. A greenish paper Méryon himself liked, and it is
one of the favourites of collectors. Its unearthly hue adds to the
weirdness of several of the pictures, often most suitably; but it is
not always good. Méryon knew this, and many of his plates--amongst
them, as I have said already, that unsurpassable masterpiece, the
_Abside_--were never printed on it. I have a _Rue des Mauvais
Garçons_--the thing was Baudelaire’s favourite--upon very bluish gray.
A thin old Dutch paper, wiry and strong, white originally and softened
by age, gives some of the finest impressions. Other good examples are
on Japanese, and there are fine ones on thinnest India paper that is
of excellent quality. Modern Whatman and modern French paper have been
used for many plates; and a few impressions, which, I think, were
rarely, if ever, printed by any one but Méryon himself, are found on
a paper of dull walnut colour. If I seem to dwell on this too much,
let it be remembered that very different effects are produced by the
different papers and the different inks. The luxurious collector,
possessing more than one impression, likes to look first at his “Black
_Morgue_,” and then at his “Brown.” The two make different pictures.
[Illustration:
MÉRYON: _La Morgue_.
]
About the Méryon collections, it may be said that M. Niel, an early
friend, possessed the first important group that was sold under the
hammer. Then followed M. Burty’s, M. Hirsch’s, and afterwards M.
Sensier’s. These fetched but modest prices--prices insignificant
sometimes--for Méryon’s vogue was not yet. Later, the possessions of
M. Wasset--an aged bachelor, eager and trembling, whom I shall always
remember as the “Cousin Pons” of certain _bric-à-brac_-crowded upper
chambers in the Rue Jacob--were sold for more substantial sums. Since
then, the collection of that most sympathetic amateur, the Rev. J. J.
Heywood--one of the first men in London to buy the master’s prints--has
passed into the hands of Mr B. B. Macgeorge of Glasgow, whose
cabinet, enriched from other sources, is now certainly the greatest.
The Méryons that belonged to Sir Seymour Haden went, some years since,
to America, where whoever possesses them must recognise collectors that
are his equals, in Mr Samuel Avery and Mr Howard Mansfield. If too many
carefully gathered groups of Méryon’s etchings have left our shores,
others remain--though very few. The British Museum Print-Room is rich
in the works of the master: many of the best impressions of his prints,
there, having belonged long ago to Philippe Burty, who early recognised
something at least of their merit, and made, in the _Gazette des Beaux
Arts_ of that day, the first rough catalogue of them.
It is time we turned for a few minutes to Felix Bracquemond--a dozen
years Méryon’s junior, for he was born in 1833. Among the sub-headings
to this present chapter there occurs the phrase, “Bracquemond’s few
noble things.” Why “few”?--it may be asked--when, in the Catalogue
of the Burlington Club Exhibition of the French Revival of Etching,
it is mentioned that the number of his plates extends to about seven
hundred, and that the list would have been longer had not Bracquemond,
in his later years, accepted an official post which left him little
time for this department of work? Well, there are two or three reasons
why, with all respect to an indefatigable artist, I still say “few.”
To begin with, no inconsiderable proportion of Felix Bracquemond’s
etched plates are works of reproduction--translations (like Rajon’s,
Waltner’s, Unger’s, some indeed of Jacquemart’s) of the conceptions of
another. These may be admirable in their own way--the _Erasmus_, after
the Holbein, in the Louvre, is more than admirable: it is masterly--a
monument of austere, firmly-directed labour, recording worthily
Holbein’s own searching draughtsmanship and profound and final vision
of human character. But we have agreed, throughout the greater part
of this book, and more especially in those sections of it which are
devoted to the art whose greatest charm is often in its spontaneity,
to consider original work and work inspired or dictated by others as
on a different level. Then again, in such of Bracquemond’s prints as
are original, there is perhaps even less than is usual, in a fine
artist’s work, of uniformity of excellence. No very great number of all
the plates M. Beraldi industriously chronicles need the collector busy
himself with trying to acquire. The largish etchings of great birds,
alive or dead, are amongst the most characteristic. With singular
freedom and richness--an enjoyment of their plumage and their life, and
a great pictorial sense to boot--has Bracquemond rendered them. If I
could possess but a single Bracquemond, I would have a fine impression
of _Le Haut d’un Battant de Porte_, the dark birds hanging there. That
plate was wrought in 1865. But _Margot la Critique_ and _Vanneaux
et Sarcelles_--prints of about the same period--likewise represent
the artist; and there is a plate done later, at the instance of the
Messrs. Dowdeswell, which is certainly a triumph of _technique_ and of
character. This is _Le Vieux Coq_.
Daubigny, Maxime Lalanne, Meissonier, Corot, are all amongst deceased
French artists who have etched ably. The two last-mentioned--doubtless
the most important or most popular artists in their own customary
mediums--wrought the fewest plates. Corot’s are characteristic
sketches. Daubigny worked more systematically at etching, and you feel
in all his works a sympathetic, picturesque vision of Nature; but his
prints never reach exquisiteness.
Lalanne, who was prolific with the needle, had elegance and charm,
and sometimes power, as well as facility. And, as a little practical
treatise that he wrote upon the subject shows, he was devoted to his
craft. Indeed, he taught it. He was best, generally, in his smaller
plates: never, I think, having beaten his dainty plate of the Swiss
_Fribourg_, which was given in “Etching and Etchers,” though a larger
_Fribourg_--a vision of the great ravine--is very noble, and nothing
is at once more learned and spontaneous than the brilliant print of
the _Conflagration in the Harbour of Bordeaux_. Also, Lalanne did
not share, and had no need to share, most etchers’ timidity in the
treatment of skies. His own are delicate and charming. In the rare
proofs of his etchings we can alone prize properly this well-bred
observer and graceful draughtsman, who was only occasionally mediocre.
A genius, wholly individual--and yet in a sense the founder of a school
or centre of a group--now occupies us. We pass to Jules Jacquemart,
who, born in 1837, died prematurely in 1880; a child of his century,
worn out by eager restlessness of spirit, by the temperament, by the
nervous system, that made possible to him the exquisiteness of his
work. The son of a collector, a great authority on porcelain, Albert
Jacquemart, Jules Jacquemart’s natural sensitiveness to beauty, which
he had inherited, was, from the first, highly cultivated. From the
first, he breathed the air of Art. Short as his life was, he was happy
in the fact that adequate fortune gave him the liberty, in health, of
choosing his work, and, in sickness, of taking his rest. With extremely
rare exceptions, he did the things that he was fitted to do, and did
them perfectly; and, being ill when he had done them, he betook himself
to the exquisite South, where colour is, and light--the things we long
for most, when we are most tired in cities--and so there came to him,
towards the end, a new surprise of pleasure in so beautiful a world.
He was happy in being surrounded, all his life long, by passionate
affection in the circle of his home. Nor was he perhaps unhappy
altogether, dying in middle age. For what might the Future have held
for him?--a genius who was ripe so soon. The years of deterioration
and of decay, in which first an artist does but dully reproduce the
spontaneous work of his youth, and then is sterile altogether--the
years in which he is no longer the fashion at all, but only the
landmark or the finger-post of a fashion that is past--the years when
a name once familiar and honoured is uttered at rare intervals and in
tones of apology, as the name of one whose performance has never quite
equalled the promise he had aforetime given--these years never came to
Jules Jacquemart. He was spared these years.
But few people care, or are likely to care very much, for the things
which chiefly interested him, and which he reproduced in his art; and
even the care for these things, where it does exist, unfortunately
by no means implies the power to appreciate the art by which they
are retained and diffused. “Still-life”--the portrayal of objects
natural or artificial, for the objects’ sake, and not as background
or accessory--has never been rated very highly or very widely loved.
The public generally has been indifferent to these things, and often
the public has been right in its indifference, for often these things
are done in a poor spirit, a spirit of servile imitation or servile
flattery, with which Art has little to do. But there are exceptions,
and there is a better way of looking at these things. Chardin was
one of these exceptions--in Painting, he was the greatest of these.
Jacquemart, in his art of Etching, was an exception not less brilliant
and peculiar. He and Chardin have done something to endow the beholders
of their work with a new sense--with the capacity for new experiences
of enjoyment--they have portrayed, not so much matter, as the very
soul of matter; they have put it in its finest light, and it has
got new dignity. Chardin did this with his peaches and his pears,
his big coarse bottles, his copper sauce-pans, and his silk-lined
caskets. Jacquemart did it with the finer work of artistic men in
household matter and ornament: with his blue and white porcelain,
with his polished steel of chased armour and sword-blade, with his
Renaissance mirrors, and his precious vessels of crystal, jasper, and
jade. But when he was most fully himself, his work most characteristic
and individual, he shut himself off from popularity. Even untrained
observers could accept this agile engraver as the interpreter of
other men’s pictures--of Meissonier’s inventions, or Van der Meer’s,
Greuze’s, or Fragonard’s--but they could not accept him as the
interpreter, at first hand, of treasures peculiarly his own. They were
not alive to the wonders that have been done in the world by the hands
of artistic men. How could they be alive to the wonders of this their
reproduction--their translation, rather, and a very free and personal
one--into the subtle lines, the graduated darks, the soft or sparkling
lights of the artist in Etching?
A short period of practice in draughtsmanship, and only a small
experience of the particular business of etching, made Jacquemart a
master. As time proceeded, he of course developed; found new methods,
ways not previously known to him. But little of what is obviously
tentative and immature is to be noticed even in his earliest work. He
springs into his art an artist fully armed--like Rembrandt with the
wonderful portrait of his mother “lightly etched.” In 1860, when he is
but twenty-three, he is at work upon the illustrations to his father’s
“Histoire de la Porcelaine,” and though, in that publication, the
absolute realisation of wonderful matter--or, more particularly, the
breadth in treating it--is not so noteworthy as in the later “Gemmes
et Joyaux de la Couronne,” there is most evident already the hand of
the delicate artist and the eye that can appreciate and render almost
unconsidered beauties.
The “Histoire de la Porcelaine” contains twenty-six plates, of which
a large proportion are devoted to the Oriental china possessed in
mass by the elder Jacquemart, when as yet there was no rage for it.
Many of Albert Jacquemart’s pieces figure in the book: they were
pieces the son had lived with and knew familiarly. Their charm, their
delicacy, he perfectly represented--nay, exalted--passing without
sense of difficulty from the bizarre ornamentation of the East to
the ordered forms and satisfying symmetry which the high taste of
the Renaissance gave to its products. Thus, in the “Histoire de la
Porcelaine”--amongst the quaintly naturalistic decorations from China
and amongst the ornaments of Sèvres, with their boudoir graces and
airs of pretty luxury fit for the Marquise of Louis Quinze and the
sleek young Abbé, her pet and her counsellor, we find, rendered with
an appreciation as just, a _Brocca Italienne_, the Brocca of the
Medicis of the Sixteenth Century, slight and tall, where the lightest
of Renaissance forms the thin and reed-like _arabesque_--no mass or
splash of colour--is patterned over the smoothish surface with measured
exactitude and rhythmic completeness. How much is here suggested,
and how little done! The actual touches are almost as few as those
which Jacquemart employed afterwards in rendering some fairy effects
of rock-crystal--the material which he has interpreted, it may be,
best of all. On such work may be bestowed, amongst much other praise,
that particular praise which seems the highest to fashionable French
Criticism--delighted especially with feats of adroitness: occupied with
the evidence of the artist’s dexterity--“_Il n’y a rien, et il y a
tout_.”
The “Histoire de la Porcelaine”--of which the separate plates were
begun, as I have said before, in 1860, and which was published by
Techener in 1862--was followed in 1864 by the “Gemmes et Joyaux de
Couronne.” The Chalcographie of the Louvre--which concerns itself with
the issue of State-commissioned prints--undertook the first publication
of the “Gemmes et Joyaux.” In this series there are sixty subjects, or,
at least, sixty plates, for sometimes Jacquemart, seated by his Louvre
window (which is reflected over and over again at every angle, in the
lustre of the objects he was drawing), would etch in one plate the
portraits of two treasures, glad to give “value” to the virtues of the
one by juxtaposition with the virtues of the other; opposing, say, the
transparent brilliance of the globe of rock-crystal to the texture and
hues, sombre and velvety, of the vase of ancient sardonyx, as one puts
a cluster of diamonds round a fine cat’s-eye, or a black pearl, glowing
soberly.
Of all these plates M. Louise Gonse has given an accurate account, in
enough detail for the purposes of most people, in the “Gazette des
Beaux Arts” for 1876. The Catalogue of Jacquemart’s etchings--which
are about four hundred in all--there contained, was a work of
industry and of very genuine interest on M. Gonse’s part, but its
necessary extent, due to the artist’s own prodigious diligence in
work, cannot for ever sufficiently excuse an occasional incompleteness
of description making absolute identification sometimes a difficult
matter. The critical appreciation was warm and intelligent, and the
student of Jules Jacquemart must always be indebted to Gonse. But for
the quite adequate description of work like Jacquemart’s--the very
subject of it, quite as much as the treatment--there was needed not
only the French tongue (the tongue, _par excellence_, of Criticism),
but a Gautier to use it.
Everything that Jacquemart could do in the rendering of beautiful
matter, and of its artistic and appropriate ornament, is represented
in one or other of the varied subjects of the “Gemmes et Joyaux,”
save only his work with delicate china. And the large plates of this
series evince his strength, and hardly ever betray his weakness. He
was not, perhaps, a thoroughly trained Academical draughtsman; a large
and detailed treatment of the nude figure--any further treatment of
it than that required for the beautiful suggestion of it as it occurs
on Renaissance mirror-frames or in Renaissance porcelains--might have
found him deficient. He had an admirable feeling for the unbroken flow
of its line, for its suppleness, for the figure’s harmonious movement.
He was not the master of its most intricate anatomy; but, on the scale
on which he had to treat it, his suggestion was faultless. By the brief
shorthand of his art in this matter, we are brought back to the old
formula of praise. Here, indeed, if anywhere, “_Il n’y a rien, et il y
a tout_.”
As nothing in Jacquemart’s etchings is more adroit than his treatment
of the figure, so nothing is more delightful and, as it were,
unexpected. He feels the intricate unity of its curve and flow--how
it gives value by its happy undulations of line to the fixed,
invariable ornament of Renaissance decoration--an ornament as orderly
as well-observed verse, with its settled form, its repetition, its
refrain. I will name one or two notable instances. One occurs in the
etching of a Renaissance mirror (the print a most desirable little
possession)--_Miroir Français du Seizième Siècle_, elaborately carved,
but its chief grace after all is in its fine proportions--not so much
the perfection of the ornament as the perfect disposition of it. The
absolutely satisfactory filling of a given space with the enrichments
of design, the occupation of the space without the crowding of it--for
that is what is meant by the perfect disposition of ornament--has
always been the problem for the decorative artist. Recent fashion has
insisted, sufficiently, that it has been best solved by the Japanese;
and indeed the Japanese have solved it, often with great economy of
means, suggesting, rather than achieving, the occupation of the space
they have worked upon. But the best Renaissance Design has solved
the problem as well, in fashions less arbitrary, with rhythm more
pronounced and yet more subtle, with a precision more exquisite, with a
complete comprehension of the value of quietude, of the importance of
rest. If it requires--as Francis Turner Palgrave said, admirably--“an
Athenian tribunal” to understand Ingres and Flaxman, it needs at all
events high education in the beauty of line to understand the art of
Renaissance Ornament. Such art Jacquemart understood absolutely, and,
against its purposed rigidity, its free play of the nude figure is
indicated with touches dainty, faultless, and few. Thus it is, I say,
in the _Miroir Français du Seizième Siècle_. And to the attraction of
the figure has been added almost the attraction of landscape and of
landscape atmosphere in the plate No. 27 of the “Gemmes et Joyaux”
which represents scenes from Ovid as a craftsman of the Renaissance has
portrayed them on the delicate liquid surface of _cristal de roche_.
And not confining our examination wholly to “Gemmes et Joyaux,” of
which, obviously, the mirror just spoken of cannot form a part--we
observe there, or elsewhere in Jacquemart’s prints, how his treatment
of the figure takes constant note of the material in which the first
artist, his original, worked. Is it raised porcelain, for instance,
or soft ivory, or smooth, cool bronze with its less close and subtle
following of the figure’s curves, its certain measure of angularity in
limb and trunk, its many facets, with a somewhat marked transition from
one to the other (instead of the unbroken harmony of the real figure),
its occasional flatnesses? If it is this, this is what Jacquemart gives
us in his etchings--not the figure only, but the figure as it comes to
us through the medium of bronze. See, for example, the _Vénus Marine_,
outstretched, with slender legs--a bronze, long the possession of M.
Thiers, I believe. One really cannot insist too much on Jacquemart’s
mastery over his material--_cloisonné_, with its rich, low tones, its
patterning outlined by its metal ribs; the coarseness of rough wood, as
in the _Salière de Troyes_; the sharp, steel weapons and the infinite
delicacy of their lines, as in _Epées_, _Langues de Bœuf_, _Poignards_;
the signet’s flatness and delicate smoothness--“c’est le sinet du Roy
Sant Louis”--and the red porphyry, flaked, as it were, and speckled, of
an ancient vase; and the clear, soft, unctuous green of jade.
And as the material is marvellously varied, so are its combinations
curious and wayward. I saw, one autumn, at Lyons, their sombre little
church of Ainay, a Christian edifice built of no Gothic stones, but
placed, already ages ago, on the site of a Roman Temple--the Temple
used, its dark columns cut across, its black stones re-arranged, and
so the Church completed--Antiquity pressed into the service of the
Middle Age. Jacquemart, dealing with the precious objects that he had
to portray, came often on such strange meetings: an antique vase of
sardonyx, say, infinitely precious, mounted and altered in the Twelfth
Century, for the service of the Mass, and so, beset with gold and
jewels, offered by its possessor to the Abbey of Saint Denis.
It was not a literal translation, it must be said again, that
Jacquemart made of these things. These things sat to him for their
portraits; he posed them; he composed them aright. Placed by him in
their best lights, they revealed their finest qualities. Some people
bore hardly on him for the colour, warmth, and life he introduced into
his etchings. They wanted a colder, a more impersonal, a more precise
record. Jacquemart never sacrificed precision when precision was of
the essence of the business, but he did not--scarcely even in his
earlier plates of the “Procelaine”--care for it for its own sake. And
the thing that his first critics blamed him for doing--the composition
of a subject, the rejection of this, the choice of that, the bestowal
of fire and life upon matter dead to the common eye--is a thing which
artists in all arts have always done, and for this most simple reason,
that the doing of it is Art.
As an interpreter of other men’s pictures, it fell to the lot of
Jacquemart to engrave the most various masters. But with so very
personal an artist as he, the interpretation of so many men, and in so
many years, from 1860 or thereabouts, onwards, could not possibly be
of equal value. As far as Dutch Painting is concerned, he is strongest
when he interprets, as in one now celebrated etching, Van der Meer
of Delft. _Der Soldat und das lachende Mädchen_ was, when Jacquemart
etched it, one of the most noteworthy pieces in the cabinet of M.
Léopold Double. It was brought afterwards to London by the charming
friend of many artists and collectors--the late Samuel Joseph--in the
hands of whose family it of course rests. The big and blustering
trooper common in Dutch art, sits here, engaging the attention of that
thin-faced and _eveillée_ maiden peculiar to Van der Meer. Behind the
two, who are contentedly occupied in gazing and talk, is the bare,
sunlit wall, spread only with its map or chart, and, by the side of the
couple, throwing its brilliant but modulated light upon the woman’s
face and on the background, is the intricately patterned window, the
airy lattice. Rarely was a master’s subject, or his method, better
interpreted than in this print. The print possesses, along with all its
subtlety, a quality of boldness demanded specially by Van der Meer, and
lacking to prints which in their imperturbable deliberation and cold
skill render well enough some others of the Dutch masters--I mean the
Eighteenth Century line engravings of J. G. Wille after Metsu and the
rest.
Frans Hals, once or twice, is as characteristically rendered. But with
these exceptions it is Jacquemart’s own fellow-countrymen whom he
translates the best. The suppleness of his talent--the happy speed of
it, not its patient elaboration--is shown by his renderings of Greuze:
the _Rêve d’Amour_, a single head, and _L’Orage_, a memorandum of a
young and frightened mother, kneeling by her child, exposed to the
storm. Greuze, with his cajoling art--which, if one likes, one must
like without respecting it--is entirely there. So, too, Fragonard--the
ardent and voluptuous soul of him--in _Le Premier Baiser_.
Jacquemart, it may be interesting to add, etched some compositions of
flowers. Gonse has praised them. To me, elegant as they are, fragile
of substance, dainty of arrangement, they seem enormously inferior to
that last century flower-piece of Jan Van Huysum’s--or rather to that
reproduction of it which we are fortunate enough to know through the
mezzotint of Earlom. And Jacquemart painted in water-colour--made very
clever sketches: his strange dexterity of handling, at the service of
fact; not at the service of imagination. In leaving him, it is well
to recollect that he recorded Nature, and did not exalt or interpret
it. He interpreted Art. He was alive, more than any one has been alive
before, to all the wonders that have been wrought in the world by the
hands of artistic men.
I have not said a word about the prices of the Jacquemart etchings.
It is still customary to buy a complete series--one particular work.
The “Porcelaine” set costs a very few pounds: the “Gemmes et Joyaux,”
something more--and Techener’s re-issue, it is worth observing, is
better printed than the first edition. Separate impressions of the
plates, in proof or rare states, sell at sums varying from five
shillings or half-a-sovereign--when scarcely anybody happens to be at
Sotheby’s who understands them--up, I suppose, to two or three pounds.
I do not think the acquisition of these admirable pieces is ever likely
to be held responsible for a collector’s ruin.
In the Introductory chapter, a word of reference to two other
Frenchmen--Legros and Paul Helleu--points to the importance which, in
contemporary original Etching, I assign to these artists. As Legros
has lived nearly all his working life in England, he is treated,
in subsequent pages, with English fellow-workers. Even Paul Helleu
I treated with Englishmen, in my book called “Etching in England,”
because he also has done some part--though a small part--of his
work here, and has been one of the mainstays of our Society of
Painter-Etchers. But in the present volume--for the purposes of the
Collector--Helleu must be placed with his compatriots. The character of
his genius too--his alertness and sensitiveness to the charm of grace
rather than of formal beauty, the charm of quick and pretty movement
rather than of abiding line--is French, essentially. He is of the
succession of Watteau. His dry-points, of many of the best of which
there are but a handful of impressions (purchasable, when occasion
offers, at three or four guineas apiece), are artist’s snap-shots,
which arrest the figure suddenly in some delightful turn, the face in
some delightful expression. Am I to mention but two examples of Paul
Helleu’s work--that I may guide the novice a little to what to see and
seek for in these elegant, veracious records--I will name then _Femme à
la Tasse_, with its happy and audacious ingenuity in point of view, and
that incomparable _Étude de Jeune Fille_, the girl with the hair massed
high above her forehead, thick above her ears, a very cascade at her
shoulders, her lips a little parted, and her lifted arms close against
her chin.
A Belgian draughtsman--established in Paris, and now approaching old
age--has seen of late his reputation extending, not only amongst
collectors of the cleverly odious; and he has shown imagination,
draughtsmanship, a nimble hand, a certain mastery of process. But in
a volume from which I must exclude so much of even wholly creditable
Art--a volume in which the subject of Woodcuts, which of old was wont
to interest, is, deliberately, almost ignored--I adopt no attitude of
apology for refusing serious analysis to the too often morbid talent
of Félicien Rops. A portfolio containing the delightful inventions of
Helleu, and the great things of Méryon, could have no place for the
record of Rops’ disordered dream. Were I to be occupied with any living
Belgian, it would be with one whose work M. Hymans, the Keeper of the
Prints at Brussels, showed me at the Bibliothèque Royale--M. de Witte.
CHAPTER V
The Revival in England--Whistler and Haden, Classics--Haden’s
first works--The “Agamemnon”--Dry-points--Etchings on
Zinc--Prices--Whistler’s French Set--His Thames series--The Leyland
period--The Venetian work--His rarest Dry-points--Whistler’s Prices
at the Heywood Sale, the Hutchinson Sale, and now.
In England, the Revival of Etching, so far as one can fix its origin at
all, seems due, in chief, to the great practical work of two etchers of
individual vision and exceptional power--Whistler and Seymour Haden.
Much writing on the subject--and some of it, I hope, not bad--has also
scarcely been without its effect. It has at least roused and sustained
some interest in Etching, amongst the public that reads. It cannot,
fairly, ever have been expected to produce great artists.
Whistler and Haden are, it is now allowed, amongst the Classics
already. Each has a place that will not be disturbed. Each is an
honoured veteran. The work of Seymour Haden has been closed long ago.
It is years since he gave his etching-needle to Mr Keppel of New York;
saying, with significant gesture, “I shall etch no more.” From the
other delightful veteran no such formal declaration has--so far as I
understand--as yet proceeded. Mr Whistler may even now surprise us by a
return from Lithography. His lithographs, which will be considered more
or less in the final chapter of this book, are indeed admirable and
engaging. But it is by his etchings that Mr Whistler’s fame will live.
And though he began to etch two score of years ago, one would be sorry
even now to feel it was quite certain that the last of his etchings had
been done.
We will speak of Seymour Haden first. He is the older of the two, and
his practical work is admittedly over. His etching, though conceived
always on fine lines, has somehow always been much more intelligible to
the large public than Whistler’s. For years, in England and America,
he has enjoyed something as near to popular success as sterling work
can ever get; and in days when I was able to pick up for six shillings,
in Sotheby’s auction-rooms, the dry-point of Whistler’s _Fanny
Leyland_--which would now be considered ridiculously cheap at just as
many guineas--Seymour Haden’s _River in Ireland_ was selling (when it
appeared and could be bought at all) at quite substantial prices. His
published series of Etchings, with the text by Monsieur Burty, and
then the eulogies of Mr Hamerton, had done something, and justifiably,
towards what is called “success”--the success of recognition, I mean,
as distinguished from the success of achievement, which was certainly
his besides. And then--in the nick of time--there had come the
_Agamemnon_, almost the largest fine etching one can call to mind; for,
in Etching, “important size” often means vulgarity. The _Agamemnon_
had an immense sale. It was seen about so much, in the rooms of
people who aspired to Taste, that it became what foolish men call
“vulgarised.” As if the multiplication of excellent work--its presence
in many places, instead of only a few--was positively a nuisance and a
disadvantage! Anyhow, Seymour Haden had already entered into fame.
In 1880, the late Sir William Drake--an intimate friend who had
collected Haden and admired him--issued, through the Macmillans, a
descriptive Catalogue of Haden’s etched work. The Catalogue takes
note of a hundred and eighty-five pieces. Scarcely anything, I think,
is omitted. Of the substantial work none bears an earlier date than
1858; but fifteen years before that--when he was a very young man,
journeying--Haden had scratched on half-a-dozen little coppers sparse
notes of places of interest he had seen in Italy; and very long ago
now (when Sir Seymour was living in Hertford Street) he showed me, I
remember, the almost unique impressions from these practically unknown
little plates. They were impressions upon which a touch or so with the
brush had--if I remember rightly--a little fortified the dreamy and
delicate sketch which the copper had received. There is neither need
nor disposition to insist too much on the existence of these plates, or
rather upon the fact that once they were wrought. They scarcely claim
to have merit. But the fact that they were wrought shows one thing a
collector may like to know--it shows that Seymour Haden’s interest
in Etching began before the days of that French Revival in which was
executed undoubtedly the bulk of his work.
These little prints, then, as far as they went, were in quite the
right spirit. They were jottings, impressions--had nothing of labour
in them. But in the interval that divides them from the important and
substantive work of 1858, 1859, 1860, and later years, the artist
must have studied closely, though he was in full practice, most of
that time, as a surgeon. In the interval, he had lived, so to put it,
with Rembrandt; he had become familiar with Claude. And though they
influenced, they did not overpower him. By 1864, there were fifty or
sixty prints for M. Burty to chronicle and eulogise, in the _Gazette
des Beaux Arts_. The greatly praised _Shere Mill Pond_ had been done
in 1860. _Mytton Hall_--which, unlike Mr Hamerton, I prefer to the
_Shere_--had been wrought one year earlier. It shows a shady avenue
of yew-trees leading to an old manor-house which receives the full
light of the sun; and in that print, early as it may seem, there was
already the breadth of treatment which as years proceeded became more
and more a characteristic of Seymour Haden’s work. In 1863 came,
amongst many other good things, _Battersea Reach_, which in the First
State bore on it this inscription of interest: “Old Chelsea, Seymour
Haden, 1863, out of Whistler’s window.” To the same year belongs the
charming plate, _Whistler’s House, Old Chelsea_. The tide is out, the
mud is exposed; on the left is Lindsay Row; and beyond, and to the
right, Chelsea Old Church and Battersea Bridge: the picturesque wooden
pile-bridge of that privileged day. It was not till 1870 that there
came the _Agamemnon_--the _Breaking-up of the Agamemnon_, to give it
its full title--a view, in reality, of the Thames at Greenwich, seen
under sunset light, the hull of the old ship partially swung round
by the tide. This very favourite print exists in a couple of States.
The Second, though less rare, is scarcely perceptibly less fine than
the First. In it a smoking chimney, a brig under sail, and two small
sailing-boats--all of them objects in extreme distance--have been
replaced by indications of the sheds of a dockyard. In the Heywood
Sale, a rich impression of the _Agamemnon_--the State not specified,
but in all probability a First--sold for £7, 10s. In the Sir William
Drake Sale, twelve years afterwards--in 1892--a First State fetched £7,
7s.; a Second, £6, 15s.
For convenience’ sake, I will name a few more excellent and
characteristic works--prints which have Seymour Haden’s most
distinguishing qualities of frankness, directness, and an obvious
vigour. His etchings are deliberately arrested at the stage of the
sketch; and it is a sketch conceived nobly and executed with impulse.
The tendency of the work, as Time went on, was, as has been said,
towards greater breadth; but unless we are to compare only such a
print as _Out of Study-Window_, say (done in 1859), with only the most
admirable Rembrandt-like, Geddes-like dry-print, _Windmill Hill_ (done
in 1877), there is no greatly marked contrast; there is no surprise;
there is but a steady and not unnatural development. I put this down,
in part at least, to the fact that when Seymour Haden first took up
Etching seriously (in 1858, remember) he was already middle-aged. He
had lived for years in the most frequent intercourse with dignified
Art; his view of Nature, and of the way of rendering her--or of letting
her inspire you--was large, and likely to be large. Yet as Time went on
there came no doubt an increasing love of the sense of spaciousness and
of potent effect. The work was apt to be more dramatic and more moving.
The hand asked the opportunity for the fuller exercise of its freedom.
_Sawley Abbey_, etched in 1873, is an instance of this, and not alone
for its merits is it interesting to mention it, but because, like a
certain number of its fellows amongst that later work, it is etched
upon zinc--a risky substance, which succeeds admirably, when it
succeeds, and when it fails, fails very much. _Windmill Hill_--two
subjects of that name--_Nine Barrow Down_, _Wareham Bridge_, and the
_Little Boathouse_, and again that _Grim Spain_ which illustrates my
“Four Masters of Etching” are the prints which I should most choose
to possess amongst those of Haden’s later period; whilst--going back
to the period of 1864 and 1865--_Sunset on the Thames_ is at the same
time a favourite and strong, and _Fenton Hook_ remarkable for its
draughtsmanship of tree-trunk and stump. Yet earlier--for they belong
to 1860 and 1859--there are the _Mytton Hall_, which I have spoken of
already, and the _Combe Bottom_. _Combe Bottom_ is unsurpassed for
sweetness and spontaneity. And _Mytton Hall_ has its full share of
that priceless element of Style which is never altogether absent from
Seymour Haden’s work. Again--and most acceptable of all to some of
us--_The Water Meadow_ (which has been circulated very largely) is,
in a perfect impression, to be studied and enjoyed as a vivacious,
happy, sympathetic transcript of a sudden rain-storm in the Hampshire
lowlands, where poplars nourish and grass grows rank. The collector who
can put these things into his folios--and a little diligence in finding
them out, and three or four guineas for each print, will often enable
him to do so--will have given himself the opportunity of confirmation
in the belief that among modern etchers of Landscape, amongst modern
exponents in the art of Black and White of an artistic sympathy with
pure and ordinary Nature, Seymour Haden stands easily first. And to
say that, is not to say that he succeeds equally, or has equally tried
to succeed, with portraiture or figure-studies. It is not to compare
him--to his advantage or disadvantage--with any other artist in the
matter of the etcher’s peculiar skill and technical mastery.
The best collection of Seymour Haden’s work that has ever been sold in
detail was the collection of Sir William Drake. In it the First State
of _A River in Ireland_--of which only twelve impressions had been
taken--fetched £49 (Dunthorne); and the First State of _Shere Mill
Bond_, £35; a unique impression of _Battersea Railway Bridge_ fetched
£18, 10s. (Deprez); _Erith Marshes_, First State, £4, 4s.; _Combe
Bottom_, First State, £3; _Sunset on the Thames_, First State, £2,
12s.; and _Sawley Abbey_, First State, £2, 4s.
With the master-etchers of the world--Méryon’s equal in some respects,
and, in some respects, Rembrandt’s--there stands James Whistler.
Connoisseurs in France and England, in America, Holland, Bavaria,
concede this, now. It was fiercely contested of old time, and there
is not much cause for wonder in that, for the work of Mr Whistler
is, and has been from the first almost, so desperately original that
the world could hardly be expected to be ready to receive it. And Mr
Whistler never by anything approaching to cheap issue facilitated
familiarity with his work. In 1868 Mr Hamerton wrote of him: “I have
been told that, if application is made to Mr Whistler for a set of his
etchings”--the set, it may be said in parenthesis, was a very small
one then--“he may perhaps, if he chooses to answer the letter, do
the applicant the favour to let him have a copy for about the price
of a good horse; but beyond such exceptional instances as this, Mr
Whistler’s etchings are not in the market.” They have been in the
market since, however--everybody knows--and if in 1868 a “set” (the
Thames Set or the French Set was meant, presumably) was valued by Mr
Whistler at the price of a horse, of late years a single print, such
as the _Zaandam_ for instance, has been valued by Mr Whistler at the
price of a Humber cycle. Even in the days--some sixteen years ago, or
so--when the work of the delightful master was least appreciated, there
was an enormous difference in the price of a print obtained through
what are known as the “regular channels” and its price if obtained in
open competition, under the hammer at Sotheby’s. Those great days!--or
days of great opportunities--when, as I have said before, I became
possessed for six shillings of _Fanny Leyland_, and, for hardly more
than six shillings, of the yet rarer dry-point, _Battersea Dawn_.
About a dozen years ago, I, with the enthusiasm of a convert, began a
Catalogue of Whistler’s prints, intending it for my own use. I finished
it for my brother-collectors, and for poor Mr Thibaudeau, who refreshed
me with money--and a little for Mr Whistler, too, if he was minded to
receive my offering. The only previously existing Catalogue--that of Mr
Ralph Thomas--had been published twelve years earlier, and had meantime
become of little service. There were several reasons for that, but,
to justify my own attempt--which, as in the case of Méryon, has been
justified indeed by my brother-collectors’ reception of it--it will
suffice if I mention one. Mr Thomas, working in 1874, catalogued about
eighty etchings. I, finishing my work in 1886, catalogued two hundred
and fourteen. Of the additional number only a few are prints which had
been already wrought when Mr Thomas wrote, and which had escaped his
notice. By far the greater portion have been etched in more recent
years. And many of them are unknown to the amateur--by sense of sight
at least--even to this day.
Whistler’s etchings are so scattered, and so many of them are, and must
ever be, so very rare, that I could not have done what I did if several
diligent collectors, well placed for the purpose, had not helped me.
Mr Thibaudeau himself--the erudite dealer--amassed much information,
and placed it at my service. Mr Samuel Avery, when Mr Keppel took me to
see him in East 38th Street, in the autumn of 1885, put at my disposal
everything he knew; and his collection was even then the worthy rival
of what Mr Howard Mansfield’s is now--the rival, almost, of Seymour
Haden’s own collection of Whistler’s, which went to America a few years
ago: drawn thither by the instrumentality of a great cheque from Mr
Kennedy. Mr Mortimer Menpes--much associated with Whistler at that
time, and who, I suppose, retains the fine collection of Whistler’s
he then possessed--took much trouble with me in the identification of
the rare things he owned, and I had to express my thanks to Mr Barrett
of Brighton, to the Reverend Stopford Brooke, Mr Henry S. Theobald,
and some of the best-known London dealers--to Mr Brown of the Fine
Art Society, and Mr Walter Dowdeswell, an enthusiast for Whistler,
who furnished me with delightful notes I never published, on the
precise condition of the impressions in my own set of the “Twenty-Six
Etchings.” Again, I saw--what any one may see--such of the Whistler
prints as are possessed by the British Museum Print-Room. And, lastly,
I had access, more than once, to Mr. Whistler’s own collection; but
that unfortunately was very incomplete. It consisted chiefly of the
later etchings.
It is now about forty years since Whistler began to etch; but his work
in Etching has never been continuous or regular, and though he has
done a certain number of things, some fine, some insignificant, since
the appearance of my Catalogue, of late his work in Etching appears to
have almost ceased. Looking back along his life, one may say, periods
there have been when he was busy with needle and copper--periods, too,
during which he laid them altogether aside. The first chronicled,
the first completed plate, was done, it was believed, in 1857--when
he was a young man in Paris. But he told me there existed, somewhere
or other, in the too safe keeping of public authorities in America,
a plate on which, before he left the public service of the States,
he neglected to fully engrave that map or view for the Coast Survey
which the authorities expected of him, but did not neglect to engrave
upon the plate, in truant mood, certain sketches for his own pleasure.
The plate was confiscated. Young Mr Whistler was informed that an
unwarrantable thing had been done. He perfectly agreed--he told the
high official--with that observation. In removing a plate from the
hands of its author before he had completed his pleasure upon it,
its author had been treated unwarrantably. Just as my Catalogue--a
“Study and a Catalogue,” I call it--was going to press, there arrived
from New York--sent thence to London by the courtesy of Mr Kennedy,
its owner--an impression from the copper I have spoken of. It is a
curiosity, and not a work of Art--a geographer’s view of the coast.
It will be noticed from my little anecdote, that, at a very early
period of his life, Mr Whistler was in the right, absolutely, and other
people in the wrong--and in the right he has remained ever since, and
has believed it, in spite of some intelligent and much unintelligent
criticism. He has been (let the collector be very sure of this) a law
unto himself--has worked in his own way, at his own hours, on none
but his own themes: the result of it, I dare to think deliberately,
the preservation of a freshness which, with artists less true to
their art and their own mission, is apt to suffer and to pass away.
And with it the charm passes. Now Whistler’s newest work--his work
of this morning, be it etching or lithograph--possesses the interest
of freshness, of vivacity, of a new and beautiful impression of the
world, conveyed in individual ways, just as much as did his early work
of nearly forty years ago. When the comparatively few people whose
artistic sensibilities allow them to really understand the delicacy
of Mr Whistler’s method, shall but have known it long enough, they
will not be found, as some among the not quite unappreciative are
found to-day, protesting that there is a want of continuity between
the earlier efforts and the later, and that the vision of pretty and
curious detail, and the firmness and daintiness of hand in recording
it, which confessedly distinguished the etchings of France and of the
Thames below Bridge, are missing to the later plates or the plates of
the middle period--to the dry-points of what I may term the Leyland
period (when he drew all three Miss Leylands, their father and their
mother too, and _Speke Hall_, where they lived), and to the more recent
Venetian etchings. _Peccavi!_ I have myself, in my time, thought that
this continuity was wanting. I have told Mr Whistler with exceeding
levity of speech, that when, in the Realms of the Blest, he desired,
on meeting Velasquez and Rembrandt, not to disappoint them, he must
be provided, for his justification, with his Thames etchings in
their finest states. It would be a potent introduction. But I am not
sure that the Venetian portfolios--the “Venice” and the “Twenty-Six
Etchings,” which are most of them Venetian in theme--would not serve
Mr Whistler in good stead. For--spite of some insignificant things
put out not long after the appearance of my Catalogue, along indeed,
or almost along with some fine ones of Brussels and Touraine--there
is a continuity which the thorough student of Mr Whistler’s work
will recognise. There is often in the Venetian things--as in the
_Doorway_ of the “Venice,” and in _The Garden_ and _The Balcony_ of the
“Twenty-Six Etchings”--an advance in the impression produced, a greater
variety and flexibility of method, a more delightful and dexterous
effacing of the means used to bring about the effect.
The Venetian etchings--some people thought at first they were not
satisfactory because they did not record that Venice which the
University-Extension-educated tourist, with his guide-book and his
volumes of Ruskin, goes out from England to see. But I doubt if Mr
Whistler troubled himself about the guides or read the sacred books
of Mr Ruskin with becoming attention. Mr Ruskin had seen Venice
nobly, with great imagination; Mr Fergusson and a score of admirable
architects had seen it learnedly; but Mr Whistler would see it for
himself--that is to say, he would see in his own way the Present,
and would see it quite as certainly as the Past. The architecture of
Venice had impressed folk so deeply that it was not easy in a moment
to realise that here was a great draughtsman--a man too of poetic
vision--whose work it had not been allowed to dominate. The past and
its record were not Whistler’s affair in Venice. For him, the lines
of the steam-boat, the lines of the fishing-tackle, the shadow under
the squalid archway, the wayward vine of the garden, had been as
fascinating, as engaging, as worthy of chronicle, as the domes of St
Mark’s.
Yet we had not properly understood Mr Whistler’s work in England, if
we supposed it could be otherwise. From associations of Literature
and History this artist from the first had cut himself adrift. His
subject was what he saw, or what he decided to see, and not anything
that he had heard about it. He had dispensed from the beginning with
those aids to the provocation of interest which appeal most strongly
to the world--to the person of sentiment, to the literary lady, to the
man in the street. We were to be interested--if we were interested at
all--in the happy accidents of line and light he had perceived, in his
dexterous record, in his knowing adaptation.
I must be allowed to say, however--and it is useful to the collector
that I should say it plainly--that there was some justification (much
more than Mr Whistler, I suppose, would allow) for those of us who did
not bow the knee too readily before the Venetian prints. In the States
in which they were first exhibited, there was, with all their merits,
something ragged and disjointed about several of them. Mr Whistler
worked more upon them later, adding never of course merely finicky
detail, but refinement, suavity. Of these particular plates, the
collector should remember, it is not the earlier impressions that are
the ones to be desired. It is, rather, the later impressions, when the
plate was, first, perfected--then even, if need arose through any wear
in _tirage_, suitably refreshed.
To return for a moment to Whistlerian characteristics. Though the
value of many of his etchings, as Mr Whistler might himself tell
us, consists in the exquisiteness of their execution and of their
arrangement of line, it would be unfair not to acknowledge that amongst
the many things it has been given to Mr Whistler to perceive, it has
been given him to perceive beautiful character and exquisite line in
Humanity--that, certainly, just as much as quaintness and charm in
the wharves and warehouses of the Port, in the shabby elegance of the
side canals of Venice, in the engaging homeliness of little Chelsea
shop-fronts. The almost unknown etching of his mother--one of the most
refined performances of his career, as exquisite, in its own way, as
the famous painting which is displayed at the Luxembourg--proves his
possession of the quality which permitted Rembrandt to draw with the
reticence of a convincing pathos his most impressive portraits of the
aged--the _Lutma_, the _Clément de Jonghe_, the _Mère de Rembrandt, au
voile noir_.
Again the _Fanny Leyland_, and _The Muff_, and many another print that
I could name, attest Mr Whistler’s solution of a problem which presents
itself engagingly, attractively, to the ingenious, and uselessly to
the incompetent--the problem of seeing beauty in modern dress, and
grace in the modern figure. Whistler, no more than Degas, Sargent, or
J. J. Shannon, sighs for the artificial dignity of the fashions of
other times. Even at moments when modern Fashion is not in truth at its
prettiest, he is able to descry a piquancy in the contemporary hat, and
to find a grace in the flutter of flounce and frill. What else after
all should we expect from an artist the sweep of whose brush would
give distinction to the Chelsea Workhouse, or to the St George’s Union
Infirmary in the Fulham Road, and for whom, under the veil of night or
dusk, the chimney of the Swan Brewery would wear an aspect not less
beautiful than King’s College Chapel? It has been given to the master
of Etching to see everyday things with a poetic eye.
“Take care of the extremities,” said old Couture, to a painter who
addressed himself to the figure: “take care of the extremities, for
all the life is there.” But that, it may truly be answered, is what
Mr Whistler has often neglected to do. It may be rejoined, however,
that where he has neglected to do it, somehow “all the life” has not
gone out of his work. And the hand of the man sitting in the boat, in
one of the most desirable of the early Thames etchings, _Black Lion
Wharf_, and (to name no other instance) the hands in the painting of
Sarasate of a dozen years ago, are reminders of how completely it is
within Mr Whistler’s power to indicate the life, the temperament, by
“the extremities,” when it suits his work that he shall do so. And the
avoidance, so often commented upon, of this detail here, and of that
detail there, itself reminds us of something important--nay, perhaps
of the central fact which determines the direction of so much of this
great etcher’s labour. It reminds us that whether Mr Whistler’s work is
record of Nature or not, it has at all costs to be conclusive evidence
of Art. And for the one as well as for the other, he has had need to
know, not only what to do--a difficult thing enough, sometimes--but
a more difficult thing yet: what to avoid doing. In other words,
selection plays in his work a part unusually important, and he has
occupied himself increasingly, not with the question of how to imitate
and transcribe, but with the question how best to imply and to suggest.
In nearly all his periods he is the master of an advanced art, which
gives a curious and a various and a continual pleasure.
And now a word or two on what is matter of business to the
collector--the business of the acquisition of Whistler’s etchings.
Unlike the thousand prints which, in these later days of “the Revival,”
are the inadequate result of the laborious industry of popular
people--and which have served their purpose when, framed and mounted,
they have covered for a while the wall-paper in every builder’s terrace
in Bayswater--works of the individuality, the flexibility, the genius
in fine of Whistler, appeal to the collector of the highest class
and of the finest taste, and, it may be even, to him alone. They lie
already in the portfolio by the side of Rembrandts and Méryons. It
is not easy to get them; or, rather, there are some which it is only
difficult, and some which it is impossible, to possess. Certain of the
coppers are known to have been destroyed; others, which one cannot
always particularise, are in all probability destroyed. Then again
there are dry-points, never very robust; some of them so delicate, so
evanescent, that the plate, should it exist, would prove to be worth
nothing. It has yielded, perhaps, half-a-dozen impressions, and they
have gone far towards exhausting it. Many plates, again, exist, no
doubt, in the late State, or in the undesirable condition, and some are
yet intact, and others, like the two Venetian series--the “Venice” and
the “Twenty-Six”--economically managed from the beginning, have yielded
a substantial yet never an extensive array of such proofs as satisfy
the eye that is educated.
Publication--if one can quite call it so--of Mr Whistler’s etchings
first began in 1859, when the artist had worked seriously for only two
or three years. Thirteen etchings, generally called “the French Set,”
were printed then by Delâtre in Paris, in very limited numbers, on the
thin Japan or China or on the good old slightly-ribbed paper that the
collector loves. The “Thames Set”--sixteen in number, and consisting
of the majority of the River pieces executed up to that time--were the
next to be offered. But they appeared, publicly, only in 1871, when,
as Mr Ellis was good enough to tell me, “Ellis & Green” bought the
plates and had a hundred sets printed. Their printing was rather dry,
so that it is really by the rare impressions which either Mr Whistler
himself, or Delâtre it may be, had printed, years before, that these
plates are to be judged. It is these impressions which represent them
most perfectly--it is these the true collector demands--though I would
not speak disrespectfully of the impressions printed by Mr Goulding
when the Fine Art Society bought the plates of Mr Ellis, or of the
subsequent ones printed when Mr Keppel, in his turn, bought the coppers
of the Fine Art Society.
Of the two other recognised sets--the “Venice” of the Fine Art Society
and the “Twenty-Six Etchings” of the Dowdeswells--it must be said first
that neither has been subjected to the vicissitudes that attended the
earlier plates. The dozen prints in the “Venice” were first issued by
the Fine Art Society in the year 1880; but, as I have said earlier,
very few of the fine and really finished impressions--of the hundred
permitted from each plate--date from as early as that year. The
“Twenty-Six Etchings,” issued by the Messrs Dowdeswell, were brought
out in 1886; Mr Whistler himself printing, with consummate skill, every
mortal copy, and making the most interesting little changes, repairs,
improvements, at the press-side. Of most of the subjects there were but
fifty impressions.
These things are wholly admirable, and mostly--it is evident--are
rare; but the extremest rarity is reserved for a few of those
many plates which do not belong to any set at all, and were never
formally issued. Thus _Paris, Isle de la Cité_--etched from the
Galérie d’Apollon in the Louvre--is of unsurpassable rarity; and it
is singularly interesting as having, though with a date as early as
1859, very distinct characteristics of a style of which the wider
manifestation came much later. The First State of the _Rag Gatherers_
is of great, though not of quite such extraordinary rarity. The
_Kitchen_, in the First State, is not exceptionally rare. It should
be had, if possible, in the Second, for, many years after its first
execution, Mr Whistler took it up again, and then, and then only, was
it that he perfected it. In subtlety of illumination, in that Second
State, it is as fine as any painting of De Hooch’s. _Westminster
Bridge_ is very rare and very desirable in the First State; in the
Second--by which time it has gone into the regular “Thames Set” or
“Sixteen Etchings”--it has lost all its delicacy and harmony: it is
hard and dry. The figure-pieces of the Leyland period--dry-points,
nearly always--are very rare. They include not only a little succession
of portraits--the lovely print of _Fanny Leyland_ I have referred to
already--but likewise a succession of studies of paid or of familiar
models, of which the _Model Resting_ is one of the most beautiful.
There is _Tillie_: a model, too: likewise of great rarity and charm. Of
the larger etchings, three of the finest are the _Putney Bridge_, the
_Battersea Bridge_, and the _Large “Pool.”_ Beyond this scale, Etching
can hardly safely go. Even this scale would be a danger to some, though
Mr Whistler has managed it. But then, that art of his--like Rembrandt’s
own--can “blow on brass” as well as “breathe through silver.” He
“breathes through silver” in the dainty rarities of a later time, the
little Chelsea shop subjects--_Old Clothes Shop_, _Fruit Shop_. Are
there half-a-dozen impressions of them anywhere in the world? And then,
the poetic charm of _Price’s Candle Works_--the easy majesty of _London
Bridge_!
As to the prices of Whistlers in the open market? Well, they
increase, unquestionably. Some of the very greatest rarities, it may
be remembered, have never appeared in the auction-room. There are
half-a-dozen, I suppose, for any one of which, did it appear, forty
or fifty guineas would cheerfully be paid. The average price, now,
of a satisfactory Whistler--to speak to the collector very roughly,
and always with the difficulty of striking an average at all--the
average dealer’s price might now be eight guineas. But we will look at
the Catalogues; premising, as has been premised already, that there
are some rarer things than any that are there chronicled. The time
when Mr Heywood sold his Whistlers was the fortunate time to buy. A
First State of the _Rag Gatherers_ was sold then for less than two
pounds; a First of the _Westminster Bridge_ (then called “The House of
Parliament”), for about five pounds; and many quite desirable things
went for a pound a piece, and some for a few shillings. In 1892,
when there came the sale of Mr Hutchinson’s collection, and of Sir
William Drake’s, opinion was more formed; yet nothing like the prices
that would be reached to-day were attained then. In Mr Hutchinson’s
collection, the First State of the _Marchande de Moutarde_--rare,
but not especially rare--went for £4, 10s.; the First State of the
_Kitchen_ for £8, 15s.; the _Lime-Burners_ for £6, 10s.; a trial proof
of the _Arthur_ for £10, 15s.; a trial proof of the _Whistler_ for
£15, 10s. Again, the _Weary_ fetched £12; the First State of _Speke
Hall_, £9, 12s.; the _Fanny Leyland_, £15, 10s.; _From Pickled Herring
Stairs_, £6, 6s.; the _Palaces_, £8, 15s.; the _San Biagio_, £7, 10s.;
the _Garden_, £5, 10s.; the _Wool Carders_, £8; the _Little Drawbridge,
Amsterdam_, £9, 15s.; the _Zaandam_, £10. At the Drake Sale--a smaller
one, as far as Whistlers were concerned--ten guineas was given for the
_Kitchen_; £19 for the _Forge_. It must be added that this _Forge_,
which is in the second published set (the “Thames series” or “Sixteen
Etchings,” call them which you will) is in the quality of its different
impressions more unequal than almost any print I know. It varies
from an ineffective ghost to a thing of beauty. At £19, let us hope
it was a thing of beauty; but very much oftener it is an ineffective
ghost--desperately overrated.
CHAPTER VI
Etchers since our great Classics--William Strang--His individuality,
and obligations to Legros--That excellent Master--Legros’s nobility
and dignity--His observation and imagination--Holroyd--The daintiness
of Short--C. J. Watson--Goff, flexible and comprehensive--The
qualities of Cameron--Oliver Hall’s Landscape--The question of
prices--Contemporary Prints generally dear.
Though no very definite commercial values may yet have been
established, in the auction-rooms, for their work, many living English
etchers of a generation later than that of Whistler and of Seymour
Haden have been for some time now appealing to the collector; and
their prints--sold chiefly perhaps at the “Painter-Etcher’s,” at Mr
Dunthorne’s, and at Mr R. Gutekunst’s--are worthy to be carefully
considered. The best of them, at least, will rank some day as only
second to the classics of their art. Indeed, if the term “the Revival
of Etching” has any meaning, it is to the best men of the later
generation that it must most apply; for “revival” signifies surely some
tolerably wide diffusion of interest, and is a word that could scarcely
be used if all we were concerned with were the efforts of two or three
isolated men of genius--in France, Méryon, Bracquemond, Jacquemart; in
England, Haden and Whistler.
No, the collector who addresses himself to the gathering of modern
etchings, must go--or may go, fairly--beyond the limits of the work
of the men I have this instant named. But in going beyond them, very
wary must be his steps. He who is already a serious student of the
older masters--he who by happy instinct, or by that poor but necessary
substitute for it, a steady application to the consideration of
great models--knows something of the secrets of Style, and so will
not fall a ready prey to the attractions of the meretricious and the
cheap. But the beginner is in need of my warning; and among the work
of the younger generation, the etching that is already popular and
celebrated--more particularly the etching that is obviously elaborate
and laboured--is as a rule the work he must eschew. The thing of course
to aim at, is to acquire gradually such “eye” and knowledge as will
enable him to pounce with safety here and there upon unknown work; but
at first it is well perhaps that in his travels beyond the territory of
the admittedly great, he shall not wander too far. I will give him the
names of a few artists, whom the connoisseur begins to appreciate,--men
of whose methods it will be interesting, and need not be extravagant,
to possess a few examples.
Of any such men, here with us in England--save indeed Legros, whose
claims to highest place I hold to be yet more incontestable--William
Strang is the one who has been known the longest, though the number
of his years may still permit him, ere he pass from us, to double the
already formidable volume of his work. Strang has etched in the right
methods, and no one knows much better than he does, the _technique_
of the craft; and, then, moreover, though he paints from time to
time a little, it is Etching--and all of it original Etching--that
is the occupation of his life. And within less than twenty years Mr
Strang has wrought--well, say between two hundred and fifty and three
hundred plates. It is no good giving the precise number, for before
this book has lain for a month upon the reader’s shelf the number will
have ceased to be precise. Almost as many kinds of subjects as were
treated by Rembrandt have been treated--and no one of them on one or
two occasions only--by Mr William Strang. He has dealt with religious
story--caring always, like Rembrandt, and like Von Uhde to-day, for
dramatic intensity in the representation of it, rather than for local
colour--he has dealt too with Landscape, with Portraiture, with grim
and sordid aspects of contemporary life.
The presence of imagination, the absence, almost complete, of formal
beauty, are the very “notes” of Mr Strang’s work--that absence is so
remarkable where it would have been least expected, that we are, it
may be, a little too apt to forget that in certain of his masculine
portraiture it does not make itself felt at all. He has made etchings
of handsome men, and they have remained handsome. He has even made
etchings of men not handsome, and handsome they have become. But he
knows not the pretty woman. And his landscape is endowed but scantily
with the beauty it cannot entirely miss. Another curious thing about
Mr Strang’s landscape is, that more even than that of Legros, his
first great master, it seems derived from but a little personal
observation and an immense study of the elder art. Indeed, I am not
quite sure whether, save in the accessories of his figures--such as the
potato-basket of one of his woebegone, limping, elderly wayfarers--Mr
Strang has ever drawn and observed anything which had not already
fallen within the observation of the great original engravers of the
remoter Past. In his dramatic pieces he shows a sense of simple pathos,
as well as of the uncanny and the weird. In Portraiture Mr Strang can
be effectively austere and suitably restrained. Occasional failures, or
comparative failures, such as the portraits of Mr Thomas Hardy and of
the late Sir William Drake, do perhaps but bring into stronger relief
the successes of the _Mr Sichel_ and of _Ian Strang_, and many others
besides. I must refrain from naming them. When Mr Strang has done so
much, and nearly all of it on a high technical level, it is natural
to feel that though out of them all the general collector of etchings
might reasonably be satisfied with the possession of a dozen--or,
peradventure, six--he would like at least to choose them for himself.
Indeed, there is no “best” to guide him to--no “worst” to guard him
against.
Legros has been named as Strang’s first master. He belongs to an older
generation, and if I name him here, between his best-known pupil and
some of the younger men, it is not to minimise his importance, but in
part as a convenient thing, and in part because, with his long years
of English practice, one hesitates to allow even French birth and a
French first education to cause one to place Legros outside the English
School that he has influenced. Born at Dijon nearly sixty years ago,
Legros has been amongst us since 1863. But it is not English life--or
indeed any life--that has made him what he is. He might have done
his work--most of it at least but the portraiture--while scarcely
wandering beyond the bounds of a Hammersmith garden. He has been fed
on the Renaissance, and fed on Rembrandt; but yet the originality of
his mind pierces through the form it has pleased him to impose on its
expression. He gives to masculine character nobility and dignity; or
rather, he is impressed immensely by the presence of these things in
his subjects. His etching of Mr G. F. Watts is perhaps--taking into
account both theme and treatment--the finest etched portrait that has
been wrought by any one since the very masterpieces of Rembrandt, nor,
honestly speaking, do I know that it fails to stand comparison even
with these.
Like his most prolific and perhaps also his most original pupil,
who has been spoken of already, Legros has little sense of womanly
beauty; but the lines of his landscape--often, as I judge, either an
imagined world or but a faded memory of our own--have refinement and
charm. His art is restful--restful even when it is weird. A large
proportion of his earlier work records the life of the Priesthood. In
its visible dignity--as I have said elsewhere--its true but limited
_camaraderie_, in its monotony and quietude, in its magnificence of
service and symbol, the life of the priest, and of those who serve in
a great church, has impressed Legros profoundly; and he has etched
these men--one now reading a lesson, one waiting now with folded hands,
one meditating, one observant, one offering up the Host, another,
a musician, bending over the ’cello or the double-bass with slow
movement of the hand that holds the bow. Dignity and ignorance, pomp
and power, weariness, senility, decay--none of these things escape
the observation of the first great etcher of the life of the Church.
_Communion dans l’Eglise St Médard_ and _Chantres Espagnols_, when seen
in fine “states,” are amazing and admirable technical triumphs, as
well as penetrating studies, the one of religious fervour, the other
of impending death. In _La Mort et le Bûcheron_--in either version
of the plate, for there are two--the imagination of Legros is at its
tenderest. Is not _L’Incendie_ dramatic, in its large and abstract
way? Is not _La Mort du Vagabond_--with the storm like the storm in
“Lear”--the one _very_ large etching that is not, in its scale, a
mistake? I know I would not have it otherwise, though it wants almost
a portfolio to itself, or, better, a frame upon the wall. One might go
on indefinitely; but again it is preferable to send the reader to the
study of the master’s long and serious work--a hundred and sixty-eight
pieces there were in 1877, when Thibaudeau & Malassis published their
Catalogue; ten years later there were ninety additions to the list;
and to this day Mr Legros has not ceased to etch. Only the very first
of his prints show any evidence of technical incompleteness. The very
latest--though no doubt, by this time, his own real message has been
delivered--the very latest (they include exquisite landscapes) show no
symptom of fatigue or decay.
Not more than once or twice, I think, in all his long career, has
Legros published his works in sets, either naturally connected or
artificially brought together. Charles Holroyd, a distinguished pupil
of Legros’s, has twice already published sets--there is his “Icarus”
set, and a little earlier in date, yet in no respect immature, his
“Monte Oliveto” set. Holroyd--with individuality of his own, without
a doubt--is yet Legros’s true spiritual child. He has much of his
refinement, of his dignity. Did he love the priesthood from Legros’s
etchings, before ever he lived with them in Italy? Rome itself, I
suppose, gave him the love of what is visibly Classic--and that is
a love which Legros does not appear to share. His composition is
generally good; his sense of beautiful “line” most noteworthy. His
trees--stone pine and olive, or the humbler trees of our North--are
thus not only individual studies, true to Nature sometimes in
detail, always in essentials--but likewise restful and impressive
decorations of the space of paper it is his business to fill. _Farm
behind Scarborough_ shows him homely, simple, and direct. Was it
a Roman garden, or Studley, that suggested _The Round Temple_? In
the little plate of the _Borghese Gardens_--my own private plate,
which I bought from him when the first impression of it hung at the
Painter-Etchers’--Holroyd consciously abandons much that is wont to
attract (atmospheric effect, for example), but he retains the thing for
which the plate existed--dignified and expressive rhythm of “line.”
That justifies it, and permits it to omit much, and to only admirably
hint at the thing it would not actually convey.
We will turn for a few minutes to another contemporary who has etched
in the right spirit--Mr Frank Short. Some people think that Mr Short
has not quite fulfilled the promise which only a few years ago he gave,
as an original etcher. For myself, I consider that the fulfilment
is, at most, only delayed: not rendered unlikely. Mr Short has been
for several years extremely busy in the translation, chiefly into
mezzotint, of pictures and drawings by artists as various as Turner,
Nasmyth, Constable, Dewint, and G. F. Watts. If engravings that are
not original inventions are ever worth buying--and that, of course,
cannot be doubted--these translations by Mr Short are worth buying,
eminently. There is not one of them that fails. His flexibility is
extraordinary. His productions are exquisite. In a parenthesis, let me
advise their purchase, when things of the sort are required. But Short
is before us just now only in the capacity of an original etcher, and,
as an original etcher, with well-nigh perfect command of _technique_,
he registers the daintiest of individual impressions of the world.
That his field as an observer at first hand is limited, is certainly
true. Coast subjects please him best. We have no finer draughtsman
of low-lying land, of a scene with a low horizon, of a great expanse
of mud and harbour deserted by the tide--all their simplicity, even
uncomeliness of theme, made almost poetic. _Low Tide and the Evening
Star_; _Evening, Bosham_; _Sleeping till the Flood_, are all, among
subjects of this order, prints that should be secured where it is
possible--and where the accumulation of modern etchings is not an
inconvenience. In _Stourbridge Canal_ and in _Wrought Nails_--both
of them finely felt, finely drawn bits of the ragged, sordid “Black
Country”--we have desirable instances of Mr Short’s dealings with
another class of theme. If you want him in a more playful mood, take
_Quarter Boys_--a quite imaginative yet gamesome vision of urchins
looking out to sea from the Belfry of the church of Rye.
C. J. Watson has for many years now been etching persistently, and
been etching well. But he has not got, and could not perhaps quite
easily get, beyond the learned simplicity of _Mill Bridge, Bosham_,
done in 1888. It is a sketch with singular unity of impression--or
rather with that unity of impression which is not so singular perhaps
when the work remains a sketch. _St Etienne-du-Mont_--a theme from
which one would have thought that Mr Watson would have been warned
off, remembering how, once and for ever, it had been dealt with by
the genius of Méryon--is, doubtless, an accurate enough portrait,
but the individuality--where? And without individuality, such work
is an architectural drawing. This _St Etienne_ bears date 1890; but
since 1890 Mr Watson has done finer things--his strong and capable
hand stirred to expression by a nature not perhaps very sensitive to
every effect of beauty, but feeling the interest of solid workmanship
and something of the charm of the picturesque. _Ponte del Cavallo_
has daintiness, and some yet more recent work in Central Italy and
Sicily--with architecture generally as the basis of its interest--may
fall reasonably enough within the province of collectors who can afford
to accumulate--who can afford to add well to well and vineyard to
vineyard.
Of the remaining English etchers of our time, Colonel Goff, Mr D. Y.
Cameron, and Mr Oliver Hall are those whom it will be best to notice
at a little length. Mr Macbeth, Mr Herkomer, Mr W. H. May, Mr Menpes,
Mr Raven Hill--others besides--have brought out prints of which the
possession is pleasant; but it is, I suppose, the three men whom
I named earlier who by reason of combined quality and quantity of
“out-put” most deserve the collector’s serious consideration.
Of these three, Goff--a retired Guardsman, but no more really an
amateur than Seymour Haden--is, I take it, the best known. Actual
popularity he has been, for an etcher, wonderfully near to attaining.
He may even now attain it. Much of the excellence of his work is
easily intelligible; his point of view, though always artistic, is one
that can be reached, often, by the ordinary spectator of his prints.
Hence, his relatively large acceptance--an agreeable circumstance which
I should be glad to consider was owing exclusively to the skill that
is certainly likewise his. Colonel Goff’s sympathies are broad; his
subjects admirably varied; and the vivacity of his artistic temperament
allows him to attack each new plate with new interest. He is almost
without mannerism in treatment, and of that which presents itself
to his gaze on his journey through the world, there is singularly
little which he is not able artistically to tackle. Not quite the
architectural draughtsman that C. J. Watson is, he yet can indicate
tastefully the architecture of church or cottage or city house. His
sympathies are with the new as much as with the old, and that is in
part because to him a building is not only, or chiefly, a monument
with historical associations; it is, above all, an excuse and a
justification for an arrangement on the copper, of harmonious and
intricate line. Very successfully he has dealt with landscape. Is it
the seaboard or the town that he depicts, he can people the place with
figures vivacious and rightly displayed. I suppose that he has executed
by this time scarcely less than a hundred plates. _Summer Storm in the
Itchen Valley_ remains the most popular, and would therefore prove, in
an auction-room, the least inexpensive. But, among the pure etchings,
_Pine Trees, Christ Church_, and _Norfolk Bridge, Shoreham_, and the
extremely delicate little print of the _Chain Pier, Brighton_, and _Low
Tide, Mouth of the Hampshire Avon_--with its own dreary but impressive
beauty--are to my mind distinctly more desirable, and should be
possessed if possible; whilst among the dry-points (and a dry-point can
never be common) I would place highest, perhaps, the peaceful little
_Itchen Abbas Bridge_.
Intricate in arrangement of line, the work of Colonel Goff is in
actual workmanship less elaborate than that of Mr D. Y. Cameron,
who, though now and again, as in that masterpiece of Landscape
work--_Border Towers_--a pure sketcher in Etching, much oftener devotes
himself to work solid, substantial, deliberate rather in fulness of
realisation than in economy of means. He is a fine engraver on the
copper; addicted to massive arrangements of shadow and light--giving
to these, wherever there is any fair excuse for doing so, a little
of the Celtic weirdness Mr Strang bestows upon the figure. Glamour,
a touch of wizardry, is in the _Palace, Stirling Castle_; and it is
not in that only. A master, already, of the arrangement of light and
shade--a master, already, of _technique_--Mr Cameron (who has studied
Rembrandt so much, and, I should presume, Méryon) is finding his own
path. Indeed, the _Border Towers_ shows that all that he has learnt
from Rembrandt he has made his own by this time. How else could he have
accomplished what is certainly one of the most complete and significant
suggestions of Landscape wrought in our day! A _Rembrandt Farm_ is
earlier. It is extremely clever, but, as its very name might lead one
to conjecture, it is more distinctly imitative. Mr Cameron was not a
master at the moment when he wrought the _Flower Market_; because, if
he did not make in that the irremediable mistake of choosing the wrong
medium--printer’s ink, where one’s cry, first and last, is naturally
for “colour”--he made at all events the mistake that Mr Whistler is
incapable of making (as his etching of _The Garden_ shows), the mistake
of working with a heavy hand, when what was wanted was a treatment
of “touch and go,” as it were--the very lightest coquetry of line.
Occasionally Mr Cameron has failed; occasionally his industry has
resulted in the commonplace; but he is a young man still; the collector
must take account of him; his will hereafter be a very distinguished
name; and meanwhile--now even--the collector of good Modern Etching is
bound to put into his folios not a few of Mr Cameron’s sterling prints.
Mr Oliver Hall--a young man also, and one who paints in water-colour as
well as etches--can hardly have done as many plates as Mr Cameron, yet;
and in none of them, free sketches of landscape--breezy, immediate,
well-disposed--has Mr Hall been so unwise as to emulate the almost
Méryon-like elaboration not inappropriate at all to the architectural
subjects of Cameron. Oliver Hall’s is delightful and sufficiently
masculine work. After a short period of immaturity, during which the
influence of Seymour Haden was that which he most disclosed, his _Trees
on the Hillside_ and _A Windy Day_ testified to great flexibility,
and to some force. The lines of “foliage,” as people call it--it is
the tree, however, rather than the leaf--the lines of the tree-form,
however intricate, did not elude his point. Afterwards, _Angerton Moss:
Windy Day_, and the _Edge of the Forest_, with its gust-blown trees and
threatening sky, and later still, _King’s Lynn from a Distance_, came
to assure us that here was an artist getting at the heart of Nature--an
artist who could bring before us a poetic vision of natural effects.
Mr Alfred East, Mr Jacomb Hood, Mr Roussel, Mr Percy Thomas, Mr J. P.
Heseltine, Mr W. H. May, Sir Charles Robinson, Mr Axel Haig, Elizabeth
Armstrong (Mrs Stanhope Forbes), and Minna Bolingbroke (Mrs C. J.
Watson) ought not to go unmentioned even in a book which has a wider
field than “Etching in England”--in which I have named some of them
less baldly.
The inexpert purchaser may like to know what is the sort of price asked
generally by its producer, or by the dealer, or the Painter-Etchers’
Society--to which the print may be intrusted--for a new etching. I
am here on ticklish ground; but I must make bold to answer, speaking
broadly, “Far too much.” Later on--before I have quite done with the
subject of the Lithograph--I shall return to the charge, on this matter
of solid cash. But each class of work stands, in the matter of price,
on its own peculiar footing; and here we talk, not of lithographs, but
of etchings and dry-points. The wholly exceptional genius, approved by
Time, and happily yet with us to benefit by the result of his fame,
may be pardoned for asking twelve guineas for one of his most recent
etchings. If he gets it, his rewards are delightfully contrasted with
those of Méryon--who was grateful when an old gentleman in the French
War Office gave him a franc and a half for an impression of the _Abside
de Nôtre-Dame_, which, because of its beauty and of its peculiar and
rare “state,” is worth to-day about a hundred and fifty pounds. But
we are not all men of exceptional genius; and, in the case of etched
work, which, without deterioration, may be issued to the number of
fifty or a hundred or a couple of hundred impressions, is it wise to
seek to anticipate what after all may prove not to be the verdict of
the world?--is it wise to limit the issue so very artificially by
the simple, I will not say the greedy process of asking two, three,
and four guineas for an impression of a good but ordinary etching?
A good etching, produced by a contemporary artist, could, quite to
the benefit of the etcher, be sold for a guinea. If the etcher has
not time to print it himself, or is not, at heart, artist enough
to wish to do so, let him send it to a good printer, with definite
instructions how to print it, and, on the average, each impression
may cost him half-a-crown. Then, of course, if he sells it through a
dealer, there will be something for the dealer--perhaps five shillings.
Say about fourteen shillings will be left for the artist. The fee is
insignificant--but, if you once interest the public, it may be almost
indefinitely multiplied. The price that is prohibitive to the ordinary
man of taste--the price that prevents him, not, of course, from
buying an etching here and there, but from forming any considerable
collection of etchings--that, if the artist only knew it, is the
greatest possible disadvantage to himself. He is concerned for his
dignity; his _amour-propre_, he sometimes says. But an etching--like
a book--is a printed thing; and the author of a book conceives, and
rightly, that his _amour-propre_ is wounded rather by absence or
narrow restriction of sale than by the moderation--the lowness, if you
will--of the price at which his book is issued.
Now a dry-point and an ordinary etching stand on different ground in
this respect. Both are printed things, indeed; but whilst the etching
will, according to its degree of force or delicacy, yield, without
“steeling,” from fifty to four hundred impressions--and generally quite
as near the four hundred as the fifty--a dry-point will inevitably
deteriorate after a dozen or twenty impressions, and may even
deteriorate after three or four. Each impression, then, of a dry-point
that is desirable at all, has its own peculiar value--its rarity to
begin with (unless you work it to death), and its unlikeness to its
neighbour. I blame no good artist, when he has made a good dry-point,
for asking two or three or four, or six or seven, guineas for it. I do
not as work of art--as providing me with joy--esteem it any more highly
than the etching. The etching, which I ought to acquire at a guinea,
may give me the gratification of a Wordsworthian poem. It may be--happy
chance for every one concerned if it is!--as directly inspired as the
_Ancient Mariner_: it may be a thing conceived and wrought in one of
those “states of the atmosphere” which (it is Coleridge himself who
says it) are “addressed to the soul.” Do I underrate it? Not a jot. But
I discern that, like the _Ancient Mariner_, it can be multiplied in
large numbers. The dry-point cannot.
Even at the risk of being charged with a certain repetition of my
argument, I shall return--as the reader has been warned already--it
will be somewhere in the chapter on modern Lithography--to this
question of the too extravagant price, and therefore of the necessarily
too restricted sale, of the contemporary print.
CHAPTER VII
Recent Interest in Martin Schöngauer--A graceful Primitive--Dürer
the exponent of the fuller Renaissance--Some principal Dürers--Their
prices at the Fisher Sale--German “Little Masters”--The Ornament
of Aldegrever--The range of the Behams--Altdorfer--Other Little
Masters--And Lucas Van Leyden.
Among the least reprehensible, and also among the least widely
diffused, of the recent fads of the collector, there is to be reckoned
a certain increase in the consideration accorded to the work of Martin
Schöngauer. If Martin Schöngauer’s ingenious and engaging plates--naïve
in conception, and, in execution, dainty--came ever to be actually
preferred to the innumerable pieces which attest the potency and the
variety of Dürer, that preference might possibly be explained, but
could never be justified. As it is, however, no reasonable admirer
of “the great Albert” can begrudge to one who was after all to some
extent his predecessor, and not in all things his inferior, the
honourable place which, after many generations of comparative neglect,
that predecessor has lately taken, and now seems likely to hold.
Schöngauer, even more it may be than Albert Dürer himself, was, as it
were, a path-breaker. The interest of the Primitive belongs to him;
and the interest of the simple. Some of his religious conceptions
were expressed in prettier form--and form on that account more readily
welcomed--than any that was taken on by the conceptions of the giant
mind that even now draws us upon our pilgrimage to Nuremberg, as Goethe
draws us to Weimar. The Virgin of Schöngauer is more acceptable to
the senses than the average Virgin of Dürer, whose children, on the
other hand (see especially the delightful little print, _The Three
Genii_, Bartsch 66), have the larger lines and lustier life of the full
Renaissance. A touch of what appeals to us as a younger naïveté, and a
touch of what appeals to us as elegance, are especially discernible in
the earlier artist’s work; and that work too, or much of it, has often
the additional attractiveness of exceptional scarcity. Likewise, it is
to most of us less familiar. But when all these elements of attraction
have been allowed for, the genius of Albert Dürer--so much deeper
and so much broader, at once more philosophical and more dramatic,
and expressed by a craftsmanship so much more changeful and more
masterly--the genius of Albert Dürer dominates. If our allegiance has
wavered, if we have been led astray for a period, by Martin Schöngauer
himself, it may be, or by somebody less worthily illustrious, we shall
return, wearily wise, to the author of the _Melancholia_ and the
_Nativity_, of the _Knight of Death_ and of _The Virgin by the City
Wall_. To study long and closely the work of the original engravers, is
to come, sooner or later, quite certainly to the conclusion that there
are two artists standing above all the rest, and that it was theirs,
pre-eminently, to express, in the greatest manner, the greatest mind.
One of these two artists, of course, is Rembrandt. And the other is
Dürer.
[Illustration:
DÜRER: _The Little White Horse_.
]
Adam Bartsch, working at Vienna, in the beginning of this century,
upon those monumental books of reference which, as authorities upon
their wide subject, are even now only partially displaced, catalogued
about a hundred and eight metal plates as Albert Dürer’s contribution
to the sum of original engraving. The Rev. C. H. Middleton-Wake,
working in 1893--and profiting by the investigations, all of them more
or less recent, of Passavant and G. W. Reid, of Thausing, Dürer’s
biographer, and Mr Koehler, the Keeper of the Prints at Boston,
Massachusetts--has catalogued one hundred and three. The number--not
so considerable as Schöngauer’s, by about a couple of score--does
not, as first thought, seem enormous for one the greater portion of
whose life was given to original engraving; but then, it must be
remembered, Dürer’s life, though not exactly a short, was scarcely a
long one. And, again, whatever may have been the processes he employed,
and even if, as Mr Middleton-Wake supposes, etched work, as well as
burin-work, helped him greatly along his way, the elaboration of his
labour was never lessened; the order of completeness he strove for and
attained had nothing in common with the completeness of the sketch.
His German pertinacity and dogged joy in work for mere work’s sake,
never permitted him to dismiss an endeavour until he had carried it
to actual realisation. Each piece of his is not so much a page as a
volume. The creations of his art have the lastingness and the finality
of a consummate Literature, and of those three material things with
which such literature has been compared--
“_marbre, onyx, émail,_”--
as the phrase goes, of one who wrought on phrases as Cellini on the
golden vase, and Dürer on the little sheet of burnished copper.
Of the hundred and three prints which, in the Fitz-William Museum, Mr
Middleton-Wake placed in what he believes to be their chronological
order--many, of course, their author himself dated, but many afford
room for the exercise of critical ingenuity and care--sixteen belong to
the series known as “The Passion upon Copper,” which is distinguished
by that title from the series of seven-and-thirty woodcuts known
generally as “The Little Passion.” The “Passion upon Copper,” executed
between the year 1507 and the year 1513, are pronounced “unequal in
their execution,” “not comparing favourably with Dürer’s finer prints,”
and “engraved for purposes of sale.” Now most of Dürer’s work was
“engraved for purposes of sale”--that is, it was meant to be sold--but
what the critic may be supposed to mean, in this case, is, that the
designs were due to no inspiration; the execution, to no keen desire.
Four much later pieces--including two _St Christophers_--are spoken
of with similar disparagement. I am unable to perceive the justice
of the reproach when it is applied to the _Virgin with the Child in
Swaddling Clothes_--a print of which it is remarked that it, like
certain others, is “without any particular charm or dignity; being
taken quite casually from burgher-life, and only remarkable for the
soft tone of the engraving.” No doubt the _Virgin with the Child
in Swaddling Clothes_ is inspired by the human life--and that was
“burgher-life” necessarily--which Dürer beheld; and it is none the
worse for that. It is not one of the very finest of the Virgins, but
it is simple, natural, healthy, and it is characteristic, as I seem
to see, not only in its _technique_, but in its conception. What more
fascinating than the little bit of background, lavished there, so small
and yet so telling?--a little stretch of shore, with a town placed
on it, and great calm water: a reminiscence, it may be, of Italy--a
_décor_ from Venice--a bit of distance too recalling the distance in
the _Melancholia_ itself. But we must pass on, to consider briefly
two or three points in Dürer’s work: points which we shall the better
illustrate by reference to the greater masterpieces.
The year 1497 was reached before the master of Nuremberg affixed a
date to any one of his plates. That is the not quite satisfactory
composition, curiously ugly in the particular realism it affects--and
yet, in a measure, interesting--_A Group of Four Naked Women_. Thausing
doubts, or does more than doubt, the originality of the design. Mr
Middleton-Wake holds that in execution, at least, it shows distinct
advance upon Dürer’s earlier work, and amongst earlier work he
includes no less than three-and-twenty of the undated plates: putting
the _Ravisher_ first, with 1494 as its probable year, and putting last
before the _Group of Naked Women_, a piece which he maintains to be the
finest of the earlier prints, the _Virgin and Child with the Monkey_.
Looking along the whole line of Dürer prints, in what he deems to be
their proper sequence, Mr Middleton-Wake observes, as all observe
indeed, wonderful variations--differences in execution so marked that
at first one might hesitate to assign to the same master, pieces
wrought so differently. He argues fully how their dissimilarity is due
“either to a marked progression in their handling” or to an alteration
in their actual method. For quick perception of such partly voluntary
change, the student is referred to an examination of the _Coat of
Arms with a Skull_, the _Coat of Arms with the Cock_, the _Adam
and Eve_, the _St Jerome_, and the _Melancholia_. The year 1503 was
probably the date of the two Coats of Arms; the great print of the
_Adam and Eve_ carries its date of “1504”; the _St Jerome_ is of 1512;
the _Melancholia_ of 1514. The practical point established for the
collector by such differences as are here visible, and which a study of
these particular examples by no means exhausts, is that he must most
carefully avoid the not unnatural error of judging an impression of a
Dürer print by its attainment or its non-attainment of the standard
established by some other Dürer print he knows familiarly already.
The aims technically were so very different, he must know each print
to say with any certainty--save in a few most obvious cases--whether
a given impression, that seems good, is, or is not, desirable. The
“silver-grey tone,” for example, so charming in one print, may be
unattainable in, or unsuitable to, another.
Upon the question of the meaning of certain prints of Dürer, any amount
of ingenious, interesting conjecture has been expended in the Past. One
of Mr Stopford Brooke’s sermons--I heard it preached, now many years
ago, in York Street--is a delightful essay on the _Melancholia_. For
suggestions as to the allegorical meaning of _The Knight of Death_,
it may be enough to refer the reader to Thausing (vol. ii. page 225)
and to Mrs Heaton’s Life of Dürer (page 168). The _Jealousy_, Dürer
speaks of, in his Netherlands Diary, as a “Hercules.” _The Knight and
the Lady_, Thausing says, is one of those Dance of Death pictures so
common in the Middle Age. Of the _Great Fortune_, Thausing holds that
its enigmatical design, with the landscape below, has direct reference
to the Swiss War of 1499, and this we may agree with; but, explaining,
it may be, too far, he writes in detail, “The winged Goddess of Justice
and Retribution stands, smiling, on a globe; carrying in one hand a
bridle and a curb for the too presumptuous fortunate ones; in the
other, a goblet for unappreciated worth.” Mr Middleton-Wake, wisely
less philosophical, urges a simpler meaning. The city of Nuremberg,
he reminds us, had, in compliance with Maximilian’s demand, furnished
four hundred foot soldiers and sixty horse, for the campaign in
Switzerland, and at the head of these troops was Pirkheimer, to whom on
his return his fellow-citizens offered a golden cup. “We assume,” says
Mr Middleton-Wake, “that it is this cup which Dürer places in the hand
of the Goddess.” With the Swiss War are also associated the _Coat of
Arms with the Cock_ and the even rarer (certainly not finer) _Coat of
Arms with a Skull_. The one may symbolise the anticipated success, the
other the failure, of the campaign into Switzerland.
[Illustration:
DÜRER: _Coat of Arms with the Cock_.
]
A reference to the Richard Fisher Sale Catalogue (at Sotheby’s,
May 1892) affords as ready and as correct a means as we are likely
to obtain of estimating the present value of fine Dürer prints. Mr
Fisher’s collection was unequal; but it was celebrated, and it was,
on the whole, admirable. It was, moreover, practically complete, and
in this way alone it represented an extraordinary achievement in
Collecting. Its greatest feature was Mr Fisher’s possession of the
_Adam and Eve_ in a condition of exceptional brilliancy, and with a
long pedigree, from the John Barnard, Maberly, and Hawkins collections.
This was the first Albert Dürer that passed under the hammer on the
occasion, and so opened the sale of the Dürers with a thunderclap,
as it were--Herr Meder paying £410 to bear it off in triumph. Then
came the _Nativity_, the charming dainty little print, which Dürer
himself speaks of as the “Christmas Day.” Mr Gutekunst gave £49 for
it. A fine impression of the _Virgin with Long Hair_ fetched £51; an
indifferent one of the more beautiful _Virgin seated by a Wall_,
£10, 15s. The _St Hubert_ sold for £48--a finer impression of the same
subject selling, in the Holford Sale, just a year later, for £150--the
_Melancholia_, £39; but, it must be remembered, the _Melancholia_,
though always one of the most sought for, is not by any means one of
the rarest Dürers. The _Knight of Death_ passed, for £100, into the
hands of Mr Gutekunst. An early impression of the _Coat of Arms with
the Cock_ was bought by Mr Kennedy for £20; the _Coat of Arms with a
Skull_ going to Messrs Colnaghi for £42. In the Holford Sale a yet
finer impression of this last subject was bought by Herr Meder for £75.
Before I leave, for a while at least, the prosaic questions of the
Sale-Room, and pass on to direct attention to the artistic virtues of
the “Little Masters,” let the “beginning collector,” as the quaint
phrase runs, be warned in regard to copies. It has not been left for
an age that imitates everything--that copies our charming Battersea
Enamel, _tant bien que mal_, and the “scale-blue” of old Worcester,
and the lustre of Oriental--it has not been left for such an age to
be the first to copy Dürer. In fact, no one nowadays bestows the
labour required in copying Dürer. He is copied nowadays only in the
craft of _photogravure_. But, of old time, Wierix, and less celebrated
men, copied him greatly. This is a matter of which the collector--at
first at least--has need to beware. It must be stamped upon his mind
that Dürer’s work at a certain period did much engage the copyist. It
engaged the copyist only less perhaps than did the work of Rembrandt
himself, through successive generations.
And now we speak, though briefly, of the seven German “Little Masters,”
of whom the best are never “little” in style, but, rather, great and
pregnant, richly charged with quality and meaning: “little” only in the
mere scale of their labour. The print-buyer who is in that rudimentary
condition that he only considers the walls of his sitting-rooms, and
buys almost exclusively for their effective decoration, does not look
at the Little Masters. Upon a distant wall, their works make little
spots. But in a corner, near the fire--on the right-hand side of that
arm-chair in which you seek to establish your most cossetted guest, the
person (of the opposite sex, generally) whom you are glad to behold--a
little frame containing half-a-dozen Behams, Aldegrevers, to be looked
at closely (pieces of Ornament perhaps; exercises in exquisite line),
adds charm to an interior which, under circumstances of Romance,
may need indeed no added charm at all from the mere possessions of
the collector. Still--there are moods. And if the German Little
Masters come in pleasantly enough, on an odd foot or so of wall, now
and then, how justified is their presence in the portfolio--in the
solander-box--when the collector is really a serious one, and when he
no longer bestows upon living, breathing Humanity all the solicitude
that was meant for his Behams!
To talk more gravely, the German Little Masters should indeed be
collected far more widely than they are, amongst us. Scarcely anything
in their appeal is particular and local. Their qualities--the qualities
of the best of them--are exquisite and sterling, and are for all Time.
The seven Little Masters, on whom the late Mr W. Bell Scott--one of the
first people here in England to collect them--wrote, in an inadequate
series, one of the few quite satisfactory books, are, Altdorfer,
Barthel Beham, Sebald Beham, Aldegrever, Pencz, Jacob Binck, and Hans
Brosamer. One or two of these may quickly be discerned to be inferior
to the others; one or two to be superior; but it would be priggish to
attempt to range them in definite order of merit. It may suffice to say
that to me at least Aldegrever and the Behams appeal most as men to be
collected. The Behams--Sebald especially--was a very fine Ornamentist.
Aldegrever, it may be, was an Ornamentist yet more faultless. Some
examples of his Ornament the collector should certainly possess. And
then he will come back very probably to the Behams, recognising in
these two brothers a larger range than Aldegrever had, and a spirit
more dramatic--an entrance more vivid and personal into human life,
a keen interest in human story. They were realists, not without a
touch of the ideal. And in design and execution, they were consummate
artists, and not only--which they were too, of course--infinitely
laborious and exquisite craftsmen.
Adam Bartsch has catalogued, in his industrious way, according to
the best lights of his period, the works of the Little Masters. His
volumes are the foundation of all subsequent study. To Altdorfer
he assigns ninety-six pieces (I speak of course here, and in every
case, of pieces engraved on metal); to Barthel Beham, sixty-four; to
Sebald Beham--whose life, though not a long, was yet a longer one than
Barthel’s--two hundred and fifty-nine; to Jacob Binck, ninety-seven;
to George Pencz, a hundred and twenty-six; to Heinrich Aldegrever, no
less than two hundred and eighty-nine; to Brosamer, four-and-twenty.
But of late years, as was to be expected, certain of these masters have
been the subjects of particular study. Thus we have, in England, the
dainty little catalogue of Sebald Beham, by the Rev. W. J. Loftie--a
book delightfully printed in a very limited edition. That book brings
up the number of Sebald Beham’s assured plates to two hundred and
seventy-four. Dr Rosenberg has also, in much detail, written in German
upon the plates of this fascinating artist; and still more lately
M. Edouard Aumüller has published, at Munich, in the French tongue,
elaborate, though indeed scarcely final, studies of the Behams and of
Jacob Binck.
Of the German Little Masters, Albrecht Altdorfer is the earliest. He
was only nine years Dürer’s junior; nearly twenty years separate him
from others of the group. Born it really even at the present moment
seems difficult to say where, Altdorfer, Dr Rosenberg considers, was
actually a pupil of Dürer’s--an apprentice, an inmate of his house,
probably, soon after Dürer as a quite young man, already prosperous
and busy, took up his abode, with his bride, Agnes Frey, at the
large house by the Thiergarten Gate. But whatever was the place of
Altdorfer’s birth and whatever the place of his pupilage--and neither
matter, as it seems, is settled conclusively--Ratisbon is the city
in which his life was chiefly spent. There he was architect as well
as painter and engraver; an official post was given him; and during
the last decade of his career his architectural work for Ratisbon
caused, it is to be presumed, the complete cessation of his work of
an engraver. Merits Altdorfer of course has--variety and ingenuity
amongst them--or his fame would hardly have survived; but Mr W.
B. Scott, whose criticism of him was that of an artist naturally
rather in sympathy with the methods of his endeavour, never rises to
enthusiasm in his account of him. His drawing is not found worthy of
any warm commendation, nor his craftsmanship with the copper. The
great lessons he might have learnt from Dürer, he does not seem fully
to have appropriated. His design is deemed more fantastic. But his
range was not narrow, and apart from his practice in what is strictly
line-engraving, he executed etchings of Landscape--caring more than
Dürer did, perhaps, for Landscape for its own sake: studying it indeed
less lovingly in detail, but with a certain then unusual reliance on
the interest of its general effect. Some measure of romantic character
belongs to his Landscape: “partly intensified,” says Mr Scott, “and
partly destroyed, by the eccentric taste that appears in nearly
everything from his hand.” The pine had fascination for him. “And he
loaded its boughs with fronds, like the feathers of birds, and added
long hues, vagaries of lines, that have little or no foundation in
Nature.”
Of both the Behams, Mr Loftie assures us that they were pupils of
Dürer. Greater even than the artist I have just been writing about,
they show, it seems to me, at once an influence more direct from
Dürer, and an individuality more potent, of their own. Barthel, the
younger of the two brothers--one whose designs Sebald, with all his
gifts, was not too proud to now and then copy--was born at Nuremberg in
1502. “Le dessin de ses estampes,” writes M. Aumüller, “est savant et
gracieux, et son burin est d’une élégance brillante et moelleuse.” The
words--though it is impossible, in a line or two, to generalise a great
personality--are not badly chosen. Exiled from Nuremberg, whilst still
young, Barthel Beham laboured at Frankfort, and, later, in Italy--a
circumstance which accounts for something in the character of his
work. For, in Barthel, the Italian influence is unmistakable; he is,
as Mr Scott says truly, “emancipated from the wilful despising of the
graces.” In Italy, in 1540, Barthel died.
Sebald Beham, the more prolific brother, whose years, ere they were
ended, numbered half a century, was born in 1500. He remained at
home--not indeed at Nuremberg, but long at Frankfort--yet, remaining
at home, his work was somehow more varied. A classical subject one
day, and peasant life the next, an ornament now, and now a design
symbolical like his _Melancholia_--these interested him in turn;
and, as for his technical achievement, his _Coat of Arms with the
Cock_ (for he, like Dürer, had that, as well as a _Melancholia_)
would suffice to show, had he nothing else to show, his unsurpassable
fineness of detail. “Cette superbe gravure,” M. Aumüller says--and most
justifiably, for technical excellence cannot go any further, nor is
there wanting majesty of Style. At the Loftie Sale some happy person
acquired for £4 this lovely little masterpiece: at the Durazzo Sale,
£5 was the price of it. Analysis of Sebald Beham’s prints shows that
of his noble work on metal seventy-five subjects are suggested by
sacred and nineteen by “profane” history. Mythology claims thirty-eight
designs, and Allegory thirty-four. Genre subjects, treated with the
various qualities of observation, humour, warmth, absorb some seventy
plates. Of vignettes and ornaments, there are about two score.
In 1881--several years after he had finished his Catalogue--the Rev. W.
J. Loftie sold in Germany his remarkable collection of Sebald Beham’s
works. Next perhaps, in importance, in recent times, to Mr Loftie’s
collection, was that of Richard Fisher--dispersed at a sale I have
already spoken off. From the Fisher Sale, which was so comprehensive in
its character, we will take note of the prices here in England of at
least a few fine things--premising that whatever be the prices fetched
by an exceptional rarity, a very few pounds (often only three or four),
spent carefully, will buy, at a good dealer’s, a fine Beham. In the
Fisher Sale then, the _Madonna and Child with the Parrot_ fetched £5,
10s.; the _Madonna with the Sleeping Child_, £17, 10s. (Meder); the
_Venus and Cupid_, £3, 10s. (Deprez); the magnificently drawn _Leda_,
only eleven shillings--but then it must have been a bad impression, for
a fine one at the Loftie Sale fetched £4, 10s., and at the Kalle Sale,
£6--_Death Surprising a Woman in her Sleep_, £3, 12s. (Meder); the
_Buffoon, and the Two Couples_, £5; the _Two Buffoons_, First State,
£7, 12s. (Deprez); the _Ornament with a Cuirass and the two Cupids_,
£3, 10s. At the same sale, Aldegrever’s _Virgin Sitting_ had gone for
£7, 10s., and Barthel Beham’s _Lucretia_ for £4, his _Fight for the
Standard_ for £4, his _Vignette with Four Cupids_ for £4, 4s. But it
ought perhaps to be remembered that in several cases the representation
of the Little Masters in Mr Fisher’s Sale was not good enough to
bring the prices which, under favourable circumstances, are wont to
be realised by the finest impressions. In regard to Barthel Beham, I
will add that the highest price accustomed to be fetched by any print
of his, is fetched by his rare, strong portrait of Charles the Fifth.
Having said what I have of it, I cannot say that it is undesirable,
but it is quite undesirable if it stands alone--for it is exceptional
rather than characteristic: in mere size, for one thing. A First State
of it has fetched as much as sixty pounds: a Second State averages
about twelve.
[Illustration:
SEBALD BEHAM: _Adam and Eve_.
]
To Aldegrever--perhaps the very greatest of the Ornamentists--the
most general of recent students of the School, Dr Rosenberg, does the
least justice. Mr Scott, upon the other hand, asserts his position
with strength; nor will it be unprofitable for amateur or collector
if I quote, at some length, what he says. The Behams, who were great,
and Altdorfer, who was scarcely great, we have--for our present
purposes--done with already. But about the others Mr Scott may well
be heard. “George Pencz,” he reminds us, “left the Fatherland and
subjected himself to Italian influence, both in manipulation and
in invention, while Brosamer and Jacob Binck are of comparatively
little consequence.” I hope--may I say in a parenthesis?--that Mr
Scott attached great weight to his “comparatively,” for otherwise
he did the charming work of Jacob Binck a rude injustice. But to
proceed--“Aldegrever is the most worthy successor to Dürer, and is
the greatest master of invention, with the truest German traditions
of sentiment and romance, as well as the most prolific ornamentist.
He remains all his life skilfully advancing in the command of his
graver, to which he remains true. Like Lucas of Leyden, he lives a
secluded life, and his miniature prints continue to issue from his
hands with more and more richness and independence of poetic thought,
until we lose sight of him, dying where he had lived, in the small
town of Soest, without any writer to record the particulars of his
modest life.” It may be added that Rosenberg considers not only that
Aldegrever was never under Dürer’s direct tuition--though carrying out
the Dürer traditions--but also that he was never in Nuremberg at all.
And, by this means isolating Aldegrever from the coterie that grew
up in the Franconian town, Rosenberg derives him rather from Lucas
van Leyden. To which Mr Scott answers, that if Aldegrever never left
his native Westphalia, never even visited Nuremberg and Augsburg, “he
apprehended the movement wonderfully from a distance, and appropriated
as much as he chose--happily for his works--as much as properly
amalgamated with his Northern nature.”
A great name has passed our lips in discussing this thing briefly. I
wish that there were space here--that it had been a part of my scheme
to treat, not so utterly inadequately, Lucas van Leyden. But in a book
of this sort--which must seize, so to say, upon finger-posts, where it
can--half of the business is renunciation, and I renounce, unwillingly,
the fair discussion of the great early Flemish master. Dürer himself
approved of him: gladly exchanged original prints with Master Lucas of
Leyden, who showed him courtesy on a journey. Numerically the work of
Lucas is not inferior--rather the other way--to Albert Dürer’s. His
range of subject was hardly less extensive, though his range of mind
was less vast. In a dramatic theme, Lucas of Leyden could hold his own
with any one. He had less of unction and of sentiment--less depth, in
fine, very likely. But the great prints of the Renaissance in the North
are not properly represented in a collector’s portfolios, if the work
of this master of various and prolific industry is altogether omitted.
His draughtsmanship, though it improved with Time, was never the
searching draughtsmanship of Dürer, indeed, or of one or two of Dürer’s
followers. Yet it was expressive and spirited. And spirit, vivacity,
a certain grace even, are well discovered in the rare work of Lucas
in a particular field in which the Behams and Aldegrever triumphed
habitually and in which Albert was occasionally great--I mean the
field of Ornament. The rare _Panneau d’Ornements_ (Bartsch, 164--dated
1528), in scheme of light and shade, in scheme of action, in ingenious,
never-wearying symmetry of line, in telling execution, reaches a place
near the summit. The collector, when the chance offers, does well to
give the six or seven, eight or ten guineas perhaps, which, in some
fortunate hour, may be its ransom.
[Illustration:
LUCAS VAN LEYDEN: _Panel of Ornament_.
]
CHAPTER VIII
Earliest Italian Prints--They interest the Antiquary more than
the Collector--Nielli--Baccio Baldini--Mantegna and his restless
energy--The calm of Zoan Andrea--Campagnola--The Master of
the Caduceus--His “Pagan sentiment”--Marc Antonio--His first
practice--His art ripest when his prints interpret Raphael--Important
Sales of the Italian Prints.
As one of the chief reasons for the composition of the present volume
is that the collector, whether a beginner or more advanced, may have
ready access to a little book which supplements to some extent, but
does not attempt to supersede, any one amongst the labours of earlier
students--and which treats often with especial prominence themes which
it seems lay scarcely at all within the range of their inquiries--it
will hardly be expected that much shall be said here on the various
departments of Italian Engraving. Italian Engraving, from the _nielli_
of Florentine goldsmiths to the larger method and selected line of Marc
Antonio, has for generations occupied the leisure and been the subject
of the investigations of many studious men. Volumes have been written
about it: treatises, articles, catalogues, correspondence innumerable.
About Italian Engraving--in any one of its branches--it would be as
easy, or as difficult, to say something new, and at the same time to
the point, as it would be to write with freshness about the decorations
of the Sistine Chapel or such an accepted masterpiece as the _Madonna
di San Sisto_. The few words I shall write upon the subject will be
of a wholly rudimentary character. If the reader wishes to go into
this subject elaborately, I refer him at once to experts. No one is
less an expert upon it than I am; but partly that all sense of balance
shall not be wanting to this book, and partly that the beginner, even
with this book alone, shall not grope wholly in the dark, the place of
the Italians must be briefly recognised. In recognising it, I do not
claim to do more, of my own proper knowledge, than bring to bear upon
the question the results of some more general studies, and perhaps
the sidelights thrown from more particular investigations into other
branches of the engraver’s achievement.
The _nielli_--those things wrought so minutely by the early goldsmiths,
Maso da Finiguerra and the rest--which are the very foundations
of Engraving, are, to begin with, _introuvable_. To the practical
collector then, it cannot be pretended that they appeal, though
they may engage the attention of the student. Then again, in fine
condition, not spoilt by the re-touching--nay, re-working--of the
plate, or the wear of the particular impression through its long life
of more than three hundred years, the somewhat maturer work of the
great Primitives, or of those who, like Mantegna himself, stands, a
link upon a borderland, is scarcely within the region of practical
commerce. The finer work of the line-engravers upon copper, of the
earlier Renaissance in Italy, does not, save on the rarest occasions,
appear in Sotheby’s auction-room. Perhaps its very scarcity, its
gradual absorption during more than one generation, into such great
private collections as are not likely to be dispersed, and, yet more,
into national, or university, or municipal collections, into which
everything entering takes at once, and with no period of novitiate,
the black veil--perhaps this very scarcity is accountable for the
lack of vivid interest in such work on the part of the collector of
modern mind. After all, even masterpieces have their day: much more
those things of which it must be said, that though endowed with a
great vigour of conception and executed often in trenchant, if not
persuasive, form, they do not in execution reach the standards set up
for us--and passing now almost into the position of “precedents”--by
the later _technique_.
If, of the work of the greatest master of the German Renaissance--of
the greatest, most original, most comprehensive mind in the whole of
German Art--it is possible to speak as that very fair and penetrating
critic, Mr P. G. Hamerton speaks, in his general essay on Engraving,
which appears in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” what is to be said
of the earlier Italians? Why, in the very passage in which Mr
Hamerton--far too intelligent, of course, to deny the greatness of his
qualities--devotes to Dürer, they, by something more than implication,
are to take their share of the dispraise. After telling us that
Martin Schöngauer’s art is a stride in advance of that of “The Master
of 1466,” Mr Hamerton adds, “Outline and shade, in Schöngauer, are
not nearly so much separated as in Baccio Baldini, and the shading,
generally in curved lines, is far more masterly than the straight
shading of Mantegna. Dürer continued Schöngauer’s curved shading with
increasing manual dexterity and skill; and as he found himself able to
perform feats with the burin which amused both himself and his buyers,
he overloaded his plates,”--“some” of his plates, would here have been
a reasonable qualification--“with details, each of which he finished
with as much care as if it were the most important thing in the
composition.” “The engravers of those days”--it is said further--“had
no conception of any necessity for subordinating one part of their
work to another. In Dürer, all objects are on the same plane.” Here Mr
Hamerton generalises far too much; but a strong, exaggerated statement
on the matter directs at all events our attention to it.
A like criticism could be passed on some, though, it must needs be
said, on less, of the Italian work of the earlier time. As a rule, when
the pure Primitives had passed, Italian work was less complicated. In
Mantegna himself, an immense energy in the figure--the completeness
with which the artist was charged with the need of expressing action,
and, it may be, the sentiment besides, in which the action had its
source--restrained him, stayed his hand, diverted his attention from
inappropriate or superfluous detail. And there were other Italian
artists of the burin in whom a rising feeling for large and decorative
grace had something of the same effect. And when we come to Marc
Antonio himself--trained though he was as a copyist of Northern
Schools--we see him able, when addressing himself to render the
compositions of Raphael, to subordinate everything to the attainment
of noble and elegant contour. The finest Marc Antonios--the _Saint
Cecilia_ and the _Lucretia_, to name but two of them (respectively £25
and £170 in a great Sale three years ago)--were wrought under Raphael’s
immediate influence; were sculpturesque and simple, never elaborately
pictorial--the result, no doubt, in part, of the circumstance that
Raphael as well as his engraver recognised that if designs (drawings,
not pictures) were the objects of copy, they could be interpreted
without going outside the proper art of the engraver. Whatever be the
fashions of the moment--and Marc Antonio’s prices, notwithstanding an
exceptional sum for an exceptional print, are, in the main, low--it
must be remembered that, even with his limitations, it was in him and
in his School that real pure line-engraving reached maturity. “He
retained,” says Mr Hamerton, summarising well enough the situation
in a sentence--“he retained much of the early Italian manner in his
backgrounds, where its simplicity gives a desirable sobriety; but his
figures are boldly modelled in curved lines, crossing each other in
the darker shades, but left single in the passages from dark to light,
and breaking away in fine dots as they approach the light itself, which
is of pure white paper.” As general description, this is excellent;
but if the new collector, taking to Marc Antonio, and buying him at a
time when, if I may adopt the phraseology of Capel Court, his stock
is quoted below par, wishes the opportunity of guidance in the study
of the development of his art, let him take up almost the latest book
that deals with the subject with minuteness and suggestiveness, if
it may not be invariably accurate or systematically arranged--I mean
the “Early History of Engraving in North Italy,” by the late Richard
Fisher, whose name as a collector and connoisseur I do not mention now
for the first time. Very interesting too is all that Mr Fisher has to
say about “the Master of the Caduceus,” Dürer’s friend and instructor,
Jacopo de’ Barbarj, who, known as Jacob Walsh, was supposed to be
German, although practising much at Venice. Passavant, who admits
some thirty pieces by him, considers him of German birth--a thing
allowed neither by Fisher nor Duplessis. “In single figures”--writes Mr
Fisher--“we have the best illustration of his talent--Judith with the
head of Holofernes and a young woman looking at herself in a mirror.”
At the British Museum a bust portrait of a young woman, catalogued by
Bartsch as amongst the anonymous Italians, has been given to Barbarj.
M. Galichon considers him eminently Pagan in sentiment. Nor is this
incompatible with Richard Fisher’s statement that in style his Holy
Families are completely Italian.
“La Gravure en Italie avant Marc Antoine”--a substantial work by
Delaborde--is a book that will not pass unnoticed by those whose
choice is for the earlier members of the Italian School. Campagnola,
it may be--whose chief piece, the _Assumption_, fetched more than £50
at the Durazzo Sale, and whose _Dance of Cupids_ reach £50 at the
Marochetti--he will find adequately treated there; and there too are
made in compact form certain instructive comparisons between Mantegna’s
work and that of Zoan Andrea and Antonio da Brescia whose labours
have their likeness to Mantegna’s own. In the rare, splendid _Dance
of Damsels_--“Dance of Four Women,” it ought rather to be, for in one
of its little-draped figures the gravity and fadedness of middle age
is well contrasted with the firm and fresh contour and gay alacrity
of youth--Zoan Andrea, whose prints are “généralement préférables”
to those of Da Brescia, shows finely not only Mantegna’s design, but
that something of his own which the great Mantuan’s design did not
give him. Many people have written well on Mantegna; he provokes
people, he stimulates them; and Mr Sidney Colvin, on the so-called
“Mantegna Playing-Cards,” has written learnedly as an investigator,
giving to designs misnamed and misunderstood their right significance.
But it is from Delaborde that I will allow myself to quote one brief
passage, which is full at least of personal conviction. What more
especially characterises--so he puts it--Andrea Mantegna’s engraved
work, is that it is “un mélange singulier d’ardeur et de patience,
de sentiment spontané et d’intentions systèmatiques: c’est enfin
dans l’exécution matérielle, le calme d’une volonté sûre d’elle-même
et l’inquiétude d’une main irrité par sa lutte avec le moyen.” Zoan
Andrea’s prints do not present these contrasts. “Tout y résulte d’un
travail poursuivi avec une parfaite égalité d’humeur; tout y respire la
même confiance tranquille dans l’autorité des enseignements reçus, le
même besoin de s’en tenir aux conquêtes déjà faites et aux traditions
déjà consacrées.” By Mantegna, about twenty-five accepted plates have
reached our time. By Zoan Andrea, a larger number have at least been
catalogued, and it is argued by some that the least authentic, as well
as the least creditable, are sometimes those which bear his signature.
[Illustration:
MANTEGNA’S _Dance of Damsels_.
]
Did I desire to manufacture “padding,” nothing would be easier than for
me to extend to a long chapter this summary assemblage of brief and
almost incidental notes on the Italian Line-Engraving of the remote
Past. But as the subject itself is one to which I have never yet been
fortunate enough to devote such a measure of study as might entitle
me to claim to be heard when speaking of it, and as the literature of
the subject exists in such abundance for the curious, I can afford
to be short. It may, however, be of some little interest to the
collector, if, before passing on to the discussion of another branch of
Print-Collecting in which I have ventured to take my own line, and am
willing on all occasions to back my own opinion, we look a little into
such records of the Sale-room as throw light upon the changing money
values of the engravings by Italian masters.
Mr Julian Marshall, now with us in his middle age, began collecting
when he was so young that his great sale occurred as long ago as 1864.
Values have changed since that day, very much. Of his four prints by
Mantegna, only one--_The Flagellation_--fetched more than £12. That
one reached £21--an early perfect state of _The Entombment_ going
for £11, 10s., and _Christ descending into Hell_ for £9. Domenico
Campagnola’s _Descent of the Holy Ghost_ then fetched £2, 2s. At the
Sykes Sale the same impression had fetched £3; at the Harford, £1,
15s. At the Marochetti Sale in 1868, not a single Mantegna, unless
_Christ risen from the Dead_, fetched a price of importance, and
this only ten guineas; but among the Marc Antonios the _Adam and Eve
in Paradise_ sold to Mr Colnaghi for £136, and _The Massacre of the
Innocents_ to Mr Holloway for £40. The _Two Fauns carrying a Child
in a Basket_--engraved by Marc Antonio, in his finest manner, after
an antique--realised £56, and the _Saint Cecilia_ £51. In the Bale
collection, in 1881, the _St Cecilia_ fetched £40, and Mariette’s
impression of the extraordinarily rare _Dance of Cupids_ £241.
That was borne off by M. Clément, who was then what M. Bouillon is
now--“marchand d’estampes de la Bibliothèque Nationale.” In the Holford
Sale, twelve years afterwards, Marc Antonio’s _Adam and Eve_ sold to
M. Danlos for £180; the _Massacre of the Innocents_ (from the Lely
Collection) to the same dealer for £190; and the _St Cecilia_ and
_Lucretia_ both to Mr Gutekunst--the first for £31; the second for £66.
The great price fetched by a Marc Antonio at this Sale was, however,
that paid for _The Plague_--a print which M. Danlos acquired for £370.
Taking note of such a sum, one could hardly believe perhaps that Marc
Antonios were not rising; but when a master falls, it is in the minor,
not the more eminent pieces--or, at least, in average, not exceptional
impressions--that we trace most certainly a decline of value. And,
taking the _St Cecilia_ alone--one of the most charming of the
subjects, as I have said before, though not one of the rarest--we find,
on the three occasions of its sale that I have cited, a high price,
one less high, and then again a lower. We find, indeed, comparing
the prices that were fetched by two impressions not presumably very
different--for both were in great Sales--that in 1893 a _St Cecilia_
brought little more than half of what it brought in 1868. The question
now for the collector’s judgment, as far as money is concerned, is,
Is it safe or unsafe for him to buy at just the present stage of a
“falling market”? Have Marc Antonios touched bottom? If he buys them
now, will he--in the phrase of sprightly ladies “fluttering” in “South
Africans”--will he be “getting in on the ground floor”?
[Illustration:
MARC ANTONIO: _St Cecilia_. After RAPHAEL
(From the Collection of A. B. BACH, Esq., Edinburgh.)
]
The collector has a right to ask himself these seemingly irreverent
questions. Nor will he love Art less, or have an eye less delicate,
because he is obliged to ask them. I do not know that the possessions
of a prudent collector should--taking things all round--bring him, if
he desires to sell, much less than he gave for them. It may be quite
enough that as long as he keeps and enjoys them, he shall lose the
interest of his money. If, in the interval, the value of his prints
happens to increase, so much the better for him--obviously. But he
enjoys the things themselves, and can scarcely exact that increase.
CHAPTER IX
French Line-Engravers of the Eighteenth Century render well
its original Art--The Prints from Watteau, Lancret, and
Pater--Watteau’s Characteristics--Chardin’s Interiors and
Studies of the Bourgeoisie--Success of his Domestic Themes--His
Portraits and Still-Life are never rendered--The lasting
popularity of Greuze--Boucher Prints at a discount--Fragonard and
Baudouin--Lavreince and Moreau.
The Eighteenth Century in France witnessed the rise, the development,
and the decay or fall of a great School of Art of which the English
public remains, even to this day, all but completely ignorant. The
easy seductiveness of the maidens of Greuze, with gleaming eyes and
glistening shoulders, has indeed secured in England for a certain
side of that artist’s work a measure of notice in excess of its real
importance; and a succession of accidents and the good taste of two
or three connoisseurs out of a hundred--they were men of another
generation--have made this country the home and resting-place of
some of the best of the pictures and drawings of Watteau. But even
Watteau is not to be found within our National Gallery. There Greuze
and Lancret--Chardin having but lately joined them with but a single
pleasant but inadequate picture--there Greuze and Lancret, seen at
least in what is adequate and characteristic, share the task of
representing French Art of the period when it was most truly French.
They are unequal to the mission. And until some can join them who will
fulfil it better, the painted work of the French Eighteenth Century
will hardly receive its due.
Fortunately, however, French Eighteenth Century artists fared well
at the hands of the line-engravers. Even of a painter who possessed
more than many others the charm of colour, it could be said by one of
the keenest of his critics that the originality of his work passed
successfully from the picture to the print. That is what Denis Diderot
wrote of Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, and it is true of them all,
from Watteau downwards. Theirs was the century of Line-Engraving in
France, as it was that of Mezzotint in England. And the practitioners
of Line-Engraving and of Mezzotint were something beyond craftsmen. Not
only were they artists in their own departments--some of them painted,
some of them designed: they were in sympathy with Art and possessed
by its spirit. Hence the peculiar excellence of their work with burin
or scraper--the high success of labours which their intelligence and
flexibility forbade to be simply mechanical.
An Exhibition which at my suggestion the Fine Art Society was good
enough to venture on, eleven years ago--but which attracted so little
attention from the great public we wanted to engage, that it must
some day, I suppose, be repeated--aimed to show those engravings
in which, with fullest effect, the line-engravers of the Eighteenth
Century rendered the thought and the impression of painters or of
draughtsmen who were, in most cases, their contemporaries. Watteau was
the first of these painters. The prints after his pictures were chiefly
wrought in the years directly following his far too early death. His
friend, M. de Julienne, planned and saw closely to the execution
of that best monument to Watteau’s memory. Cochin and Aveline, Le
Bas and Audran, Surugue and Brion, Tardieu and Laurent Cars, worked
dexterously or nobly, as the case might be, in perpetuation of the
master’s dignity and grace. Lancret and Pater were often translated
by the same interpreters. Chardin’s work was popularised--as far as
France is concerned--a very few years after, and with substantially
the same effect. Later in the century, some changes which were not
all improvements, began to be discernible in the newer plates. The
manly method of which Laurent Cars was about the most conspicuous
master, yielded a little to the softer practice of the interpreters
of Lavreince or to the airy yet not inexact daintiness of the method
of the translators of Moreau. The later style of engraving was suited
to the later draughtsmanship and painting. Probably indeed it was
adopted with a certain consciousness of their needs. Anyhow, not
one of the conspicuous figures in the history of French Eighteenth
Century Design--except Latour, who practically has not been reproduced
at all--can be said to have suffered seriously at the hands of his
translators. What French pictorial artists thought and saw and tried to
tell, upon their canvases and drawing papers, is, in the main, to be
read in the prints after their works. In these prints we may note alike
the triumphs and the failures of the real French School. There is no
denying its deficiencies. But it is as free from conventionality as the
great School of Holland--as independent of tradition--and it is as true
to the life that it essays to depict.
Along the whole of the Eighteenth Century--not in France only--Watteau,
who lived in it but twenty years, is the dominating master. To put the
matter roughly and briefly, he is the inventor of familiar grace in
Art. His treatment of the figure had its perceptible influence even
upon the beautiful design of Gainsborough; and the way in which he
saw his world of men and women dictated a method to his successors
in France, down to the revival of the more academic Classicism.
Artists--when they have been so comprehensive as to occupy themselves
with other people’s Art--have known generally that Watteau’s name has
got to stand among only ten or a dozen of the greatest, but the English
amateurs, or rather English picture and print buyers, are still but few
who are acquainted with his range and feel the sources of his power.
He has not been very popular, because, according to ordinary notions,
there is but scanty subject in his designs. The characters in his drama
are doing little--they are doing nothing, perhaps. But as the knowledge
of what real Art is, extends, and as our sensibility to beauty becomes
more refined, we shall ask less, in presence of our pictures, what
the people are doing, and shall ask more, what they are. Are they
engaging?--we shall want to know. Are they pleasant to live with?
Watteau placed a real humanity in an ideal landscape; but it was still
a chosen people that entered into his Promised Land, and the chosen
people were ladies of the Court and Theatre, and winning children, and
presentable men. His pictures--all the large, elaborate, finely wrought
prints after them--are the record of what was in some measure in these
people’s daily lives, yet it was even more in his own dream. “Toute
une création de poëme et de rêve est sortie de sa tête, emplissant son
œuvre de l’élégance d’une vie surnaturelle.” Through all his art he
takes his pleasant company to the selected places of the world, and
there is always halcyon weather.
Sometimes it is only the comedians of his day--whose mobile
faces Watteau had seen behind the footlights of the stage--who
make modest picnic, as in the _Champs Elysées_ (the engraving by
Tardieu)--find shade as in the _Bosquet de Bacchus_ (the engraving
by Cochin), or enjoy at leisure the terraced gardens, the vista,
the great trees of the _Perspective_ (the engraving by Crepy). And
sometimes--inhabitants no more of a real world--the persons of his
drama prepare, with free bearing, to set out upon long journeys. It
is now a pilgrimage to Cythera (_L’Embarquement pour Cythère_, or the
_Insula Perjucunda_)--suddenly they have been transported indeed to
the “enchanted isle” (Le Bas’s drawing of the distant mountains in
_L’Ile Enchantée_, is, I may say in an underbreath, a little indefinite
and puzzling). In any case the land that Watteau’s art has made more
beautiful than ordinary Nature, is peopled by a Humanity keenly and
finely observed, and portrayed with an unlimited control of vivacious
gesture and of subtle expression.
The unremitting study that made not only possible but sure an unvarying
success, in themes so manifestly limited, is evidenced best in such
collections of Watteau’s drawings as that acquired gradually by the
British Museum, and that yet finer one inherited by the late Miss
James, and now, alas! dispersed. There the complete command of line
and character is best of all made clear, and the solid groundwork for
success in Watteau’s pictures is revealed. Elsewhere--in the “Masters
of Genre Painting”--I have found space to explain more fully than
can be done in these pages, that however manifestly limited were
his habitual themes, his range was really great enough, since--not
to speak of the “Elysian Fields”--it covered the landscape and the
life of the France he knew. He has drawn beggars as naturally as did
Murillo; negroes as fearlessly as Rubens; people of the _bourgeoisie_
as faithfully almost as Chardin. And, far from the cut chestnut-trees
on whose trimmed straightness there falls in an unbroken mass the
level light of his gardens, Watteau draws at need the open and common
country, peasants and the soldiery, the baggage-train passing along
the endless roads from some citadel that Vauban planned. What Watteau
saw was the sufficient and the great foundation of all that he
imagined, and his art’s abandonment of the everyday world was to exalt
and to refine, rather than to forget it.
The line-engravings after Watteau--largeish, decorative, vigorous while
delicate--remain comparatively inexpensive. A rare impression “before
letters” attains, perhaps, now and then a fancy price; but Time has
very little affected the money value of the impressions with full
title, which, if reasonable care is exercised, can be secured in fine
condition, of such a dealer as Colnaghi, here in England, and in Paris,
of Danlos, say, or of Bouillon--occupied though they all of them are,
habitually, with more costly things. Often two or three sovereigns
buy you an excellent Watteau, clean and bright, and not bereft of
margin. To have to give as much as £5 for one, would seem almost a
hardship. And the work of Lancret and Pater--ingenious, interesting
practitioners in Watteau’s School--may be annexed at an expense even
less considerable.
Lancret was but a follower of Watteau: Pater was confessedly a pupil.
We shall have to come to Chardin to find in French Art the next man
thoroughly original. And Chardin was a great master. But Lancret
and Pater, though they are but secondary, are still interesting
figures. Neither of them, imitative though they were in varying
degrees--neither of them made any pretentions to their forerunner’s
inspired reverie. Lancret, as far as his invention was concerned,
was at one time satisfied with a symbolism that was obvious, not to
say bald. At another, as in the sedate _L’Hiver_ (engraved by Le
Bas), and the charming pictures of the games of children, _Le Jeu de
Cache-cache_ and _Le Jeu des Quatre Coins_ (both of them engraved by
De Larmessin), he was gracefully real, without effort at a more remote
imagination than the themes of reality in gentle or in middle-class
life exacted. At another time again, he lived so much in actual things,
that he could make the portraits, not of deep grave men indeed such
as the Bossuets and the Fénelons of the Seventeenth Century, but
of the lighter celebrities of his careless day. That day was Louis
the Fifteenth’s--“c’était le beau temps où Camargo trouvait ses
jupes trop longues pour danser la gargouillade.” And Lancret painted
Mdlle. Camargo (and Laurent Cars engraved her), springing to lively
airs. Voltaire had said to her, distinguishing all her alacrity and
fire from the more cautious graces of Sallé, the mistress of poetic
pantomime--Voltaire had said to her--
“Les nymphes sautent comme vous,
Et les Graces dansent comme elle.”
And the truth of the description is attested by Lancret’s picture, and
by the rosy and vivacious pastel in Latour’s Saint-Quentin Gallery.
Pater, a fellow-townsman of Antoine Watteau’s, was his pupil only
in Watteau’s later years. At that time Watteau suffered from an
irritability bred of an exhausting disease and of a yet more
exhausting genius. Master and pupil fell out. But, in his last days
of all, Watteau summoned to him the painter who had come from his own
town, and in a month, for which the younger artist was ever grateful,
Pater was taught more than he had ever been taught before. The pupil
had the instinct for prettiness and grace, and in cultivating it
Watteau was useful. But there was one thing the master could not teach
him--originality. And his record of the engaging trivialities of
daily life, where pleasure was most gracious and life most easy, was
undertaken by a mind wholly contented with its task. The mind aspired
no farther. The faces of Watteau, especially in his studies, are often
faces of thoughtful beauty; sometimes, of profound and saddening
experience. But, like a lesser Mozart--and the Mozart of a particular
mood--Pater proffers us his engaging _allegro_. The aim of all his
art--its light but successful endeavour--is summed up in the title of
one of the prettiest of his prints and pictures. It is, _Le désir de
plaire_.
Presently we leave that world of graceful fantasy, which Watteau
invented, and his pupils prolonged--a world in which dainty
refreshments are served to chosen companies under serene skies--and,
still in the full middle of the Eighteenth Century, we are face to face
with the one great artist of that age whom Watteau never affected.
Chardin was the painter of the _bourgeoisie_. With a persistence just
as marked as that of the most homely Dutchmen, but with a refinement
of feeling to which they were generally strangers and which gave
distinction to his treatment of his theme, he devoted himself to the
chronicle of prosaic virtues. In his Art, no trace of the selected
garden, of the elegant gallantries, of the excitement of Love, in the
gay or luscious weather. The honest townspeople know hardly a break
in their measured sobriety. They are mothers of families; the cares
of the _ménage_ press on them; house-work has to be got through;
children taught, admonished, corrected. Never before or since have
these scenes of the kitchen, the schoolroom, or the middle-class
parlour, been painted with such dignity, such truth, such intimacy,
and such permissible and fortunate reserve. We see them to perfection
in Chardin’s prints--in the prints, I mean, that were made after him,
for he himself engraved never. There are two other sides of his Art
which the contemporary line-engravings do not show. One of them is
his mastery of still-life--his great and exceptional nobility in the
treatment of it. There is just a hint of that, it is true, in the
delicate engraving of _L’Œconome_, and the broader, richer engraving of
_La Pourvoyeuse_; but for any real indication of it, and even that is
but a partial one, we must come to Jules de Goncourt’s etching of the
_Gobelet d’Argent_, which suggests the luminousness, the characteristic
_reflets_, and the _touche grasse_ of the master. The other side
of Chardin’s talent which the engravings do not represent, is his
later skill in professed portraiture, and especially in portraiture
in pastel, to which the fashionable but well-merited triumphs of
Latour directed him in his old age. But the deliberate limitations
of the Eighteenth Century prints do not in any way invalidate the
excellence, the completeness even, of their performance. The collector
should address himself to their study. A little diligence, a little
patience, and a hundred pounds, and it would not be impossible to form
a collection in which nothing should be wanting. I remember that I gave
M. Lacroix or M. Rapilly, in Paris, not more than seventy-five francs
an impression for pieces in extraordinarily fine condition, and with
margins almost intact.
[Illustration:
CHARDIN: _Le Jeu de l’Oye_.
]
Chardin went on working till he was eighty years old. He enjoyed
popularity, and he outlived it. From 1738 to 1757, there were issued,
in close succession, the engravings, about fifty in number, which,
with all their differences, and with all sorts of interesting notes
about them, M. Emanuel Bocher has conscientiously and lovingly
catalogued. They were published at a couple of francs or so apiece;
their appearance was wont to be welcomed in little notices in the
_Mercure de France_, just as the _Standard_ or the _Times_ to-day might
applaud a new Cameron or a new Frank Short; and they hung everywhere on
_bourgeois_ walls. The canvases which they translated were owned, some
by a King of France, and some by a foreign Sovereign. Little in the
work of the whole century had greater right to popularity than the _Jeu
de l’Oye_, with its exquisite and homely grace--Surugue has perfectly
engraved it--_L’Etude du Dessein_, austere and masterly (Le Bas has
rendered well the figure’s attitude of absorption), _Le Bénédicité_,
with the unaffected piety, the simple contentment of the narrow home,
and _La Gouvernante_, with the young woman’s friendly camaraderie and
yet solicitude for the boy who is her charge.
At last Fashion shifted. Chardin was in the shade. Even Diderot got
tired of him; though it was only the distaste of a contemporary for
an excellence too constantly repeated--and the artist betook himself,
with vanished popularity, to changed labours. But the vogue had lasted
long enough for his method to be imitated. Jeaurat tried to look at
common life through Chardin’s glasses. But Jeaurat did not catch the
sentiment of Chardin as successfully as Lancret and Pater had caught
the sentiment of Watteau. And along with a little humour, of which
the print of the _Citrons de Javotte_ affords a trace, he had some
coarseness of his own which assorted ill with Chardin’s homely but
unalloyed refinement. Chardin was profound; Jeaurat, comparatively
shallow. You look not without interest at the productions of the one;
you enter thoroughly into the world of the other. The creation of
Chardin--which his engravers pass on to us--has a sense of peace, of
permanence, a curious reality.
Reality is that which to us of the present day seems above all things
lacking to the laboured and obvious moralities of Greuze, who was
voluptuous when he posed to be innocent, and was least convincing when
he sought to be moral. Yet Greuze, when he was not the painter of the
too seductive damsel, but of family piety and family afflictions, must
have spoken to his own time with seeming sincerity. Even a liberal
philosophy--the philosophy of Diderot--patted him gently on the back,
and invited him to reiterate his commendable and salutary lessons. But
the philosophy was a little sentimental, or it would scarcely have
continued to Greuze the encouragement it had withdrawn from Chardin.
The Greuze pictures chiefly engraved in his own time were his obtrusive
moralities. They now find little favour. But Levasseur’s print of
_La Laitière_ and Massard’s of _La Crûche cassée_--elaborate, highly
wrought, and suggesting that ivory flesh texture which the master
obtained when he was most dexterously luxurious--these will fascinate
the Sybarite, legitimately, during still many generations.
Before the first successes of the painter of that _Laitière_ and that
_Crûche cassée_, there was flourishing at Court, under the Pompadour’s
patronage, the “rose-water Raphael,” the “bastard of Rubens.” This was
François Boucher. The region of his art lay as far indeed from reality
as did Watteau’s “enchanted isle,” and it had none of the rightful
magnetism of that country of poetic dream. It was not, like Watteau’s
land, that of a privileged and fortunate humanity, but of
“False Gods, and Muses misbegot.”
Where Boucher tried to be refined, he was insincere; and where he
was veracious, he was but picturesquely gross. His notion of Olympus
was that of a mountain on which ample human forms might be undraped
with impunity. That Olympus of a limited imagination he frequented
with industry. But, as a decorative painter, there is no need to
undervalue his fertility and skill, his apparently inexhaustible though
trivial impulse; and if few of his larger compositions have deserved
those honours which they have obtained, of translation into elaborate
line-engraving, hosts of the chalk studies which are so characteristic
of his facile talent were appropriately reproduced in fac-simile by the
ingenious inventions of Demarteau. These fac-similes were very cheap
indeed not many years ago, nor are they to-day expensive. Of Boucher’s
more considered work, engraved in line, _La Naissance de Vénus_, by
Duflos, and _Jupiter et Léda_, by Ryland, are important and agreeable,
and, as times go, by no means costly instances.
Fragonard, besides being a nobler colourist than Boucher--as the
silvery pinks and creamy whites of the _Chemise en levée_, at the
Louvre, would alone be enough to indicate--was at once a master of more
chastened taste and of less impotent passion. He was of the succession
of the Venetians. Fragonard came to Paris from the South--from amidst
the olives and the flowers of Grasse--and he retained to the end a
measure of the warmth and sunshine of Provence. The artistic eagerness,
the hurried excitement, of some of his work, is much in accord with his
often fiery themes; but in _L’Heureuse Fecondité_, _Les Beignets_, and
_La Bonne Mère_ (all of them engraved by De Launay) the collector can
possess himself of compositions in which Fragonard depicted domestic
life in his own lively way. That is only one side of his mind, and,
like his love of dignified and ordered artificial Landscape, it is
little known. Elsewhere he showed himself a skilled and an appreciative
observer of wholly secular character, and he embodied upon many a
canvas his conception of Love--it was not to him the constant devotion
of a life, but the unhesitating tribute of an hour. _Le Verre d’Eau_
and _Le Pot au Lait_ are good gay prints, but not for every one. In _Le
Chiffre d’Amour_, Affection, which with Fragonard is rarely inelegant,
becomes for a moment sentimental.
Contemporary with Fragonard were a group of artists who, more than
Fragonard, left Allegory aside, and exercised their imagination only
in a rearrangement of the real. These were the French Little Masters:
amongst them, Lavreince, the Saint-Aubins, Baudouin, Eisen, Moreau le
jeune. They had seen the life of Paris--Baudouin, the debased side of
it; but even Baudouin had some feeling for elegance and comedy. Eisen
was above all an illustrator. Augustin de Saint-Aubin, a man of various
talents, displayed in little things, is studied most agreeably in those
two pretty and well-disposed interiors, _Le Concert_ and _Le Bal paré_.
They are his most prized pieces; and prettiness having often more money
value than greatness, they are worth more than any Watteaus--they are
worth full twenty pounds the pair. And that is all I can afford to say
of Augustin de Saint-Aubin. Lavreince and Moreau must be spoken of a
little more fully.
Nicholas Lavreince was by birth a Swede, but, educated in Paris and
practising his art there, he was more French than the French. Edmond
and Jules de Goncourt, the best historians of the Painting of the time,
do not much appreciate him: at least in comparison with Baudouin.
They say that Baudouin’s method was larger and more artistic than
Lavreince’s, whose way was generally the way of somewhat painful
finish. I have seen by Lavreince one agreeable water-colour which
has all the impulse of the first intention, and, so far, belies the
De Goncourts’ judgment. But the judgment is doubtless true in the
main. That does not make Lavreince a jot less desirable for the
collectors of prints. Both he and Baudouin wrought to be engraved,
but Lavreince’s work was done with a much larger measure of reference
to that subsequent interpretation. The true _gouaches_ of Lavreince
are of extraordinary rarity; and if their method is in some respects
less excellent than that of the companion-works of Baudouin, their
themes are more presentable. Lavreince, in his brilliant portrayal of a
luxurious, free-living Society, sometimes allowed himself a liberty our
century might resent; but Baudouin’s license--save in such an exquisite
subject as that of _La Toilette_, which depicts the slimmest and most
graceful of his models--was on a par with that of Rétif de la Bretonne.
A proof before all letters of the delightful _Toilette_--engraved so
delicately by Ponce--is worth, when it appears, some twelve or fifteen
pounds: a more ordinary, a less rare impression, is worth perhaps three
or four.
[Illustration:
BAUDOUIN: _La Toilette_.
]
Baudouin--in too much of his work--was the portrayer of coarse intrigue
in humble life and high: Lavreince and Moreau, masters of polite Genre,
with subjects wider and more varied, the chroniclers of conversations
not inevitably _tête-à-tête_. For vividness and intellectual
delicacy of expression in the individual heads, one must give the
palm to Moreau. The De Goncourts claim for him also pre-eminence in
composition; but in one piece at least--in the _Assemblée au Concert_,
engraved by Dequevauviller--Lavreince runs Moreau hard. And Lavreince,
I can’t help thinking, has an invention scarcely less refined. What
can be gentler, yet what if gentle can be more abundant comedy than
his, in the _Directeur des Toilettes_?--the scene in which a prosperous
Abbé, an arbiter of Taste in women’s dress, dictates the choice to
his delightful friend, or busily preserves her from the chances of
error. And very noteworthy is Lavreince’s way of availing himself of
all the opportunities for beautiful design--beautiful line, at all
events--which were afforded him by the noble interiors in which there
passed the action of his drama. Those interiors are of the days of
Louis Seize, and are a little more severe, a little less intricate,
than the interiors of Louis Quinze. Musical instruments, often
beautiful of form--harp, harpsichord, and violoncello--play their part
in these pictorial compositions. Prints from Lavreince, like prints
from Moreau, are too gay and too agreeable not to be always valued.
England and America will surely take to them, as France has done long
ago.
It has been claimed for Moreau--Moreau “le jeune,” to distinguish him
from his less eminent brother--that he is yet more exact than Lavreince
is, in his record of the fashions of his period in furniture and dress.
And sometimes, on this very account, his effect is more prosaic--just
as at the contemporary theatre the accessories are apt to dominate or
dwarf the persons of the drama. Yet Moreau’s people have generally some
interest of individuality and liveliness, and these characteristics
are nowhere better seen than in the two series which he designed to
show the life of a great lady from the moment of motherhood and the
daily existence of a man of fashion. These prints--such as _C’est un
Fils, Monsieur_; _La Sortie de l’Opéra_; _La Grande Toilette_--should
be possessed, let me tell the collector, with the “A.P.D.Q.” still
upon them: not in a later state. Moreau, besides being a charming and
observant draughtsman, was himself a delicate engraver; but he left
to others (Romanet, Baquoy, and Malbeste amongst them) the business
of reproducing his story of the ruling classes--of the leaders of
Society--and it was sufficiently popularised. Having regard to what
it was--a story, to some people, of irritating even though of elegant
triviality--perhaps it was as well for those ruling classes of the
_Ancien Régime_ that it did not go further--that it was not actually
broadcast. Of Beaumarchais’s pungent comedy the saying has since passed
round, that it was the Revolution “_en action_.” So envy or contempt
might surely have been fostered by the wide-spread perusal of Moreau’s
exquisite, unvarnished record, and the Revolution have been advanced
by a day.
With Moreau’s art, the Eighteenth Century closes. There is an end of
its luxury and its amenity--an end of the lover who insists and the
lady who but lightly forbids. There followed after it the boneless,
nerveless, still eminently graceful pseudo-classicism of Prud’hon, and
the sterner pseudo-classicism of David, which recalled the ideal of
men to a more strenuous life. But that life was not of the Eighteenth
Century. The inflexible David, like the dreamy Prud’hon, was an artist
for another age. The graceful, graceless Eighteenth Century--with its
own faults, and no less with its own virtues--had said its last word.
Familiar and luxurious, tolerant and engaging, it had expressed through
Art the last of its so easily supported sorrows and its so easily
forgotten loves.
CHAPTER X
The range of Turner Prints--His earlier Engravers--His “Liber
Studiorum”--Its etchings, proofs, completed mezzotints--Its money
value--“Liber” Collectors--The “Southern Coast” Series--The “England
and Wales”--The “Richmondshire” Prints--“Ports” and “Rivers of
England”--The Turner Prints secure the Master’s fame.
Turner prints constitute a class apart. The prints which others made
after Turner’s drawings and pictures, the prints he executed to some
extent or wholly himself, the engravings in line and the engravings in
mezzotint, are all of them wont to be collected not so much as part of
the representation of a particular method of work, but rather as the
representation of an individual genius and of a whole school of the
most highly skilled craftsmen.
The Turner prints range in period from a year at least as early as
1794 to a year at least as late as 1856--for though Turner was then
dead, one or two of the finest engravers whom he had employed were at
that date still labouring in the popularisation of his pieces. They
range in size from the dainty vignette a couple of inches high, to
the extensive plate--a wonder of executive skill, yet often, too, a
wonder of misplaced ingenuity--which may be three feet long. Between
them come the very masterpieces of the landscape engraving of last
century--line-engravings like the “Southern Coast”; mezzotint supported
by etching, like the “Liber Studiorum.” They range in value between a
couple of shillings or so--the price, when you can get the print, of a
specimen of the early publications in the “Copper-plate Magazine”--to,
say, well shall we say to £50?--the price of an exceptional proof
of a fine, rare subject in “Liber.” In point of number, those of
which account may reasonably be taken by the student of our greatest
Landscape artists through the charming medium of his prints--or if you
will by the student of Engraving who finds in pieces after Turner alone
a sufficient range of method in the illustration of Landscape--in point
of number those which there need be no desire to ignore or forget,
reach, roundly speaking, to four or five hundred. It is possible to
make the study and acquisition of them the main business of the life of
an intelligent collector.
Mr W. G. Rawlinson is perhaps amongst existing connoisseurs the one
whose knowledge of the engravings by Turner, and after him, is the
widest and most exact. Mr Rawlinson has greatly extended the sum of his
own knowledge since he penned that catalogue raisonné of the “Liber
Studiorum” which remains his only published contribution to the history
of the prints of Turner. The book is of much value; but though, broadly
considered, it remains an adequate and serviceable guide, there must by
this time be a good many corrections in the matter of “States”--rarely
is it that the issue of a First Edition of a descriptive catalogue
of engraved work does not elicit, from one source or another, some
information, the existence of which the author had had no reason to
surmise. And, moreover, it may be hoped that Mr Rawlinson’s more
extended studies in the field of his particular inquiry will bear fruit
some day in the production of another volume, devoted this time to
the tale of the great series of Line-Engravings and the less numerous
productions in pure Mezzotint. “Liber,” remember--the master-work,
which is thus far the only one to have been elaborately discussed or
chronicled by any critic--is the result of a combination of Mezzotint
with Etching. But we will go back a little, and will take the
prints--or such of them as there is cause to mention--in due order.
I recollect Mr Rawlinson saying to me, not many months ago--in speaking
of the little publications of the “Copper-plate Magazine” and of
such-like small and early work--that Turner was never properly engraved
till he was engraved by James Basire; and I think, upon the whole, that
this is true. At a later period, Turner himself protested that he was
never properly, at all events never quite perfectly, engraved, till he
was engraved by John Pye--but then that was for a quite different order
of work from that which occupied him in the first years of his skilled
and accomplished practice. What Mr Rawlinson meant was, that whereas
the engraver--tasteful and in a measure delicate, yet slight and
wanting wholly in subtlety of realisation and treatment--who did the
little prints in the “Copper-plate Magazine,” such as the _Carlisle_
and the _Wakefield_, failed to translate into his art all the really
translatable qualities of the immature yet interesting work to which
he addressed himself, Basire, in the brilliant and solid prints which
served as head-pieces to the “Oxford Almanacks,” from 1799 to 1811, did
the most thorough justice to their mainly architectural themes. It was
in the year in which Basire finished--and Turner’s art, by this time,
had, of course, greatly changed--that there was executed by John Pye
the very work (_Pope’s Villa_) which extorted from Turner what it may
be was his first warm tribute of admiration to anybody who translated
him. But four years before this, Turner, with Charles Turner, the
engraver in mezzotint, had begun the publication of the immortal series
of “Liber Studiorum.”
The set of prints which Turner issued as his “Liber Studiorum”--with
an allusion, tolerably evident, to the “Liber Veritatis” of Claude--is
but one series of several with which the English master of Landscape
occupied himself during the fifty years, or more, of his working life.
But it is the first series that was conceived by him; and it is, in the
best sense, the most ambitious; and it remains the noblest and the most
representative. In its actual execution Turner had a greater hand--an
incomparably greater hand--than in that of any of its successors; and
its scheme permitted a variety, an effective suddenness of transition,
denied to the artist when, in later years, he was depicting that
portion of the county of Yorks which is known as Richmondshire, or
the “Southern Coast,” or the “Rivers of France,” or the “Ports of
England,” or even all the places which it pleased him to choose for
one of the most elaborate of his publications, “The Picturesque Views
in England and Wales.” A long tether was allowed him, unquestionably,
in some of these sets; but in the “Liber”--as it is called, briefly
and affectionately, by collector and student--there was no question of
tether at all. In it, a subject from Classical Mythology might stand
side by side with a subject drawn from English barton and hedgerow--I
am, as it were, naming _Procris and Cephalus_, _Æsacus and Hesperie_,
the exquisite though homely _Straw Yard_, the entirely prosaic _Farm
Yard with a Cock_. The interior of a London church, with its Georgian
altar and its pews cosily curtained for the most respectable of
_bourgeois_, might be presented in near neighbourhood to some study
which Turner had recorded of the eternal hills, or of a great storm
that gathered, rolled over, and passed away from Solway Moss.
[Illustration:
TURNER: _The Straw Yard_.
]
I have used the word “study,” since it is Turner’s own. But each plate
in “Liber Studiorum” is much more than a study. It is a finished
composition. Turner spared neither time nor pains--though in this
case, as in others, he was careful, where that was possible, to spare
money--in making his work all that the wisest lover of his genius might
expect it to be. Whatever rivalry there was with the “Liber Veritatis”
of Claude--the later portions of which were issuing from the house of
Boydell at the very moment that Turner was planning the “Liber”--the
rivalry was conducted upon no equal terms. I say nothing in
depreciation of Claude’s “Liber Veritatis.” In it, one of the greatest
practitioners of mezzotint engraving--Richard Earlom--reproduced, with
learned simplicity, Claude’s masterly memoranda--the sometimes slender
yet always stately drawings in the preparation of which Nature had
counted for something, and Art had counted for more. Claude’s bistre
sketches, by their dignity and style--even the hurried visitor to
Chatsworth may know that--are akin to the landscapes of Rembrandt, to
the studies of Titian. But the artist of the “Liber Veritatis” worked
in haste, worked purposely in slightness, and more than one generation
separated him from the engraver who was to execute the plates. Turner
worked with elaboration, and worked at leisure, and he etched upon the
plates, himself, the leading lines of his composition, and he was in
contact with the engravers, and his directions to these accomplished
craftsmen were rightly fastidious and endlessly minute.
Claude too was an etcher, yet it is not in the “Liber Veritatis”--it
is in the rare and early States of his _Shepherd and Shepherdess
Conversing_, of his _Cowherd_ (“Le Bouvier”), of his _Cattle in Stormy
Weather_--that (as a previous chapter has insisted) we are to find
proof of his skilled familiarity with that means of expression which
Turner employed as the basis of his work in the “Liber.” Claude,
when he etched, etched for Etching’s sake, and used with pleasure
and with ease the resources of the etcher’s art. Turner restricted
Etching within narrower limits. When one remembers the circumstance
that, having etched the outlines, on the plate, he took a dozen or
a score, perhaps, of impressions from it before he caused the work
in mezzotint to be added, it is difficult to assert that he did not
attach a certain value to the etched outlines. And indeed they are of
extraordinary significance and strength: they show economy of labour,
certainty of vision and of hand. It is very well that they, as well
as the finished plates, should be collected. But, in his pleasure in
possessing himself of these rare, noble things, the collector must not
allow himself to forget that they were essentially a preparation and a
sustenance for that which was to follow--for that admirable mezzotint
on which the subtlest lights and shadows of the picture, its infinite
and indescribably delicate gradations, were intended to depend.
Of this Mezzotint it is time to speak. Its employment, though it
proved--as I think I have implied already--wonderfully conducive to
the quality of the “Liber” plates, was not resolved upon at first. The
process of aquatint, in which much work was done about that time--in
which, only a very few years before “Liber” began, Turner’s friend,
Thomas Girtin, had produced some broadly-treated views of Paris--had,
at first, been thought of. Negotiations were opened with Lewis, and
he executed in aquatint one of the plates, which Turner did indeed
eventually use, but which he was careful not to use in the earliest
numbers of the publication. The superiority of Mezzotint he recognised
quite clearly. He employed the best mezzotinters. He busied himself
to instruct them as to the effects that he desired. He learnt the art
himself, and himself mezzotinted, with great exquisiteness, ten out
of the seventy-one plates. He worked, in later stages, upon all the
rest of them; obtaining generally the most refined beauty, but working
in such a fashion as to exhaust the plate with extravagant swiftness.
Then he touched and retouched, almost as Mr Whistler has touched
and retouched the plates of his Venetian etchings. So delicate, so
evanescent, rarity is not an aim, but a need, with them.
The publication of the “Liber”--the great undertaking of the early
middle period of Turner’s art--began in 1807, and its issue was
arrested in the year 1819. It was never completed--seventy-one finished
plates were given to the world out of the hundred that were meant to
be. But Turner had by that time proceeded far with the remainder, of
which twenty plates, more or less finished, testified to a gathering
rather than a lessening strength. By the non-publication of these later
plates, the collector--if not necessarily the student--is deprived of
several of the noblest illustrations of Turner’s genius. Nothing in
the whole series shows an elegance more dignified than that which the
_Stork and Aqueduct_ displays; the mystery of dawn is magnificent in
the _Stonehenge_; and never was pastoral landscape--the England of
field and wood and sloping hillside--more engaging or suggestive than
in the _Crowhurst_.
The mention of these plates--the hint it gives us as to difference
of subject and of aim--brings up the question of the various classes
of composition into which Turner thought proper to divide his work.
His advertisement of the publication affords a proof of how widely
representative the work was intended to be; nor indeed, did the
execution at all fall short of Turner’s hope in this respect. The work
was to be--and we know, now, how fully it became--an illustration of
Landscape Composition, classed as follows: “Historical, Mountainous,
Pastoral, Marine, and Architectural.” And further, it is said in the
advertisement, “Each number contains five engravings in mezzotint:
one subject of each class.” But Turner, in these matters, was
extraordinarily unmethodical--I should like to say “muddled.” Each
number did contain five engravings, and they were “in mezzotint,”
with the preparation in etching; but it was by no means always that
there was one subject of each class, for Turner divided the Pastoral
into simple and what he described as “elegant” or “epic” Pastoral (Mr
Roget thinks that the “E.P.” means “epic”), and the very first number
contained a Historical, a Marine, an Architectural subject, but it
contained no Mountainous, for the Pastoral was represented in both of
its forms (“P.” and “E.P.”).
The actual publication was exceedingly irregular. Sometimes two
numbers--or two parts, as we may better call them--were issued at
once. Sometimes there would be an interval of several years between
the issue of a couple of parts. There is no doubt that as the work
progressed Turner felt increasingly the neglect under which it
suffered. Gradually he lost interest in its actual issue--but, never
for a moment in its excellence.
Charles Turner, the admirable mezzotint engraver--who, it should hardly
be necessary to say, was no relation of the greater man--had charge
of “Liber” in its early stages. The prints of the first parts bore
an inscription to the effect that they were “Published by C. Turner,
50 Warren Street, Fitzroy Square.” But in 1811--when three years had
elapsed since the publication of the fourth part--the fifth came out
as “Published by Mr Turner, Queen Anne Street, West”--and “Mr Turner”
meant, of course, the author of the work. Charles Turner, who had
engraved in mezzotint every plate contained in the four parts with
whose publication he was concerned, engraved, likewise, several of
the succeeding pieces. Thus his share in the production of “Liber”
was greater than that of any of his brethren. William Say’s came next
to his in importance--importance measured by amount of labour--and
Mr Rawlinson has pointed out that William Say approached his work
with little previous preparation by the rendering of Landscape. The
remark is, in some degree, applicable to most of Say’s associates. The
engraver in mezzotint, at that time, as in earlier times, flourished
chiefly by reproducing Portraiture. Raphael Smith and William
Ward--great artists who were still living when the “Liber” was
executed, but who had no part in the performance--had been employed
triumphantly, a very little earlier, in popularising that delightful
art of Morland, in which landscape had so large a place. Dunkarton,
Thomas Lupton, Clint, Easling, Annis, Dawe, S. W. Reynolds, and Hodges
complete the list of the engravers in mezzotint who worked upon the
“Liber.” Admirable artists many of them were, but the collector, if
he is a student, cannot forget how much the master, the originator,
dominated over all.
Mr Ruskin and several subsequent writers have written, with varying
degrees of eloquence, of originality, and, I may add, of common sense,
as to the moral, emotional, or intellectual message the “Liber” may
be taken to convey. This is scarcely the place in which to seek to
decipher with exhaustive thoroughness a communication that is on the
whole complicated and on the whole mysterious. The reader may be
referred to the last pages of the final volume of “Modern Painters” for
what is at all events the most impressive statement that a prose-poet
can deliver as to the gloomy significance of Turner’s work. Mr Stopford
Brooke--rich in sensibility and in imaginative perceptiveness--follows
a good deal in Mr Ruskin’s track. I doubt if Mr Hamerton or Mr Cosmo
Monkhouse--instructive critics of a cooler school--endorse the verdict
of unmitigated gloom, and I have myself (in a chapter in a now
well-nigh forgotten essay of my youth) ventured to hold forth upon the
intervals of peace and rest which “Liber Studiorum” shows in its scenes
of solitude and withdrawal: the morning light, clear and serene, in the
meadows below Oakhampton Castle; the graver silence of sunset as one
looks wistfully from heights above the Wye, to where, under the endless
skies, the stream deploys to the river. I am referring, of course, to
the _Oakhampton Castle_ subject, and to the _Severn and Wye_; but the
argument might have been sustained by allusion to many another print.
More important to our present purpose than to settle accurately its
moral mission or to agree upon the sentiment of this or that particular
plate, is it to value properly the sterling and artistic virtues which
“Liber” makes manifest. Of these, however, there is one thing only that
I care to emphasise here. Let all beauties of detail be discovered; but
let us even here, and in lines that are of necessity brief, lay stress
upon the all-important part played in the plates of “Liber” by one
old-fashioned virtue, that will yet be fresh again when some of those
that may seem to supplant it have indeed waxed old. It is the virtue
of Composition. “Liber Studiorum” shows, in passage after passage of
its draughtsmanship, close reference to Nature, deep knowledge of her
secrets; but it shows I think yet more the unavoidable conviction,
alike of true worker and true connoisseur, that Nature is, for the
artist, not a Deity but a material: not a tyrant but a servant. In the
near and faithful study of Nature--and nowhere more completely than in
the prints of “Liber”--Turner did much that had been left undone by
predecessors. But he was not opposed to them--he was allied to them--in
his recognition of the fact that his art must do much more than merely
reproduce. “Nature,” said Goethe, “Nature has excellent intentions.”
And by Composition, by choice, by economy of means, sometimes by very
luxury of hidden labour, it is the business of the artist to convey
these intentions to the beholders of his work. How much does he
receive? How much of himself, of his creative mind, must we exact that
he shall bestow?
Let us come down, immediately, to money matters, and other practical
things for the collector’s benefit.
It is still possible, here and there, in an auction room, to buy an
original set of “Liber Studiorum”--a set, that is, as Turner issued
it--but it is never desirable. For Turner, who was not only a great
poet with brush and pencil, and scraper and etching needle, but an
exceedingly keen hard bargainer and man of business, took horrible
care (or just care, if we choose to call it so) that the original
subscribers to his greatest serial should never get sets consisting
altogether of the fine impressions. He mixed the good with the
second-rate: the second-rate with the bad. It was not till collectors
took to studying the pieces for themselves, and making up collections
by purchase of odd pieces here and there--rejecting much, accepting
something--that any sets were uniformly good. The first fine set,
perhaps, was that, in various States, which was amassed by Mr Stokes,
and passed on to his niece, Miss Mary Constance Clarke. To have the
marks of these ownerships at the back of a print, is--in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred--to have evidence of excellence. Twenty years
ago, one could buy such a print, now and then, at Halsted’s, the
ancient dealer’s, in Rathbone Place; and have an instructive chat to
boot, with an old-world personage who had had speech with “Mr Turner.”
Even now, in an auction room, one may get such a print sometimes.
Another of the very early collectors was Sir John Hippesley, who bought
originally on Halsted’s recommendation, and who--having been for years
devoted to works of other masters--ended by breakfasting, so to speak,
on “Liber Studiorum”: on the chair opposite to him, as he sat at his
meal, a fine print was wont to be placed. Amongst living connoisseurs,
Mr Henry Vaughan and Mr J. E. Taylor, Mr Stopford Brooke and Mr W.
G. Rawlinson, have notable collections of very varying size and
importance. Mr Rawlinson believes much more than I do--if I understand
him aright--in the desirability of possessing engravers’ trial
proofs--in a certain late stage. Most engravers’ proofs are, of course,
mere preparations, curious and interesting, but in themselves far less
desirable than the finished plates to whose effects of deliberate and
attained beauty they can but vaguely approximate. Of course if you are
so exceedingly lucky a man as to have been able to pounce upon the
particular proof which was the last of the series, you possess a fine
and incontestable thing; but generally an early impression of the First
published State represents the subject more safely and assuredly; and,
failing that, an early impression of the Second State; and so on. An
indication of priority is no doubt well--but it is well chiefly for the
feebler brethren. You must train your eye. Having trained it, you must
learn to rely on it. Books and the knowledge of States are useful, but
are not sufficient.
In the few years that elapsed between the establishment of “Liber”
as avowedly fit material for the diligence and outlay of the
collector, and the great sale of the “remainders” in Turner’s
own collection--which only left Queen Anne Street in 1873, some
two-and-twenty years after his death--prices for fine impressions of
the “Liber” plates, bought separately, were high. Then, in 1873, during
that long sale at Christie’s, a flood of prints, and many of them
very fine ones, came upon the market. “Would they ever be absorbed?”
it was asked. They were absorbed very quickly. But just until they
were absorbed, it was, naturally, possible, not only to choose (at
the dealer’s, chiefly, who bought big lots; at the Colnaghi’s and
Mrs Noseda’s, particularly)--it was possible to choose sagaciously,
out of so great a number, and to choose cheaply too. Then “markets
hardened.” The various writings calling attention to the wisdom of
collecting had probably their effect. Then things slackened again.
And now, though rare proofs and very fine impressions--which are what
should be most cared about--hold their own, there is a certain lull
in the activity of buying. The undesirable impression goes for very
little. Yet the fluctuations, such as they are, either way, are
of no vast importance. Of any but the very rarest, or very finest
subjects, six to twelve guineas gets a good First State. Three to six
guineas may be the price of a good Second. A Third or Fourth or Fifth
State fetches less, unless--as in an exceptional instance, like the
_Calm_--it is preferable. Of all the different subjects, the rarest is
_Ben Arthur_. In a fine impression--with the cloudland and the shadows
not impenetrably massive--it is exceedingly impressive. But never as
a thing of power should I rate it above _Solway Moss_ or _Hind Head
Hill_; or, as a thing of beauty, above _Severn and Wye_.
No great collection of the “Liber Studiorum” has been sold of late
years, but if we go back to the year 1887, we can give a few prices
culled from the catalogue of the Buccleuch Sale. An engraver’s
proof of the _Woman with a Tambourine_ fetched £15, 15s. there; an
engraver’s proof of _Basle_, £27; a proof of the _Mount St Gothard_,
which at least must have had the virtue of approaching finish, fell to
Colnaghi’s bid of £55; the First State of the _Holy Island Cathedral_,
which sold for £3, 3s., must either have been poor or monstrously
cheap, though the plate is one in which, even to the collector with the
most trained eye, the possession of the First State is not strictly
necessitated: the subject is among those--and they are not so very
few--in which the Second State, well chosen, is altogether adequate.
The First State of the _Hind Head Hill_ reached £14, 14s.; the First
of the _London from Greenwich_, with its noble panorama of the long
stretched Town and winding river, reached £15, 15s. A proof of the
_Windmill and Lock_ reached £31; a First State of the _Severn and Wye_,
£21; a First State of the _Procris and Cephalus_, £11; a First State of
the _Watercress Gatherers_, £11, 11s. The pure etchings, which I have
written of in an earlier paragraph in this chapter, sell, generally
speaking, for three or four guineas apiece; the etching of the _Isis_,
which is extremely rare, fetched at the Buccleuch auction £13, 13s.
By the Fine Art Society £74 was paid for a First State of the _Ben
Arthur_. The plates least eagerly sought, or in inferior condition,
went for all sorts of prices between a pound or two and four or five
guineas. I think, as far as value may be judged without the presence of
the particular impressions which were sold, the little list I have now
given above may fairly indicate it, but no quite thorough indication
can be got without an immense accumulation of detail, and, on the
reader’s part, an immense knowledge in interpreting it. It is not
unintentionally that we have lingered long over the “Liber.” But more
than one other great series must engage at all events a brief attention.
In 1814 began the famous “Southern Coast” series, which was brought to
an end in 1827. For these prints, engraved in admirable and masculine
“line,” chiefly by the brothers George and William Cooke, Turner had
made water colours, whilst as a preparation for the “Liber,” he had
made but slight though finely considered sepia drawings--mere guides
and hints to himself and the engravers he employed upon the plates:
things whose significance was to be enlarged: not things to be merely
copied and scrupulously kept to. In quite tolerable condition the
ordinary impressions of the “Southern Coast” plates are to be had in
large book-form; but the collector, buying single piece by single
piece, at one or two or three guineas each, seeks generally impressions
before letters or with the scratched title. Of course the variations
in condition are noticeable, but in the firm “line” of the “Southern
Coast,” they are at least much less noticeable than in the delicate and
evanescent mezzotints of “Liber.”
The year in which the publication of the “Southern Coast” was
finished--when prints picturesque and vivid, and in some cases, as
in the _Clovelly_ of William Miller, perfectly exquisite, had been
presented of the most interesting seaboard places between Minehead
and Whitstable--that year was the period at which the publication of
the third great series, the “England and Wales,” was begun. It was
to have extended to thirty parts or more: each part containing four
subjects. But, like “Liber,” it received, on its first issue, no
full and satisfying measure of encouragement, and though it reached
its twenty-fourth part, it did not go further. It was published at
about two guineas and a half a part. “England and Wales” sets forth
with great elaboration of line engraving the characteristics of the
later middle period of Turner’s art, so far as black and white can
set it forth at all. That was the period in which subject was most
complicated and most ample--even unduly ample--and in which Turner
dealt at once with the most intricate line and with all sorts of
problems of colour, atmosphere, illumination. The work of all that
period, from 1827, say, to ten years onwards--with many of its merits,
its inevitable shortcomings, and its immense ambition--the “England and
Wales” represents. The work of various engravers trained by Turner for
the interpretation of all that was most complicated, it will ever be
interesting and valuable. Such prints as _Stamford_, _Llanthony Abbey_,
and the noble _Yarmouth_ stand ever in the front line. The last, like
the _Clovelly_ of the “Southern Coast,” is a work of William Miller,
the old Quaker engraver, whose rendering of Turner’s delicate skies
no other line engraver has approached--not even William Cooke, who
did so well that troop of light little wind clouds in the _Margate_
of the “Southern Coast.” Admirable then, indeed, many of these things
must be allowed to be; and in this sense they are almost unique, that
scarcely anything else has possessed their qualities. Yet on the whole
one admires “England and Wales” with reservations. One’s heart goes out
more thoroughly to “Liber” and to “Southern Coast.”
There are other series which must not be passed over altogether--the
“Richmondshire Set,” of which the first print was executed, I think, in
1820, though the whole volume was not issued till 1823. It too is in
line: the finest print of all, perhaps the _Ingleborough_. Then there
are six “Ports of England”: impressive, varied little mezzotints,
unsupported by etching--prints in one of which Turner has set down,
for all time, his clear, unequalled perception of the beauty of the
Scarborough coast-line. Then there are the “Rivers of England,” with
the noble _Arundel_, the restful _Totness_. Then there are, in line, the
almost over-dainty yet miraculous little prints of “Rivers of France.”
Then there are the wonderful vignettes in illustration of Walter Scott.
These, like the illustrations to the Rogers’ “Poems” and the “Italy,”
with which they have the most affinity, are luminous and gem-like.
The Rogers illustrations of course deteriorate in later editions; the
“Italy” of 1830 and the “Poems” of 1834 are the ones that should be
possessed; and were the present volume of a wider scope and addressed
to the book-collector, I should allow myself to say here what it seems
I do say here, without “allowing myself”--that the collector should
get, if possible, a copy in the original boards, and may give £5 for
that as safely as a couple of sovereigns for a re-bound copy.
Turner is represented on many a side by the engraver’s art, and in most
cases with singular good fortune. For some, there are the vignettes
which have the finish of Cellini work. For some, it may be, the large,
more recent plates, the _Modern Italy_ and _Ancient Italy_, that hang,
I cannot help considering, rather ineffectively upon the wall: too big,
not for their place, but for their method of execution--and yet, like
so many, wonderful. He is represented best of all perhaps in works
of middle scale--in the virile line of the “Southern Coast,” and the
unapproachable mezzotint and etching of the “Liber.” If everything that
he has wrought with brush or pencil were extinguished, these things,
living, would make immortal his fame.
CHAPTER XI
The healthy appreciation of Mezzotint--Its faculty of conveying the
painter’s very touch--Landscape Scenes in Mezzotint--Comparative
Rarity of Landscapes--The Constables--Vast volume of Rare Pieces
and Portraits--The Prints after Sir Joshua Reynolds--Dr Hamilton’s
Catalogue--The smaller number of Gainsboroughs--Increased
appreciation of Romney--Mr Percy Horne’s book on these men--George
Morland--The cost of Mezzotints now, and when first issued.
Of modern fashions in Print Collecting, the appreciation of mezzotints
is assuredly one of the healthiest, and--apart from the question of the
very high prices to which mezzotints have lately been forced--there
is only one drawback to the pleasure of the collector in bringing
them together: the collector of mezzotints has to resign himself to
do without original work. The scraping of the plate in these broad
masses of shadow and light--a method immensely popular as means of
interpretation or translation of the painter’s touch--has from the days
of the invention of the process by Ludwig von Siegen to the days of its
latest practice, never greatly commended itself to the original artist
as a method for fresh design. There are a few exquisite exceptions; and
perhaps there is no sufficient reason why there should not be more;
but the exceptions best known, and most likely to be cited, the prints
of Turner’s “Liber Studiorum,” are exceptions only in so far as regards
that small proportion of the whole--about ten amongst the published
plates--wrought by Turner himself.
And, further, the collector, if he cares much for Landscape subjects,
will note that landscapes in mezzotint are comparatively few. It
was in the Eighteenth Century that the production of mezzotint was
most voluminous; and the Eighteenth Century took little interest in
Landscape. In the earlier half of our own century--ere yet the art had
almost ceased to be practised--the world was given a few famous sets of
landscapes in mezzotint; but they were very few. Turner’s “Liber” (with
its backbone of etching) was followed by the half-dozen pieces of the
“Ports of England,” and by “Rivers of England,” or “River Scenery,” as
it is sometimes called, “after Turner and Girtin.” And then, well in
the middle of the half-century, we were endowed with the delightful,
now highly prized mezzotints, which were executed by David Lucas after
the works of Constable, homely when they were sombre, homely too
when they were most sparkling and alive. They too, the “Constable’s
English Landscape”--like the “Liber” prints of Turner--were influenced,
for better or worse, by the supervision of the creative artist. The
tendency of Lucas may have been to make them too black--even Constable
never blamed him for making them, likewise, massive. Sparkle and
vivacity, as well as obvious breadth and richness, were wanted in
adequate renderings of Constable; and all these, by the adaptability of
Lucas’s talent, by his rare sympathy, were obtained.
[Illustration:
DAVID LUCAS: CONSTABLE’S _Spring_.
]
In our own day, several meritorious artists--Wehrschmidt and Pratt and
Gerald Robinson and others--have done, in several branches, interesting
work in mezzotint; and Frank Short, in one print especially that I
have in my mind, after a Turner drawing--an Alpine subject--and again
in a decisive mezzotint, _A Road in Yorkshire_, after Dewint (a road
skirting the moors)--is altogether admirable. And, to name yet a third
instance of the art of this flexible translator, there is the quite
wonderful little vision of the silvery grey Downs, after a sketch by
Constable in the possession of Henry Vaughan, whose greater Constable,
the _Hay Wain_, was generously made over to the nation. The work of
David Lucas, himself--even in the radiant _Summerland_, or in the
steel-grey keenness of the _Spring_--did not excel in delicacy of
manipulation Frank Short’s delightful rendering of Constable’s vision
of the Downs.
But I am not to dwell longer upon particular instances. We are brought
back to the fact that it is not, generally speaking, in examples of
Landscape Art that the collector of mezzotints must find himself
richest. The collector’s groups of landscapes will be limited--and in
the first place are the rare Proofs--Lucas’s Proofs--after Constable.
In the collection of religious compositions, of _genre_ pieces, of
theatrical subjects, of “fancy” subjects--in which that which is
most “fancied” is the prettiness of the female sex--in sporting
and in racing subjects (amongst the latter there are a few most
admirable prints after George Stubbs), and most of all, of course, in
portraits, from the days of Lely to the days of Lawrence, there will be
opportunities of filling portfolio after portfolio, drawer after drawer.
It is difficult, I think, for the collector--still more for the
student who has not a collector’s practical interest in the matter--to
realise what is actually the extent of that contribution to the
world’s possessions in the way of Art, which has been made, and all
within about two hundred years, by the engravers in mezzotint. Some
eighteen years ago, an Irish amateur, Mr Challoner Smith, began the
publication of a Catalogue which, when it was concluded, several years
later, had extended to five volumes. It was a colossal labour. Styled
by its compiler “British Mezzotint Portraits,” it really includes
the chronicle of many firings which at least are not professedly
portraits--yet it excludes many too. Whatever it excludes, its bulk
is such, that, amongst the mass of its matter, it comprises full
descriptions of between four and five hundred plates by one artist
alone. The man is Faber, junior. Fifty plates are chronicled by an
engraver more modern of character, more popular to-day--Richard Earlom;
amongst them, more than one of the _genre_ or incident pictures after
Wright of Derby (in which a difficult effect of chiaroscuro--an effect
of artificial light--is treated boldly, vigorously, not always very
subtly), and the marvellously painter-like plates of _Marriage à la
Mode_, so much more pictorial than the brilliant line-engravings
executed much earlier after those subjects. But not, be it observed,
mentioned by Challoner Smith amongst the Earloms, are two other prints
in which, in the reproduction of still-life, engraving in mezzotint
reaches high-water mark; I mean the now most justly sought-for plates
after the Fruit and Flower Pieces of Van Huysum. By James Watson, a
contemporary of Earlom’s, more or less, about a hundred and sixty
prints are described. By J. R. Smith--who engraved so many of the
finest of the Sir Joshuas--there are described two hundred, but by
the John Smith who, a century earlier, recorded almost innumerable
Knellers, there are all but three hundred. The difference in the number
of plates produced by the younger men and by the elder--James Watson,
Earlom, and J. B. Smith upon the one hand; John Smith and Faber on the
other--finds its explanation in the tendency of mezzotint to become
more elaborate, more refined, more perfect, presumably slower, during
the hundred years or so that separated the beginning, not from the
end indeed (for the end, strictly speaking, is not yet), but from
the very crown and crest of the achievement. Much of the early work
is very vigorous. John Smith, especially, was within limited lines
a sterling artist; though mainly, like the portrait painters that
he worked after, without obvious attractiveness and indeed without
subtlety. The exceedingly rare examples of Ludwig von Siegen and of
Prince Rupert show that these men--at the very beginning even--were
artists and not bunglers. But when one compares that early work, John
Smith’s even--done, all of it, when the art was but in its robust
childhood--with the infinitely more refined and flexible performance of
the men of the Eighteenth Century, one wonders only at the great body
of achievement, dexterous, delicate, faultlessly graceful, vouchsafed
to the practitioners of mezzotint during the last decades of that
later epoch. And between the distinctly later work and the distinctly
earlier, of the less engaging executants, there came, be it remembered,
the masculine art of M‘Ardell, a link in the chain; for M‘Ardell learnt
something from the early men, and was the master of more than one of
the more recent. He is admirable especially in his rendering of the
portraits of men.
A vast proportion of the work of the first practitioners of Mezzotint
appeals rather to the collector of portraits for likeness’ sake,
than to the collector of prints for beauty’s sake and Art’s. Such a
collector is a specialist the nature of whose specialty obliges him
to amass a certain amount of artistic production without necessarily
having any great regard for the Art that is in it. We are not
concerned, in this volume, with this specialty, honourable and
serviceable as it may be--a book which, by reason of more pressing
claims, leaves out of consideration the manly and yet highly refined
labours of Nanteuil, Edelinck, the Drevets (masters of reproductive
work in pure “line ”), may well be pardoned if it does not pause over
mere portraiture--I mean, the less artistic portraiture--in mezzotint.
The collector who is as yet but a beginner should be encouraged to
direct his eye to the more statedly and purposely artistic--to the
hill-tops where he will find already, as his comrades in research,
those who have brought to the task of collecting a long experience and
a chastened taste. In other words, the generation of Reynolds and of
Gainsborough, or else the generation of Romney and of Morland, has to
be reached before the mezzotint collector can lay hands on the great
prizes of his pursuit. The perfectly translated art of these painters
is amongst the few things which may be accounted popular and yet may be
accounted noble.
In saying this, I do not preclude myself from saying also that I think
the sums given at present for the most favourite instances of mezzotint
engraving are distinctly excessive. We will look at a few of them in
detail, on a later page. Fashion knows little reasonableness--but
little moderation--and hence it is that a translation of Reynolds,
gracious and engaging, commands, if it happens to be at all rare, the
price, and often more than the price, of an original and important
creation of Dürer’s, or even of Rembrandt’s. But what shall we say when
we have to recollect that, at the present moment, even the mezzotints
after Hoppner are ridiculously dear!
Of all the masters of the Eighteenth or early Nineteenth Century, it is
Sir Joshua Reynolds who has been engraved most amply. It is safe to
say that there are something like four hundred prints after his painted
work--prints of the great time, I mean, ending not later than 1820, and
taking, amongst others, no account of the smaller plates of which S.
W. Reynolds executed so many. The latest and best Catalogue of these
great Reynolds prints is that of Dr Hamilton--a labour of diligence
and loving care undertaken in our own generations. Of the painters
of the British School, Morland probably comes next to Reynolds, in
respect of the number of engravings executed after his work. Apart
from prints in stipple, there exist after Morland something like two
hundred mezzotints. A systematic Catalogue, with states and all, is
still to be desired, as a sure practical guide to the collector of
Morland; but meanwhile useful service has certainly been rendered by
the Exhibitions at the Messrs Vokins’s, for these were wonderfully
comprehensive, and with them careful lists--only just short of being
catalogues _raisonnés_--have been issued. William Ward--Morland’s
brother-in-law--and J. R. Smith, with whom he was associated, were his
two principal engravers; but many another accomplished craftsman had
a hand in popularising his labours by reproducing his themes--amongst
them John Young, the author of the rare and little known, and poetic
plate, _Travellers_. Mr Percy Horne--himself, like Dr Hamilton, a
well-known collector--has done for Gainsborough and Romney what
Dr Hamilton has done for Sir Joshua. In one volume, charmingly
illustrated with a few specimen subjects, Mr Percy Horne has issued
a Catalogue of the engraved portraits and fancy subjects painted by
Gainsborough and by Romney--the Gainsborough pieces of which he has
taken note having been published between 1760 and 1820; the Romneys,
between 1770 and 1830. By Gainsborough, there are eighty-eight, of
which seventy-seven are portraits. The numbers include some in stipple
and a few even in line, but the bulk are, of course, mezzotints. By
Romney--somehow more popular with the engravers, and, it would seem,
with the public--there are no less than a hundred and forty-five, of
which a hundred and thirty-six are portraits. But it is difficult, in
this matter, to draw the line very sharply, owing to the habit of the
beauties of that day to be painted not only as themselves, but “as
Miranda,” “as Sensibility,” and the like. Mr Horne himself reminds us,
by cross references in his index, that even of the few Romneys which
he has chosen to catalogue as “fancy subjects,” some are in truth
portraits. Among the engraved Romney portraits, no less than twenty are
avowed representations of the fascinating woman who inspired Romney
as did no other soul, and without whose presence he not seldom pined.
She came to him first as Emma Hart, or Emma Lyon, mistress of Charles
Greville. He knew her afterwards as the wife of Sir William Hamilton.
The modified and unforbidding Classicism of her beauty accorded well
with his ideal--helped perhaps to form it--and, admirable as is much of
the work of his in which she had no place, Romney is most completely
Romney when it is Lady Hamilton he is recording.
The value of an average Romney print is to-day at least as high as
that of an average Reynolds, and much higher than that of an average
Gainsborough. An exceptional print like his _Mrs Carwardine_, than
which nothing is finer--a well-built gentlewoman, seen in profile, in
close white cap, her head bent prettily over a nestling child, and her
arms clasped at his back--sells for about a hundred guineas, and, in a
fine impression, is scarcely likely to fetch less. It was engraved by
J. R. Smith in 1781. Very beautiful and delicate, though not perhaps so
extremely rare, is the _Elizabeth, Countess of Derby_, engraved by John
Dean. Two hundred pounds has been fetched by Raphael Smith’s engraving
of Romney’s Lady Warwick. Of Gainsboroughs, perhaps the very finest is
one engraved by Dean; this is the _Mrs Elliot_, a print of 1779; a very
great rarity; a thing of delightful and dignified beauty, and in its
exquisite delicacy, quite as characteristic of the engraver as of the
original artist. It is a long time since any impression has been sold.
About £70 was the last chronicled price for it. It would fetch more, so
experts think, did it reappear to-day.
[Illustration:
REYNOLDS: _Miss Oliver_.
]
The highest price ever yet paid for a print after Sir Joshua is, as I
am told, £350; and this was given for an impression of Thomas Watson’s
print after the picture sometimes called “An Offering to Hymen”--the
_Hon. Mrs Beresford, with the Marchioness Townshend and the Hon. Mrs
Gardiner_. For a while, the _Ladies Waldegrave_, engraved by Valentine
Green, was considered at the top of the tree. £270 has been cheerfully
paid for it. Mr Urban Noseda--than whom no dealer in England is a
greater specialist in mezzotint, for he has inherited, it seems, his
mother’s eye--the eye which made that lady so desirable a friend to
the collector, a quarter of a century ago--Mr Urban Noseda (if I can
get somehow to the end of a sentence so involved and awkward that I am
beginning to feel it must necessarily be very clever too) tells me,
from Notes to which he has had access, that the original price of even
the most important of these Sir Joshua prints was never more than a
guinea and a half, and that not a few were issued at five shillings.
The Morland prices still seem moderate when compared with those of
average Sir Joshuas: actually cheap when compared with those that
are finest and rarest. Lately, the charming pair, _A Visit to the
Child at Nurse_ and _A Visit to the Child at School_, fetched, at
Sotheby’s, twenty-seven guineas; the _Farmer’s Stable_ fetched, at
the Huth Sale, £11, 10s.; the _Carrier’s Stable_, not long since at
Christie’s, fetched twenty-one guineas; _Fishermen going out_, by S. W.
Reynolds, has realised £17; _The Story of Letitia_, a small set, has
realised £30, but would to-day fetch more--in fine condition. Mr Noseda
says--and I suppose those other great authorities on Mezzotint, Messrs
Colnaghi, would confirm him--that the original prices of the Morlands
ranged from seven and sixpence to a guinea. Great as the difference is
between the sum first asked and the sum now obtained, I cannot in the
case of this so genial, graceful, acceptable, observant master, think
it is excessive. A generation that has gone a little mad over J. F.
Millet, and other interesting French rustic painters, may allow itself
some healthy enthusiasm when George Morland is to the front.
CHAPTER XII
Lithography, the convenient invention of Senefelder--Its recent
Revival due to the French and Whistler--Legros--Fantin--Whistler’s
Lithographs only inferior to his Etchings--C. H. Shannon’s
Lithographs the best expression of his art--Lithography and Etching
compared--Will Rothenstein--Oliver Hall--The Lithographs of
Roussel--Other Draughtsmen--The contemporary Lithograph foolishly
costly.
A final chapter I devote to another of the most justifiable and
reasonable of the more recent fads in Print Collecting--to a branch
of the collector’s pursuit far less important, indeed, and far less
interesting than Etching, far less historic than Mezzotint, but far
more creditable than the mania of the inartistic for the pretty
ineptitude of the coloured print. I am speaking of Lithography.
Men who are familiar with the later development of artistic work, know
that not exactly alongside of the very real and admirable Revival
of Etching, but closely following behind it, there has proceeded
some renewal of interest in the art of drawing upon stone, which, in
1796, was invented by Senefelder. Often, however, nowadays, it is not
literally “on stone.” Without defending the change--and yet without the
possibility of violently accusing it, seeing the achievements which
at least it has not forbidden--I may note that, as a matter of fact, a
transfer-paper, and not the prepared stone, is, very frequently in our
day, the substance actually drawn on.
Well, the renewal of interest in the art of Lithography owes much to
Frenchmen of the present generation, and much to Mr Whistler. I say
“the present generation” in talking of the French, because (not to
speak of the qualities obtained two generations ago by our English
Prout), Gavarni’s “velvety quality” and the “fever and freedom of
Daumier” were noticeable, and might have been influential long before
the days of our present young men. The work of Fantin-Latour, has been
to them an example, and the noble work of Legros, and the work of
Whistler. Fantin-Latour--that delightful painter of flowers and of the
poetic nude--has endowed us in Lithography as well as in Painting with
reveries of the nude, or of the slightly robed. They are all done in
freely scraped crayon. A few of them--such as _The Genius of Music_,
or the quite recent _To Stendhal_ or _Les Baigneuses_--the collector
of lithographs is bound to possess. But I must turn, in detail, to Mr
Whistler.
Mr Tom Way, who knows as much about Lithography as any one--and more,
perhaps, than any one about the lithographs of Whistler--assured me,
a year since, that something like a hundred drawings on the stone, or
transfer-paper (for Mr Whistler sometimes uses the one and sometimes
the other), had been wrought by one whose reputation is secure as
the master-etcher of our time. Since then Mr Way has accurately and
eulogistically catalogued them. They amount now, or did when Mr Way
finished his catalogue, to exactly a hundred and thirty. But Mr
Whistler is always working. Let us recall a few of them--most, though
indeed by no means all of them, were first seen in an exhibition held
in the rooms of the Fine Art Society. Before then, they were wont to
be shown privately, to Amateurs, by one or two dealers. Earlier still,
they were not shown at all; though a few of the finest of them had
been long ago wrought. There was that most distinguished drawing that
was published for a penny in the _Whirlwind_--the lady seated, with
a hat on, and one arm pendant. It is called _The Winged Hat_. As in
Mr Whistler’s rare little etching of the slightly-draped cross-kneed
girl stooping over a baby, one enjoys, in _The Winged Hat_, the
suggestion of delicate tone on the whole surface: the working of the
face is particularly noteworthy by reason of the subtle way in which
the draughtsman had suggested, by means of the handling of his chalk,
a different texture. “By means of the handling of his chalk,” did I
write?--perhaps a little too confidently. One can’t quite say how he
did really get it. But he has got it, somehow.
Then there is that admirable portfolio, of only five or six, the
Goupils published--containing the _Limehouse_, mysterious, weird, and
unsurpassable, and a _Nocturne_, wholly exquisite. Again, there is
_Battersea Bridge_, of 1878, which, good though it is, does not stand
comparison with Mr Whistler’s etchings of the same and similar themes.
Then there is a rare subject which people learned in Lithography are
wont to account a masterpiece in the method--a drawing tenderly washed:
a thing of masses and broad spaces, more than narrow lines. It is
called _Early Morning_, and is a vision of the River at Battersea. It
is faint--faint--of gradations the most delicate, of contrasts the
least striking--a gleam of silver and white.
Later, among many others, there have been that drawing of a draped
model seated which appeared in the now rare “L’Estampe Originale”; the
_fin_ portrait of M. Mallarmé--a writer so difficult to understand,
that by the faithful his profundity is taken for granted--some slender,
lissome nudes or semi-nudes, most characteristic of Whistler; the
_St Giles’s Church_, the _Smith’s Yard_, _Lyme Regis_, the _Belle
Dame paresseuse_, with the quality of a chalk drawing; the _Belle
Jardinière_, which has something, but by no means all of the infinite
freedom of the etching of _The Garden_; again, _The Balcony_ with
people peering down from it, as if at a procession--and procession
indeed it was, since the thing was wrought on the day of Carnot’s
funeral. Then, in the _Forge_ and _The Smith of the Place du Dragon_
there is the tender soft grey quality which people learned in these
things conceive, I think generally, to be impossible to “transfer.”
But of the younger artists who have worked in Lithography it is time
to say something. Mr Frank Short, with his placid dream of _Putney_,
with the intricate rhythm of line of his _Timber-Ships_, _Yarmouth_,
should not be passed by. Nor Mr Francis Bate, who, to draw as he has
drawn, and see as he has seen, _The Whiting Mill_, could not possibly
have been wanting in originality of expression or of sight. Nor Mr
George Clausen, again, whose _Hay Barn_ bears witness not only to
his easy command of _technique_, but to his flexibility. It is one
of those treatments of rustic life in which Mr Clausen has been wont
to show the influence of Millet, if not of Bastien Lepage. It is of
a realism artistically subdued, yet undeniable. Of the work of C. H.
Shannon I must speak a good deal more fully, for of C. H. Shannon,
Lithography is the particular art. He is no beginner at Lithography: no
maker of first experiments. I do not know that he--like Mr Short--is
an engraver in any way. He is not, like Mr Whistler, celebrated on
two continents as etcher and painter to boot. He is above all things
draughtsman--draughtsman poetic and subtle. The air of Lithography he
breathes as his native air.
C. H. Shannon’s art it is by no means easy for the healthy normal
person to appreciate at once. It is possible even for a student of
the matter to lose sight of Shannon’s poetry and sensitiveness, in a
fit of impatience because the anatomy of his figures does not always
seem to be true, or because his sentiment has not robustness. I have
a lurking suspicion that I was myself rather slow to appreciate him.
Few people’s appreciation of the original in Art, comes to them all
at once. And touchy folk--unreasonable, almost irresponsible--are
apt to blame one on this account. One has “swallowed one’s words,”
they say--because one has modified an opinion. The world, even the
intelligent world, they querulously grumble, was not ready to receive
them. Is that so very amazing? Themselves, doubtless, were born with
every faculty matured--they possessed, upon their mother’s breasts, a
nice discrimination of the virtues of Lafitte of ’69. Some of us, under
such circumstances, can but crave their tolerance--we were born duller.
Of lithographic _technique_, Mr C. H. Shannon--to go back to him, after
an inexcusable digression--is a master; and here let it be said that
not only does he draw upon the stone invariably, whilst Mr Whistler
(it has been named before) sometimes does and sometimes does not
draw on it, but he insists also upon printing his own impressions.
He has a press; he is an enthusiast; he sees the thing through. The
precise number of his lithographs it is not important to know. What is
important, is to insist upon the relative “considerableness” of nearly
all of them. With him the thoroughly considered composition takes the
place of the dainty sketch. Faulty the works of Charles Shannon may be,
in certain points; deficient in certain points; but rarely indeed are
they slight, either in conception or execution. Of each one of them
may it be said that it is a serious work: the seriousness as apparent
in the more or less realistic treatment of _The Modeller_ as in
_Delia_, ideal and opulent and Titianesque. The _Ministrants_, of 1894,
is perhaps his most important. What is more exquisite than the just
suggested movements of _The Sisters_? _Sea-Breezes_ is noteworthy, of
course, in composition, and refined, of course, in effect.
Before I go on to discuss a few others of the modern men, it may be
more interesting to remind the reader--it may be, even to inform
him--what is and what may hope to be Lithography’s place. In such
signs of its revival as are now apparent, he will surely rejoice.
One does rejoice to find an artist equipped with some new medium of
expression--some medium of expression, at all events, by which his
work, while remaining autographic, may yet be widely diffused. And
the art or craft of Lithography, whatever it does not do, does at
least enable the expert in it to produce and scatter broadcast, by
the hundred or the thousand if he choose, work which shall have all
or nearly all the quality of a pencil or chalk drawing, or, if it is
desired, much of the quality even of a drawing that is washed. This
is excellent; and then again there is the commercial advantage of
relatively rapid and quite inexpensive printing. But what the serious
and impartial amateur and collector of Fine Art will have to notice
on the other side, is, first of all, that Lithography is not richly
endowed with a separate quality of its own. With work that is printed
from a metal plate, this is quite otherwise. Mezzotint has a charm that
is its own, entirely. And Line-Engraving has the particular charm
of Line-Engraving. And Etching--the biting, which gives vigour now,
and now extreme delicacy; the printing, which deliberately enhances
this or modifies that; the burr, the dry-point work, its intended
effect; the papers, and the different results they yield, of tone
or luminousness--all these things contribute to, and are a part of,
Etching’s especial quality and especial delight.
A comparison between Lithography and Etching in particular--putting
other mediums aside--leads to further reflections. Lithography lacks
the relief of etched work. “You can’t have grey and black lines”--a
skilled etcher says to me, who enjoys Lithography as well as Etching,
and sometimes practises it--“you can’t have grey and black lines,
in that the printing of a lithograph is surface-printing, and every
mark upon the stone prints equally black. Therefore for grey work
in Lithography, you must have a grain upon the stone--or on the
transfer-paper--that your drawing is made on.” And he adds, “Whatever
can be done upon a lithographic stone, can be done with a much higher
quality upon a plate.” And the soft grey line, he says, when got upon
the stone--“well, if that is what you want, in a soft-ground etching it
can be got much better.”
As to Mezzotint again, to compare the quality of a fine mezzotint from
copper, with any quality that is obtainable in stone, would, generally,
be absurd. We are brought back, however, to that which is Lithography’s
especial virtue and convenience--it gives the autographic quality of
the pencil drawing, of the chalk drawing, of the drawing that is washed.
When, in these last words, I tried to indicate Lithography’s natural
limits, and said, practically, that its main function was to produce
“battalions” where ordinary drawing must produce but “single spies,”
I said nothing that need encourage readers to suppose that its
process lay perfectly at the command of every draughtsman, and that
the first-comer, did he know well how to draw, would get from the
lithographic stone every quality the stone could yield. And this
being so, it can surprise no one if in a chapter on the Revival
of Lithography I give conspicuous place to the young men who have
really fagged at it, rather than to the possibly more accomplished,
the certainly more famous artists who have drawn just lately on the
tracing-paper, oftener than not in complimentary recognition of the
fact that now a hundred years have passed since Alois Senefelder
invented the method which, half a century later, Hulmandel did
something to perfect.
Mr C. H. Shannon--pre-eminently noticeable among these younger
men--has been discussed already. We will look now at the work of
another of them--Mr Will Rothenstein, whose mind, whose hand-work, is
conspicuously unlike Mr Shannon’s, in that, though he can be romantic,
he can scarcely be poetic. A vivid realism is his characteristic, and,
with that vivid realism, romance, phantasy, caprice--either or all--may
find themselves in company; but poetry, hardly. Mr Rothenstein--as
there is some reason, perhaps, for telling the collector--is not only
young, but extremely young. His series of Oxford lithographs were
wrought, most of them, when he was between twenty and two-and-twenty
years old. It was an audacious adventure, with youth for its excuse.
For this set of Oxford portraits was to be the abstract of the
Oxford of a day. In it, Professors and Heads of Houses are--men who
for perhaps a generation remain in their place--but in it, too, are
athletes, engaging undergraduates, lads whose achievements may become
a tradition, but whose places know them no more. The first part of
the “Oxford Characters”--that is the proper name of it--appeared in
June 1893. In it, is the portrait of that great Christ Church boating
man, W. L. Fletcher, and a portrait of Sir Henry Acland, for which
another more august-looking rendering of the same head and figure was
after a while substituted. Again, there is an admirable vision of Max
Müller--Mr Rothenstein’s high-water mark, perhaps, in that which he
might probably suppose to be the humble art of likeness-taking.
Quite outside the charmed Oxford life are the subjects of some of Mr
Rothenstein’s generally piquant portraits. There is the portrait of
Emile Zola, for instance. I never saw the man. This may or may not
be a _terre-à-terre_ view of him. Most probably it is. But certainly
the face, with its set lips and hollow cheeks, is cleverly rendered,
though in such rendering we may fancy not so much the author of the
_Faute de l’Abbé Mouret_ and of the _Page d’Amour_, as the author of
_Nana_ and of _Le Ventre de Paris_. Again, there is a portrait, at once
refined and forcible, of that great gentleman, path-breaking novelist,
and dainty connoisseur, Edmond de Goncourt, elderly, but with fires
unquenched in the dark, piercing eyes, and the great decoration, so
to say, of snow-white hair. Then again, the pretty, pleasing lady,
the fresh young thing with her big bonnet--the lady seen full-face,
her lips drawn so tenderly. Such flesh and blood as hers, had the
Millament of Congreve. If sometimes in them the anatomy of the figures
is expressed insufficiently, these works are at least executed with
well-acquired knowledge of the effects to which Lithography best lends
itself. It can escape no one that, whatever be their faults, the artist
utters in them a note that is his own.
To trace, with fairness, the revival of Lithography, even in England
only, it should be mentioned that a generation after the achievements
of Samuel Prout--his records of architecture in Flanders and in
Germany--and the somewhat overrated performances of Harding, the
members of the Hogarth Sketching Club made one night, at the house
of Mr Way, the elder--the date was the 15th of December, 1874--a
set of drawings on the stone. They must be rare, now. Indeed the
only copy I have seen was that shown to me at the printing-house in
Wellington Street. One of the best was Charles Green’s drawing of two
men--ostlers, both of them, or of ostler rank--one of them lighting his
pipe. The hand is excellently modelled: the light and shade of the
whole subject has crispness and vigour. Sir James Linton contributed a
_Coriolanus_ subject, in something more than outline, though not fully
expressed--and yet it is beautifully drawn. Mr Coke sent a _Massacre of
the Innocents_, classic and charming in contour; while to look at the
_Sir Galahad_ of Mr E. J. Gregory is to recall to mind completely the
great Romantic Gregory of that early day.
In the Paris Exhibition of Lithographs and in that at Mr Dunthorne’s,
there have figured a group of subjects done lately by well-known
Academicians and others, and printed--some of them with novel
effects--by or under the close direction of Mr Goulding, that famous
printer of etchings, who now, it seems, has the laudable ambition of
rivalling, as a printer of lithographs, the great house of Way. He has
his own methods. The original work is of extremely various quality.
Much of it was produced somewhat hurriedly. I do not mean that the
drawings were done rapidly, or that it would have been wrong if they
had been; for, obviously, the rapid drawing of the capable is often as
fine as the slowest, and has the interest of a more urgent message.
I mean that they were done, for the most part, by those not versed,
as yet, in such secrets as Lithography possesses. Yet, coming often
from artists of distinction, many of them have merits. Not much is
finer than a girl’s head, by Mr Watts. It is mostly “in tone”; and it
is scarcely too much to say of it that it is strong as anything of
Leonardo’s--as anything of Holbein’s, one might as easily declare, did
not Holbein’s name suggest, along with strength, a certain austerity
which Mr Watts mostly avoids. There is a graceful figure-drawing by
Lord Leighton, who was interested in the new movement, but who was far
too sensible to set vast store by what--as I remember that he wrote
to tell me--was the only lithographic drawing he had ever executed.
There are strong studies by Sargent--rather brutal perhaps in light and
shade--of male models, whose partial nudity there is little to render
interesting.
We are brought back then to the work of artists not Academicians at
all--men some of them comparatively young in years, but older in a
faithful following of the lines on which the craft of Lithography most
properly moves. There is Mr C. J. Watson, for instance. The personal
note--which, I cannot conceal it, I esteem most of all, and most of all
must revel in--the personal note may be, with him, a little wanting;
but thorough craftsman he undeniably is. And by Mr Oliver Hall, one
of the most delightful of our younger etchers, who as an etcher has
been treated in his place, there is a vision of some grey sweeping
valley--_Wensleydale_--with trees only in middle distance, or in the
remote background. In it, and perhaps even more especially in that
quite admirable lithograph, _The Edge of the Moor_, we recognise that
way of looking at the world which we know in the etchings; but the
intelligence and sensitiveness of the artist have suffered him, or
led him rather, to modify the work: to properly adapt it to the newer
medium. _The Edge of the Moor_ is, I have implied, quite masterly; and
then again there is a tree-study in which Mr Hall recalls those broad
and massive, yet always elegant sketches made by the great Cotman, in
the latest years, generally, of a life not too prolonged.
Again, among fine lithographs exhibited or not exhibited, there is,
by Mr Raven Hill, _The Oyster-Barrow_--a marvellously vivid, faithful
study of “Over the Water” (or of Dean’s Yard, it may be) by night--and
the equally momentary, spontaneous vision of _The Baby_, with the
rotundity of Boucher, and more than the expressiveness of the late
Italian: a baby lost, one must avow, to all angelic dreams, and set on
carnal things. Perhaps Mr George Thomson’s best lithograph remains the
_Brentford Eyot_, though there is charm of movement in at least one
figure-study. By Mr Charles Sainton there is a luxurious head of just
the type one might expect from the author of silver-points seductive
and popular. Mr Walter Sickert’s work, whether you like it or not, at
least has, visibly, its source in personal observation and deliberate
principle.
By M. Théodore Roussel there are a whole group of lithographs,
dainty and delightful, exquisite and fresh--with so much of his own
in them, as well as something, of course, of Mr Whistler’s. By the
side of his _Scene on the River_--a quaint Battersea or Chelsea bit,
I take it--place one of his supple nudities, and against his supple
nudity, place his _Opera Cloak_. Charming! all of them. The man is a
born artist--he not only draws but sees: sees with refinement and
distinction. And there must come a time when Roussel’s work will be
appreciated far more widely.
By Mr Jacomb Hood there is a spirited elderly man’s portrait, and an
_Idyll_--a Classical or an Arcadian _pas de quatre_--of singular,
unwonted charm. By Mr Corbett, the semi-classical landscape painter,
there is a nude study--a torso, magnificently modelled. By Mr Solomon
Solomon there is a _Venus_, correct in draughtsmanship of course; nor
wanting in dramatic quality, for it is not the undressed woman of too
many students, but Aphrodite herself--“Vénus, à sa proie attachée.”
And lastly--since I cannot merely catalogue--there is Mr Anning Bell,
who has bestowed on us enjoyable designs--book-plates _hors ligne_
indeed, so charming are they in their reticence and grace and measured
beauty. In Lithography, we may be thankful for the Tanagra-like grace
of his _Dancing Girl_. But “Why Tanagra?” am I asked. Because Classical
without austerity: provokingly Modern, and yet endowed with the
legitimate and endless fascination of Style.
And now, to end with, it seems advisable to say something on the
very practical matter of the acquisition of lithographs by the
collector, and on their cost. The money value of the lithograph is
most uncertain. When the lithograph appears in a popular magazine--the
actual lithograph, remember; no merely photographic reproduction of
it--it is, on publication, valued at a couple of shillings, or at a
shilling, or, as in the extraordinary case of publication in the
extinct _Whirlwind_, even at a penny. The prices I have named are,
most of them at least, absurd; but on the other hand the dealer’s
price--sometimes the original artist’s price--for an impression, is
wont to be excessive. A lithograph can be printed--as magazine issue
suffices to show--in considerable numbers. Nothing restricts it as
the ordinary unsteeled etching is restricted: still less, as the
dry-point is restricted. There is no reason, except the scantiness of
the public demand, why it should not be issued in an edition almost
as large as that of the average book. Nor is the printing costly. Nor
has the drawing on stone or transfer-paper involved anything more of
labour, skill, or genius, than is involved in the preparation of a
single chapter of a fine novel--of a single paragraph in a fine short
story. Yet while the novel sells probably at six shillings, and the
whole short story (and other short stories along with it) sells, very
likely, at three-and-sixpence, the impression of a lithograph--unless,
as I have said before, it be published in a magazine--is seldom sold
for less than a guinea or two. The Fine Art Society asked something
like three guineas apiece, I think, for the lithographs of Whistler,
even when it first exhibited them. Things, of course, have occurred
that have raised their value since. I mentioned the circumstance to a
man who was interested in the question, both as artist and connoisseur.
“You do not want to vulgarise lithographs,” he said, “by issuing too
many impressions.” I wonder how many impressions of Gray’s “Elegy”
have been issued? And how many of the “Ode to Duty”? And I wonder
whether Wordsworth and Gray have been “vulgarised,” because the fruit
of their genius has been widely diffused?
APPENDIX
CERTAIN WOODCUTS
Though when this volume was first planned, it was supposed that
in its regular course it might embrace a chapter upon Woodcuts,
mature consideration and the progress of the work revealed to me the
undesirableness of treating either by my own or by a more qualified
hand the theme of Woodcuts, at any important length; and in adding here
a Note on certain examples of that ancient art, it is convenient that I
should say plainly why the matter is left to an Appendix.
First, then, treatment exhaustive, or adequate, could only have been
supplied by some one other than myself: my own knowledge of woodcuts
being merely that of an outsider who cannot withhold a measure of
interest from any departments of Art. To have invited the continued
presence of an expert--an enthusiast in the particular thing--would
have been at least to deprive the book of that unity of sentiment which
comes of undivided authorship, and which even in a work of this sort
may conceivably be a benefit: moreover, although a complete Guide to
Old Prints must include of necessity many words about Woodcuts, it was
doubtful whether the subject of “Fine Prints” involved even a mention
of them. I mean, it might be argued, plausibly, that Woodcuts, however
fine in their design--and the design of the giant Dürer was given to
some of them--are in the very nature of things scarcely “fine” in
execution. To say that the best recall the utterance of noble sentiment
by rough and uncouth tongue, is not for a moment to minimise their
sterling worth. Lastly, too, the collectors of them--in England at
least--are scanty in the extreme. When--one may ask--do they appear
at Sotheby’s? As objects of research, they seem hopelessly out of
fashion. It may be that they had their day when only the Past was
thought interesting. But it has been one of the objects of this book to
acknowledge specially the interest of more modern achievement, and not
to call contemporary genius only “talent,” until it is contemporary no
longer, and, being dead--and dead long since--may be accorded its due.
But I should like to tell the beginner in the study of Prints one or
two quite elementary things--as, for instance, that the best and the
most numerous of old Woodcuts are German; that not a few of the earlier
masters of Copperplate Engraving carried out upon the wood-block
certain of their designs; that in the days of Bewick the art had a
certain revival, finding itself well adapted--in book illustration at
all events--to the rendering of Bewick’s homely and rustic themes. And
so one might go on--but after all, Book Illustration is no part of
one’s theme. Let it just be mentioned about Bewick--before we leave
the English woodcuts for the earlier masters--that the rarest and in
some respects the most important of his works (not, I think, the most
fascinating) is the piece known as the _Chillingham Bull_. When only a
few impressions had been taken from it, the original block split. Hence
the print’s scarcity; and in its scarcity we see in part at least the
cause of its attractiveness.
A passage in the last annual report made by Mr Sidney Colvin to the
Trustees of the British Museum--in his capacity as Keeper of the
Prints--reminds me of a splendid gift made lately to the nation by the
munificence of Mr William Mitchell: a gift which the possession of
money alone, and of a generous intention, could not have empowered
him to make; only deep knowledge, and real diligence in the art of
collecting, made the thing possible. Through Mr Mitchell’s gift
there passes into the store-house of the Department of Prints this
connoisseur’s collection of German and other Woodcuts, including a
series of those by Albert Dürer, which is almost complete, and “quite
unrivalled,” Mr Colvin says, “in quality and condition.” The whole
array includes 1290 early woodcuts, chiefly, as will be seen, German,
and constituted for the most part as follows:--104 by anonymous German
artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; 151 single cuts
by Albert Dürer, together with the Little Passion (set of proofs),
the Life of the Virgin (first state, without text), and the Great
Passion, the Life of the Virgin, and the Apocalypse (all with Latin
text, edition of 1511); 63 by Hans Schaufelein, including two sets of
proofs of two series of the Passion; 18 by Hans Springinklee, including
14 proofs of illustrations to “Hortulus Animæ”; 7 by Wolfgang Huber;
36 by Hans Baldung; 7 by Johann Wechtlin; 19 by Hans Sebald Beham;
43 by Lucas Cranach, including a unique impression of the St George,
printed in gold on a blue ground; 60 by Albert Altdorfer; 40 by Hans
Burgkmair; 313 by or attributed to Hans Holbein; 9 by Urs Graf; 12 by
Heinrich Holzmüller; 14 by J. von Calcar; 5 by Jost Amman; 11 by Anton
von Worms; 16 by Lucas van Leyden; 6 attributed to Geoffroy Tory; one
attributed to Marie de Medicis; the large view of Venice by Jacopo de’
Barbarj, first state; 9 by Niccolò Boldrini; 5 by I.B. with the bird.
An inspection of this collection alone, in the Museum Print Room,
constitutes, at first hand, an introduction to the study of an ancient,
quaint, and pregnant art.
So much had I written when there came to me a note from Mr O.
Gutekunst, curiously confirming, on the whole, the view that I had
taken as to the small place filled by Woodcuts, generally, in the
scheme of the modern collector. It is not, however, so much on
this account that I print the note here, as because it contains
one or two particulars--especially as to money value--not named by
me, and which may be of interest. “The history of Woodcuts,” says
Mr O. Gutekunst--instructing my ignorance--“begins, as you know,
practically with printed books in which the woodcuts took the place
of the miniatures, etc., in Manuscripts. During almost the whole of
the Fifteenth Century the Woodcut was thus confined to illustration,
and belongs far more to the bibliophile than to the Print-collector.
_Vide ‘Biblia Pauperum’_ and similar works--in Italy, Germany, and the
Netherlands--Block Books, Incunabula, etc., etc. The great period of
Wood Engraving as a distinct art by itself--a then and now appreciated
mode of expression of the artist--is the first half of the Sixteenth
Century.” Mr Gutekunst then cites to me works by masters, some of
whom have been named. “There were Dürer, Cranach, Holbein, Altdorfer,
Brosamer,” he says. “Fine specimens of these men’s work, particularly
portraits, and when printed in one, two, or more colours, are now,
and always must have been, exceedingly rare, with prices varying
from, say £20 to £80 for single very fine specimens. The decadence
begins with Jost Amman, for instance, in Germany, and Andreani, say,
in Italy, where the works of earlier, and more particularly the
masters of the wrong half of the Sixteenth Century, were reproduced in
chiar-oscuro.” With the exception perhaps of the remarkable impressions
in Mr Mitchell’s collection, Mr O. Gutekunst asserts that the finest
specimens always were most appreciated in Germany, and adds, “There has
ever been more interest taken in Woodcuts by German collectors than by
any others.”
POSTSCRIPT: 1905
I somehow omitted from the First Edition of this book the reference
I ought to have made to Charles Jacque. It is not necessary to treat
him at length; for, while few etchers have been more prolific, it must
always be recollected that to be prolific is not to be important. It is
by quality that an artist, in any Art, alone becomes important. Charles
Jacque’s quality varies. Many of his etchings are merely dexterous
memoranda of his pictures--done for his own service, presumably,
rather than for the world. Even here, he can often be very spirited;
sometimes even very desirable. He has done most vivacious _croquis_.
And, for those whom the vivacious _croquis_ does not content, it should
be named that he has done likewise highly serious and more obviously
well considered work, full of the true pictorial quality--and done
it with the force of a painting in monochrome, and with an etching’s
spontaneity.
* * * * *
It happens that I have just a little amended, in the text of this
volume, the reference to Maxime Lalanne. By way of exception, that
reference is not now quite as it stood at first: so that perhaps it
may not be necessary to say anything more of Lalanne here, except just
this--inequality is his characteristic, as well as elegance. He knew
his business too well ever to work unadroitly. Methods of all sorts
lay at his command--I do not mean “tricks.” But what did not lie at
his command, was invariable fineness or freshness of vision. That is
not to be wondered at. Now, however, that we have seen, at Mr Richard
Gutekunst’s, the artist’s own Collection of his etchings, we have seen
for the first time what they can be--in quite perfect impressions.
And the result is, that true Collectors, who hitherto have been
little busied about him, will look to it that Lalanne does not remain
unrepresented in their portfolios.
* * * * *
Since I made my reference to Mr D. Y. Cameron, in the text, that most
serious artist has more than justified anything I may have prophesied
about him. In the old spirit, yet with even more marked excellence,
he has continued and extended his work; and it will not be deemed out
of place for me to mention that two years ago he had done so much and
so well, that I addressed myself to making a Catalogue of what he had
up to that time produced. My own belief in him is made evident by
recording this circumstance. And a considerable Public--now eager for
his prints--shares my convictions about him.
* * * * *
Muirhead Bone, in the lines that are now being written, finds himself
named for the first time in this book. Of the younger etchers, there
is absolutely no one who, I do not mean as regards variety of theme,
but as regards perfection and intricacy of work upon a given plate,
can accomplish so much. His certain and brilliant draughtsmanship, and
his skill in the _technique_ of Etching--of Dry-Point especially--have
been applied chiefly to records, un-Méryon-like--that is to say,
vivacious and very matter-of-fact, rather than solemn or poetic--of
vanishing London. Behold his _Clare Market_. If the old “Gaiety”
Theatre disappears from the Strand, Mr Muirhead Bone finds it in his
heart to be consoled by a new one. And he depicts the slow departure
of the old, and the up-building of the new. He, more than any one, has
revealed the interest of scaffolding. But he is not always re-building.
Sometimes--as in his plate called the _Shot Tower_, but really
devoted, not to that only, but to Waterloo Bridge and the North Lambeth
Shore--nothing is threatened. And there is a hay-mow by him, “seen”
in dry-point, very much as Dewint would have seen it in Water-colour.
Broad, yet extraordinarily observant, is Muirhead Bone’s work.
* * * * *
At the Annual Exhibitions of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers,
there have been noticed--since the year when _Fine Prints_ first
appeared--contributions, not in the least to be despised, by Miss
Constance Pott and Miss Margaret Kemp-Welch. Really, some of them--Miss
Kemp-Welch’s simple _In the Marsh_, for instance--are so good that they
should almost suffice to enable their authors to survive the deplorable
disadvantage of being only women. Quite hopefully may one look on the
artistic future of these ladies--on the public recognition of it.
* * * * *
At present, however, I find in the work of a man not yet spoken of--Mr
E. Charlton--more absolute unity, without monotony of repetition--more
artistic individuality, in fine. Why is it not already better known?
Useless question, as far as the big Public is concerned, when people
go into the Exhibition and fancy that some of the best work is the
self-assertive work of Mr Brangwyn, that leaps to their eyes. The
German proverb says--or Mr Robert Browning once told me that it
said--“What has a cow to do with nutmegs?” And what have people who
do not understand in the least the spirit of Etching, got to do with
modest, thoughtful little records of harbours, quays, and all that lies
about them--of warehouse, boat and barge--by this dainty, accurate
draughtsman, Mr Charlton, who does not want to knock any living mortals
down--metaphorically speaking--by the work of his needle, but to charm
them rather, to put on them the spell, wrought on those who are worthy
to receive it, by the rhythm of intricate line? The lines that delight
me on a quay--in a harbour--by the sheds and steamers of Newhaven or
Lymington, say--delight me yet more, because they are refined upon, in
the modest etchings of Mr Charlton.
Among contemporary Frenchmen, Eugène Béjot, with his Montmartre and
Seine pieces, must unquestionably be named--and some of his work
possessed.
* * * * *
And now we come down to grosser matter--to questions of Price.
Scattered about the volume, will be found references to prices given
for noble prints--and prints not noble--and of these references some
are not as representative as they were eight years ago. I will not go
into great detail here; but I will say a few things. First, I will
say that, broadly speaking, the tendency is towards a marked increase
in money value, particularly for good work, and good original work.
Some few interesting artists--it is true--scarcely hold their own. The
money value of Hollars--not of late years excessive--has not materially
increased. Hogarth’s prints are, I consider, quite absurdly cheap--but
foolish people, not in the least particular as to the things they read,
are sometimes very squeamish as to the things they see. Some Dutch
etchers, not discussed much in the course of my volume, are amongst
those towards whom sensible interest turns. It cannot be long before
the admission is made generally, that Bega--with his truth of action
and his magnificence of composition, addressed to tavern themes--is
fully Ostade’s equal, and not at all his follower. Of course, the
greatest Dutchman--Rembrandt--increases steadily in money value. There
is no fine print by Rembrandt which--bought at the current price
for it--should not be, in the phrase of stock-brokers, a very “safe
lock-up.” Dürers, too, have rightly gone higher; and there must be more
and more recognised the happy invention and the perfect craftsmanship
of the Behams and Aldegrever.
* * * * *
Interest shifts a little in regard to the Mezzotints after Sir Joshua.
The money value of his pretty women--generally of title--has been so
high, that, if there is common-sense left in the land, it can scarcely
get much higher; but knowing people are beginning, I believe, to buy
the less celebrated women--such as the _Miss Oliver_ it may be (in
the illustration to the present edition of this book)--and the finer
of the mezzotint portraits of men, not only after Sir Joshua, but
after Romney. Turner’s “Liber” is looking up again, and the demand
for Constables--David Lucas’s smaller mezzotints--will certainly not
diminish.
French Eighteenth Century Prints--whether the grave Chardins, the
stately Watteaus, or the lighter records of light loves--are worth more
than when I wrote eight years ago: partly because well-to-do English
people of taste have now taken to buying them. As for the “coloured
print”--at the best, rather dainty--it will, I trust, have had its day
before long.
* * * * *
The best Modern Etching--whether English or French--is more and more
valued. A set of Seymour Haden’s Paris publication, “Etudes à l’Eau
Forte”--consisting of twenty-five prints, worth, eight years ago, about
thirty guineas together--sells to-day for a hundred and twenty. Still
more conspicuous, however, is the rise in Méryons and Whistlers. At
the Wickham Flower Sale, in London, last December, Méryon’s print of
the _Morgue_--a Second State--fetched £86; his _St. Etienne-du-Mont_,
£58; his _Galérie de Nôtre-Dame_, £56. There was no fine _Abside_ at
that Sale; but elsewhere a fine First State has fetched over £200, and
a fine Second State, £140. As for Whistlers, at the Wickham Flower
Sale--to take three instances of different periods in the master’s
work--the _Kitchen_ went for thirty-one guineas; the _Garden_ for
forty; and _Pierrot, Amsterdam_, for fifty-six.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ALVIN, LOUIS. Catalogue Raisonné de l’Œuvre des trois frères, Jean,
Jerome, et Antoine Wierix. 8vo. 1866.
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INDEX
_Abside de Nôtre-Dame_, 72, 73, 74
_Adam and Eve_, 144, 146, 166
_Æsacus and Hesperie_, 192
_Agamemnon_, 101, 104
Aldegrever, 15, 154, 155, 156
Altdorfer, 150, 151
_Amsterdam, View of_, 53
_Ancient Italy_, 207
_Angerton Moss_, 135
Annis, 198
Antonio da Brescia, 164
_Antwerp Cathedral_, 44, 46
_Arche du Pont Nôtre-Dame_, 72
_Arms of Paris_, 81
Armstrong, Elizabeth, 135
_Arundel_, 207
Arundel, Lord, 42
_Assemblée au Concert_, 185
_Assumption_, 164
Audran, 171
Aumüller, 150, 152, 153
Aveline, 171
Avery, Samuel, 83, 109
_Baby, The_, 234
Baccio Baldini, 161
Bacon, Sir Hickman, 69
_Les Baigneuses_, 220
_Bain Froid Chevrier_, 81
_Balcony, The_, 112
Bale, Sackville, 166
_Bal Paré, Le_, 183
Barnard, John, 38, 146
Barrett, Edward, 109
Bartolozzi, 25, 26
Bartsch, Adam, 141, 149, 163
Basire, James, 190
_Basle_, 203
Bate, Francis, 225
_Battersea Bridge_, 120
_Battersea: Dawn_, 108
_Battersea Railway Bridge_, 107
_Battersea Reach_, 103
Baudelaire, 82
Baudouin, 183, 184
_Bêcheurs, Les_, 68
Beham, Barthel, 149, 150
Beham, Hans Sebald, 149, 150, 152-154
_Beignets, Les_, 182
Béjot, Eugène, 248
Bell, Anning, 235
_Ben Arthur_, 203, 204
_Bénédicité, Le_, 179
Beraldi, 84
_Beresford, Hon. Mrs_, 218
Binck, Jacob, 149, 155
Binyon, 36
_Black Lion Wharf_, 116
Blanc, Charles, 48
Bocher, Emanuel, 179
Bolingbroke, Miss, 131, 135
Bolswert, 13
Bone, Muirhead, 246
_Bonne Mère, La_, 182
_Bonus, Ephraim_, 59
_Border Towers_, 133
_Borghese Gardens_, 129
_Bosquet de Bacchus_, 173
Boucher, François, 181, 182
Bouillon, Jules, 166, 175
_Bouvier, Le_, 38, 39, 193
Boydell, Alderman, 193
Bracquemond, 82
_Brentford Eyot_, 234
Brion, 171
_Brocca Italienne_, 89
Brooke, Stopford, 109, 145, 198, 201
Brosamer, Hans, 149
Buccleuch, Duke of, 57, 203
_Buffoon and Two Couples_, 154
Burty, P., 82, 83
_Butterflies_, 45
_Calm, A_, 203
_Camargo, Mlle._, 176
Cameron, D. Y., 133, 134
_Campo, Vaccino_, 37, 39
_Canal, The_, 56
_Carrier’s Stable_, 219
Cars, Laurent, 171, 176
_Carwardine, Mrs_, 218
_Cattle Going Home in Stormy Weather_, 37, 38
_Cecilia, Saint_, 162, 167
_C’est un Fils, Monsieur!_, 186
_Chain Pier, Brighton_, 133
_Chalice, The_, 46
_Challoner, Sir Thomas_, 46
_Champs Elysées_, 173
_Chantres Espagnols_, 127
Chardin, 18, 19, 34, 87, 177-180
Charlton, E., 247
_Charles the Fifth_, 154
_Chemise en levée_, 182
_Chiffre d’Amour_, 183
_Christ Healing the Sick_, 58
_Christ Descending into Hell_, 166
_Christopher, Saint_, 142
Cipriani, 26
_Clare Market_, 246
Clarke, Mary Constance, 201
Claude, 16, 37-39
Clausen, George, 225
Clément, 166
Clint, 198
_Clovelly_, 21, 37, 205, 206
_Coat of Arms with the Cock_, 144, 146, 147, 153
_Coat of Arms with a Skull_, 144, 146, 147
Cochin, 171
Colnaghi, 56, 59, 147, 175, 202, 219
Colvin, Sidney, 164, 243
_Combe Bottom_, 106, 107
_Communion dans l’Eglise St Médard_, 127
_Concert, Le_, 183
_Conflagration in Bordeaux_, 85
Constable, 20, 210, 211, 249
Cooke, George, 21
Cooke, William, 21
_Coppenol_, 60
Corbett, 235
_Coriolanus_, 231
Corot, 85
_Cottage with Dutch Hay Barn_, 17, 54
_Cottage with White Palings_, 53
Crepy, 173
_Crowhurst_, 196
_Crûche Cassée_, 181
_Dance of Cupids_, 166
_Dance of Damsels_, 164
_Dance by the Waterside_, 38
_Dance under the Trees_, 38, 39
_Dancing Girl_, 235
Danlos, 166, 167
Daubigny, 85
David, 187
Dawe, 198
Day, Mr Justice, 69
Dean, John, 218
_Death Surprising a Woman_, 154
Debucourt, 27
Delaborde, 164
Delâtre, 118
_Delia_, 226
Demarteau, 182
_Départ pour le Travail, Le_, 68
Deprez, 23, 58, 107
_Derby, Elizabeth, Countess of_, 218
_Désir de Plaire_, 177
Dewint, 129, 211
Diderot, 170, 181
_Directeur des Toilettes_, 185
Dowdeswell, Walter, 109
Drake, Sir William, 102, 106, 121
Drevet, 13, 214
Duflos, 182
Dumesnil, 38
Dunkarton, 198
Dunthorne, 106, 122
Duplessis, 163
Durazzo, 164
Dürer, Albert, 14, 139-147, 161
Earlom, 97, 193, 212, 213
_Early Morning_, 224
Easling, 198
East, Alfred, 135
“Eaux-Fortes sur Paris,” 77
Edelinck, 13
_Edge of the Forest_, 135
_Edge of the Moor_, 233
_Edinburgh_, 43
Eisen, 183
_Elliot, Mrs_, 218
Ellis, F. S., 118
_Embarquement pour Cythère_, 173
_Empty Pitcher_, 40
“England and Wales,” 205
_Entombment_, 166
_Entrée du Convent des Capucins_, 80
_Epées, Langues de Bœuf, Poignards_, 94
_Erasmus_, 84
_Erith Marshes_, 107
_Etienne-du-Mont, St_, 72, 76
_Étude de Jeune Fille_, 98
_Etude du Dessein_, 179
_Evening, Bosham_, 130
Faber, junior, 212
_Family, The_, 41
_Fanny Leyland_, 61, 101, 115, 121
Fantin-Latour, 222
_Farm behind Scarborough_, 128
_Farmyard with a Cock_, 192
_Farmer’s Stable_, 219
_Femme à la Tasse_, 98
_Fight for the Standard_, 154
Fisher, Richard, 38, 41, 57, 146, 153, 163
Fisher, R. C., 73
_Fishermen Going Out_, 219
_Flagellation, The_, 166
_Forge, The_, 121
_Four Naked Women_, 143
Fragonard, 182, 183
_Fribourg_, 85
_Fruit Shop_, 120
Gainsborough, 215, 217, 218
_Galérie de Nôtre-Dame_, 72
Galichon, 163
_Garden, The_, 112, 121
Geddes, 52, 66, 67
“Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne,” 89, 91, 97
_Genii, The Three_, 140
Girtin, 194
_Glaneuses, Les_, 68
_Gobelet d’Argent, Le_, 178
Goff, Colonel, 131-133
_Goldweigher, The_, 55
_Goldweigher’s Field_, 54, 55
Goncourt, Edmond et Jules de, 184
_Goncourt, Edmond de_, 231
Gonse, Louis, 90, 96
Goulding, 118, 232
_Grande Toilette, La_, 186
Gregory, E. J., 232
Green, Charles, 231
Green, Valentine, 218
_Greenwich, Long View of_, 45
Greuze, 19, 180, 181
_Grim Spain_, 105
Gutekunst, 41, 58, 147
Gutekunst, O., 244
Gutekunst, R., 122
_Haaring, Old_, 59
Haden, Seymour, 38, 39, 64, 100-107
Hall, Oliver, 134, 135, 233
_Halliford-on-Thames_, 66
Halsted, 201
Hamerton, P. G., 73, 107, 160, 161
Hamilton, Lady, 217
Hamilton, Dr, 216
_Haut d’un Battant de Porte, Le_, 84
Heaton, Mrs, 145
Helleu, P., 22, 98
Herkomer, 131
_Heureuse Fecondité, L’_, 182
Heywood, Rev. J. J., 43, 82
Higgins, Alfred, 69
Hill, Raven, 234
_Hind Head Hill_, 203
Hippesley, Sir John, 201
Hirsch, 82
_Hiver, L’_, 176
“Histoire de la Porcelaine,” 88, 89, 90, 95, 97
Hodges, 198
Hogarth, 18
Holbein, 57
Holford, 17, 55, 58, 166
Hollar, Wenceslaus, 36, 42-47
_Hollar_, 46
_Holy Island Cathedral_, 203
Hood, Jacomb, 135, 234
Hoppner, 215
Horne, Percy, 216
Holroyd, Charles, 128, 129
Horsburgh, 37
_Hubert, Saint_, 147
Huet, Paul, 67
Hulmandel, 229
Hume, Sir Abraham, 57
Hutchinson, 121
Huysum, Jan Van, 97
Hymans, Henri, 99
_Ile Enchantée, L’_, 174
_Incendie, L’_, 127
_Ingleborough_, 206
_In the Marsh_, 247
_Isis, Temple of_, 204
“Italy,” The, 207
_Itchen Abbas Bridge_, 133
Jacque, Charles, 245
Jacquemart, Albert, 86
Jacquemart, Jules, 86-97
_Jealousy_, 145
Jeaurat, 180
_Jeu de Cache-cache_, 176
_Jeu de l’Oye_, 179
_Jeu de Quatre Coins_, 176
_Jewish Bride, The Great_, 60
_Jonghe, Clément de_, 17, 61, 62
Joseph, Samuel, 95
_Jupiter et Léda_, 182
Kemp-Welch, Margaret, 247
Kennedy, 109, 111
Keppel, Frederick, 68, 100, 109
_King’s Lynn_, 135
_Kitchen, The_, 119
Kneller, 213
_Knight of Death, The_, 145, 147
Knowles, James, 79
Koehler, 141
Lacroix, 179
_Laitière, La_, 181
Lalanne, Maxime, 85
Lancret, 18, 175
_Landscape with a Flock of Sheep_, 56
_Landscape with an Obelisk_, 54, 56
_Landscape with a Tower_, 17
_Large “Pool,” The_, 120
Larmessin, De, 176
Lavreince, 184, 185
Lebrun, 67
_Leda_, 154
_Ledikant_, 63
Legros, Alphonse, 126-128, 222
Leighton, Lord, 233
Lely, 20
_Letitia, The Story of_, 219
Lewis, 194
Leyden, Lucas van, 14, 156, 157
“Liber Studiorum,” 20, 189, 204
“Liber Veritatis,” 191, 193
_Lime-Burners_, 121
Linton, Sir J. D., 231
_Little Boathouse_, 105
Loftie, Rev. W. J., 150, 153, 154
_London from the Top of Arundel House_, 45
_London from Greenwich_, 203, 204
_London Bridge_, 120
_Low Tide and the Evening Star_, 130
_Low Tide: Mouth of the Hampshire Avon_, 133
Lucas, David, 20, 210, 211, 249
_Lucretia_, 162, 167
Lupton, Thomas, 198
_Lutma_, 17, 60
M‘Ardell, 20, 214
Maberly, 29
Macgeorge, B. B., 73, 79, 82
_Madonna with the Sleeping Child_, 154
Mansfield, Howard, 73, 83
Mantegna, 13, 161, 164, 165
Marc Antonio, 13, 162
_Marchande de Moutarde_, 121
_Margate_, 37
_Margot la Critique_, 84
_Marriage à la Mode_, 19
Marshall, Julian, 39, 45, 46
Maso da Finiguerra, 159
Massard, 19, 181
_Master of the Caduceus_, 163
_Master of 1466, The_, 161
May, W. H., 131
Meder, 41
Meer, Van der, 96
_Melancholia_, 140, 144, 145, 147
_Mère de Rembrandt au Voile Noir_, 61, 115
Méryon, 21, 69-83
Metsu, 96
Middleton-Wake, Rev. C. H., 49, 141, 143
_Mill Bridge, Bosham_, 130
Miller, William, 21, 205
Millet, Jean-François, 67, 68
_Ministrants_, 227
_Miroir Français_, 92
Mitchell, William, 243
_Modern Italy_, 207
_Mont St Gothard_, 203
“Monte Oliveto,” 128
Moreau le jeune, 19, 186
_Morgue, The_, 72
Morland, 12, 216, 219
_Mort et le Bûcheron, La_, 127
_Mort du Vagabond, La_, 127
_Muff, The_, 115
_Muffs_, 44
_Mytton Hall_, 103, 106
_Naissance de Vénus_, 182
_Naked Woman seen from behind_, 63
Nanteuil, 214
_Nativity, The_, 140
_Nave of St George’s Chapel_, 44
Niel, 82
_Nine Barrow Down_, 105
_Nocturne, Battersea_, 223
_Norfolk Bridge, Shoreham_, 132
_North of London, Six Views in the_, 45
Noseda, Mrs, 202
Noseda, Urban, 219
_Oakhampton Castle_, 199
_Océanie_, 80
_Old Clothes Shop_, 120
_Oliver, Miss_, 249
_Omval_, 55
_Orage, L’_, 96
_Ornament with a Cuirass_, 154
_Ornament, Panel of_, 157
Ostade, 36, 40, 41
_Out of Study-Window_, 104
_Painter, The_, 41
_Palaces_, 121
_Palace, Stirling_, 133
_Paris, Isle de la Cité_, 119
Parthey, 43
Passavant, 141
“Passion, Little,” 142
“Passion upon Copper,” 142
Pater, 176, 177
_Peasant Paying his Reckoning_, 41
_Peckham Rye_, 66
Pencz, 149, 155
Pennell, J., 131
_Perspective_, 173
_Petit Pont_, 73
_Petite Pompe_, 81
_Pickled Herring Stairs_, 121
_Pine Trees, Christchurch_, 132
_Plague, The_, 167
_Pompe Nôtre-Dame_, 73
_Pont-au-Change_, 72, 74
_Pont-au-Change vers 1784_, 79, 80
_Pont Neuf_, 72
_Pont Neuf et la Samaritaine_, 79
_Pope’s Villa_, 191
“Ports of England,” 206, 207
Pott, Constance, 247
_Pourvoyeuse, La_, 178
_Premier Baiser_, 96
_Price’s Candle-Works_, 120
_Procris and Cephalus_, 192
_Putney_, 225
_Putney Bridge_, 120
Pye, John, 191
_Quarrel with Drawn Knives_, 41
_Quarter Boys_, 130
_Rag Gatherers_, 119
_Rape of Europa_, 39
Raphael, 12, 162
Rapilly, 179
_Ravisher, The_, 144
Rawlinson, W. G., 189, 190, 201
_Receipt, The_, 67
Reid, G. W., 141
Rembrandt, 16, 17, 48-65, 88
_Rembrandt Drawing_, 57, 58
_Rembrandt with a Sabre_, 58
_Rembrandt with a Turned-up Hat_, 58
_Rembrandt Farm, A_, 133
_Rêve d’Amour_, 96
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 12, 215, 216
“Richmondshire,” 206
_River in Ireland_, 101
“Rivers of France,” 207
_Road in Yorkshire_, 211
_Rochoux’s Card_, 81
Roget, J. L., 196
Romanet, 186
Romney, 12, 217
Rops, 99
Rosenberg, Dr, 150, 155
Rothenstein, Will, 229
_Round Temple_, 129
Rousseau, Théodore, 67
Roussel, Théodore, 234
_Royal Exchange_, 46
Rubens, 13, 174
_Rue des Mauvais Garçons_, 82
_Rue des Toiles_, 80
Rupert, Prince, 18
Ruskin, 198
_Salière de Troyes_, 94
_San Biagio_, 121
_Sawley Abbey_, 105
Say, W., 197
Schöngauer, Martin, 139, 140, 161
Scotin, 19
Scott, W. B., 149, 151, 155
_Sea Shells_, 46
_Seasons, The_, 45
Senefelder, 221
_Severn and Wye_, 199, 204
Shannon, C. H., 225-227
_Shepherd and Shepherdess Conversing_, 38, 39
_Shere Mill Pond_, 103, 106
Short, Frank, 129, 130
_Shot Tower_, 247
_Sichel, Mr_, 125
Sickert, Walter, 234
Siegen, Ludwig von, 209
_Six, Burgomaster_, 59
_Sleeping till the Flood_, 130
Smith, Challoner, 212
Smith, John, 20, 213
Smith, J. Raphael, 18, 213
_Smith of the Place du Dragon_, 224
_Snyders_, 40
_Sortie de l’Opéra_, 186
“Southern Coast,” 204, 205
_Speke Hall_, 121
_Spring_, 211
_Stamford_, 206
_Stonehenge_, 195
_Stork and Aqueduct_, 195
_Stourbridge Canal_, 130
_Strang, Ian_, 125
Strang, William, 124, 125
_Summerland_, 211
_Summer Storm_, 132
_Sunset_, 37
_Sunset on the Thames_, 105
Surugue, 171
_Suttermans_, 40
_Sylvius_, 60
Tardieu, 171, 173
Taunay, 27
Taylor, J. E., 201
Techener, 97
“Thames Set,” 118, 121
Thausing, 145
Theobald, H. S., 69
Thomas, Ralph, 108
Thompson, J. Pyke, 73
Thomson, George, 234
_Three Trees, The_, 55
“Tickets,” 26
_Tillie_, 120
_Timber Ships_, 225
_Toilette, La_, 184
_Toilette, La Grande_, 186
_Tolling, Van_, 60
_Tombeau de Molière_, 78
_Tour de l’Horloge_, 72
_Tourelle, dite “de Marat”_, 78
_Tourelle, Rue de la Tixéranderie_, 72
_Trees on the Hillside_, 134
Turner, Charles, 191, 197
Turner, J. M. W., 20, 21, 188-208, 210
“Twenty-six Etchings,” 117, 118
_Two Buffoons_, 154
_Two Fauns_, 166
Vandyke, 36, 39
_Vanneaux et Sarcelles_, 84
Vaughan, Henry, 201, 211
“Venice,” The, 112, 117
_Venus and Cupid_, 154
_Vignette with Four Cupids_, 154
_Vieux Coq, Le_, 85
_Virgin by the City Wall_, 140, 147
_Virgin with the Child in Swaddling Clothes_, 143
_Virgin and Child with the Monkey_, 144
_Virgin with Long Hair_, 146
Vokins, 216
_Vosterman, Lucas_, 40
Vosterman, 13
_Wael, De_, 40
_Wakefield_, 191
Walsh, Jacob, 163
Ward, William, 197
_Wareham Bridge_, 105
_Water Meadow_, 106
Wasset, 75, 82
_Watercress Gatherers_, 204
Watson, C. J., 233
Watteau, 171-175, 177, 181
Way, T. R., 222
_Weary_, 121
_Westminster Bridge_, 119, 121
Wheatley, 27
Whistler, 100, 107-121, 222-224
_Whistler’s House_, 103
_Whitstable_, 37
Wilkie, Sir David, 67
Willshire, Dr, 29
_Windmill Hill_, 104, 105
_Windy Day_, 134
_Winged Hat, The_, 223
Witte, De, 99
_Woman with the Arrow, The_, 63.
_Yarmouth_, 206
_Zaandam_, 107, 121
Zoan Andrea, 164
THE END
PRINTED BY OLIVER AND BOYD, EDINBURGH.
_Uniform with this Volume_
The Coin Collector
By W. Carew Hazlitt
_New and Revised Edition_
Illustrated with 12 full-page Plates depicting 129 Rare Pieces
_Pub 7s. 6d. net_
CONTENTS
Introductory--Collectors and Collections--Value of Coins--Unique or
Remarkable Coins--Greek Coins--Rome--Continent of Europe--United
Kingdom--The Coin Market--Terminology--Bibliography--Description of
Plates--Index.
“Mr Hazlitt is an expert in regard to coins; his book from the
practical standpoint is trustworthy.”--_Notes and Queries._
“We may say at once that we have a very interesting and instructive
volume before us. The subject is, of course, only lightly
touched upon, and no attempt at dealing with any section of it
in detail is made. This is as it should be in a book on coins in
general.”--_Antiquary._
“Perhaps as excellent an introduction to the study of a delightful
pursuit as could have been written.”--_Daily Telegraph._
“Abreast of the latest discoveries and theories, and is sure
of a welcome from the general reader as well as from the
collector.”--_Scotsman._
“This admirable volume gives a bird’s-eye view of the whole. It is
clear that Mr Hazlitt is not only an enthusiast in the subject of his
book, but also a student whose knowledge is at once singularly wide
and remarkably accurate.”--_Publishers’ Circular._
_Uniform with this Volume_
Old Violins
By Rev. H. R. Haweis
_New Edition_
Illustrated by 12 full-page Plates of Violins by Celebrated Makers
_Pub 7s. 6d. net_
CONTENTS
Prelude--Violin Genesis--Violin Constitution--Violins at
Brescia--Violins at Cremona--Violins in Germany--Violins
in France--Violins in England--Violin Varnish--Violin
Strings--Violin Tarisio--Violins at Mirecourt, Mittenwald, and
Markneukirchen--Violin Treatment--Violin Dealers, Collectors, and
Amateurs--Postlude--Dictionary of Violin Makers--Bibliography and
Description of Plates.
“In matters pertaining to Old Violins he is known as a specialist,
and, moreover, one who writes in a pleasant flowing style, which
cannot be said of all specialists. His ‘Old Violins’ therefore
scarcely needs recommendation. He discourses about Italian,
French, and English violins, about varnish, strings, bows, violin
dealers, collectors, and amateurs. There are some fine plates, a
dictionary of violin makers, and a bibliography. The book is one
for reading, and also for reference, and in its lighter pages for
recreation.”--_Athenæum._
The Book Collector
By W. Carew Hazlitt
A General Survey of the Pursuit, and of those who have engaged in it,
from the Earliest Period to the Present Time; with an Account of
Public and Private Libraries, and Anecdotes of their Founders or
Owners, and Remarks on Bookbinding and on Special Copies of Books,
illustrated with a beautiful photogravure of a famous sale of books at
Sotheby’s, square cr 8vo, art canvas, gilt top, fore and under edges
uncut.
_Pub 7s. 6d. net_
“As Mr Hazlitt shows, his field of choice is wide enough. Ancient
typography fascinates some, but here a long purse is needed. Bibles
and Testaments, Liturgies, Books of Hours, or similar devotional
works appeal to others. The British Museum Library, for instance,
is singularly rich in editions in all languages of the ‘Imitatio
Christi.’ Books of travel, of voyages, and on topography, such as
county and town histories, have all their devotees, and of late
years the search for Alpine literature has become so much keener
that some books, printed barely forty years ago, have quite doubled
their published price. Yet even the systematic collector, as Mr
Hazlitt tells us, often runs risks. Here, as among all things human,
fashions and whims exist, and a particular class of literature may
have ‘booms’ and ‘slumps,’ like certain ‘stocks’ of a questionable
character. The books, for instance, in William Morris’s library were
‘below mediocrity in state,’ and of little intrinsic value, yet
they excited keen competition, and went for sums ‘which were simply
absurd.’”--_Standard._
“The subject abounds with stories, for, indeed, in a sense which the
author of the aphorism little imagined, _habent sua fata libelli_.
We might fill columns with curiosities about the buying and selling
of books from these pages. Mr Hazlitt, however, is not of the
non-literary collectors; no man could write such a book as this about
the subject if he were. Readers, therefore, as well as buyers, may
find ‘The Book Collector’ to their taste. Then there is the eleventh
chapter, with its many interesting anecdotes of inscriptions;
often the casual name or note which some purchaser or owner of a
bye-gone time has written will be of more interest than the volume
itself.”--_Spectator._
“There is pleasure nevertheless--nay, much intellectual and
sometimes pecuniary profit--in the pursuit, when intelligently
pursued. Mr Hazlitt discourses pleasantly on every side of
book-collecting, and his book will be valued by all interested in the
subject.”--_Chambers’ Journal._
_Illustrated with upwards of 450 Engravings on Wood_
Amateur’s Guide to Architecture
By S. Beale
Embracing Egyptian, Assyrian, Roman, Grecian, Italian, Renaissance,
and Early English Specimens of Tombs, Doors, Windows, Arches,
Bridges, Aqueducts, Balconies, Roofs, Supports, Porticos, Turrets,
Steeples, Pillars, Columns, Ornaments, Capitals, Mouldings, examples
of Wood Carving, etc.
_Post 8vo. Pub 3s. 6d._
CONTENTS
PART I.: Introductory--General Outlines. PART II.: Trabeated or Beam
Architecture--1. Egypt; 2. Chaldæa, Assyria, and Persia; 3. India;
4. China; 5. Japan; 6. Asia Minor; 7. Greece; 8. Sicily. PART III.:
Round-Arched Architecture--1. Etruria and Rome; 2. Early Christian
Churches; 3. Byzantine Churches; 4. Romanesque Churches; 5. Norman;
6. Saracenic. PART IV.: Pointed, or Gothic Architecture. PART V.:
Renaissance Architecture--Architectural Examples which may be studied
in London.
“Admirably adapted to fill the position it assumes. It explains in
the simplest possible manner the distinctions, not only between the
various styles of architecture, but between the different styles of
ornamentation; and in every case there is an illustration, which
cannot fail to fix in the mind the distinctions of which the author
has been talking.”--_Scotsman._
* * * * *
Transcriber’s note
Minor punctuation and formatting errors have been changed without
notice; otherwise spelling and punctuation has been retained as
published. The following Printer errors have been changed.
=CHANGED= =FROM= =TO=
Page 7: “MERYON’S Etching” “MÉRYON’S Etching”
Page 7: “_The Straw-Yard_” “_The Straw Yard_”
Page 33: “case is it an indispensible “case is it an indispensable
virtue” virtue”
Page 44: “Hollar a compact selecttion” “Hollar a compact selection”
Page 68: “and his _Bécheurs_” “and his _Bêcheurs_”
Page 72: “Galerie de Nôtre-Dame” “Galérie de Nôtre-Dame”
To face
Page 82: “MERYON: _La Morgue_” “MÉRYON: _La Morgue_”
Page 107: “_Coombe Bottom_, First “_Combe Bottom_, First
State” State”
Page 121: “_Lime Burners_” “_Lime-Burners_”
Page 121: “ghost--desperately “ghost--desperately
over-rated” overrated”
Page 144: “Arms with the Skull” “Arms with a Skull”
Page 147: “Arms with the Skull” “Arms with a Skull”
Page 159: “spoilt by the retouching” “spoilt by the re-touching”
Page 170: “Jean Baptiste Simeon “Jean Baptiste Siméon
Chardin” Chardin”
Page 172: “What French pictorial artist “What French pictorial
thought” artists thought”
Page 186: “_La Sortie de l’Opera_” “_La Sortie de l’Opéra_”
Page 243: “Jacopo de ’Barbarj” “Jacopo de’ Barbarj”
Page 256: “_Buffon and Two Couples_” “_Buffoon and Two Couples_”
Page 256: “_Chemise enlevée_” “_Chemise en levée_”
Page 256: “Arms with the Skull” “Arms with a Skull”
Page 256: “Dance by the Water-side” “_Dance by the Waterside_”
Page 257: “_Epées, Langues de Bœufs,_” “_Epées, Langues de Bœuf_”
Page 257: “_Etude de Jeune Fille_” “_Étude de Jeune Fille_”
Page 258: “_Jeu de Câche-câche_” “_Jeu de Cache-cache_”
Page 258: “_Little Boat-house_” “_Little Boathouse_”
Page 259: “_Mort et le Bucheron, La_” “_Mort et le Bûcheron, La_”
In the Index on Page 259, there is an entry for “Pennell, J., 131”.
That name doesn’t appear on that page or anywhere else in the book.
All other inconsistencies are as in the original.
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