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Title: Four Masters of Etching
Author: Frederick Wedmore
Release Date: September 27, 2021 [eBook #66392]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR MASTERS OF ETCHING ***
FOUR MASTERS OF ETCHING
------------------------------------------------------------------------
This Edition is limited to
Two Hundred and Fifty Copies.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_FOUR MASTERS OF ETCHING_.
BY
FREDERICK WEDMORE.
WITH ORIGINAL ETCHINGS
BY
HADEN, JACQUEMART, WHISTLER, AND LEGROS.
LONDON:
_THE FINE ART SOCIETY, LIMITED._
148, NEW BOND STREET.
1883.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
IT is well to say, in a word or two, what this short book aims at.
Unavoidably inferior to Mr. Hamerton’s in merit, it is voluntarily much
more limited in scheme. Taking only the four artists who seem to me most
worthy of note among the many good etchers of our day, it seeks to study
their work with a degree of detail unnecessary and even impossible in a
volume of wider scope. In trying to do this, it can hardly help
affording, at least incidentally, some notion of what I hold to be the
right principles of etching, nor can it wholly ignore the relation of
etching to other art, or the relation of Art to Nature and Life. But
these points are touched but briefly, and only by the way.
A book of larger aim, on Etching in England and France, might
justifiably have given almost as much importance to Macbeth and Tissot
here, and to Bracquemond there, as has been given in the annexed pages
to Haden, Whistler, Jacquemart, and Legros. But Macbeth and Tissot
belong to a younger generation than do any of my four masters. Much of
what the art of etching could do in modern days was already in evidence
before their work began. My four masters are four pioneers. Bracquemond
may be a pioneer also; but in his original work, skilled and individual
as that is, he has chosen to be very limited. The place he occupies is
honourable, but it is small.
About the four chapters that here follow I need say very little. That on
Seymour Haden has been passed through the _Art Journal_, that on Legros
through the _Academy_, that on Jules Jacquemart through the _Nineteenth
Century_. All have now been revised. Something of the chapter on
Whistler has also appeared in the _Nineteenth Century_, but in quite
different form, and I will explain why. In the first place, since that
article appeared, Mr. Whistler has given me cause to modify to some
extent my estimate of his art. Having seen this cause, I have acted on
it. I am not a Mede nor a Persian. And in a system of criticism which
seeks to inquire and understand, rather than to denounce, there is place
for change. Again, much of the article in the _Nineteenth Century_ was
occasioned not by Mr. Whistler’s practice, but by the attack which he
made upon a great teacher and critic, and, by implication, upon all
critics who allow themselves that abstinence from technical labour which
is often essential if their criticism is to be neither immature for want
of time to spend on it nor prejudiced because of their exclusive
association with some special ways or cliques in art. Whatever dealt
with this business I have now withdrawn. It was written for a particular
purpose, and its purpose was served.
A word now on a matter of detail. Two expressions in the body of this
volume—“our _Dusty Millers_” (page 10), and “_M. Rodin_ here” (page
42)—which only the really careful reader will honour me by noticing, are
due to the fact that after the body of the volume was finally printed,
some change was made in the choice of the illustrations. For Mr. Haden’s
copper of _Dusty Millers_, I have been happy to be able to substitute
_Grim Spain_, the only Spanish subject of his which I thoroughly like.
And in place of M. Legros’s learned but hardly attractive portrait of M.
Rodin, it has been still more fortunate that it has been possible to
procure the portrait of Mr. Watts, the painter, one of the most
triumphant instances of Legros’s art.
F. W.
_London, 1883._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I. SEYMOUR HADEN 1
CHAPTER II. JULES JACQUEMART 12
CHAPTER III. J. A. M. WHISTLER 28
CHAPTER IV. ALPHONSE LEGROS 40
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
“GRIM SPAIN” Etched by F. SEYMOUR 10
HADEN
ORIENTAL PORCELAIN by JULES JACQUEMART 16
PUTNEY by J. A. MCN. WHISTLER 36
PORTRAIT OF G. F. by ALPHONSE LEGROS 42
WATTS, R.A.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I.
SEYMOUR HADEN.
PERHAPS the two qualities which, as one gets a little _blasé_ about the
productions of Art, continue the most to stir and stimulate, and to
quicken the sense of enjoyment, are the quality of vigour and the
quality of exquisiteness. If an artist is so fortunate as to possess
both these virtues in any fulness, he is sure not only to please a
chosen public during several generations, but to please the individual
student—if he be a capable student—at all times and in all moods, and,
of the two, perhaps, that is really the severer test. But to have these
qualities in any fulness, and in equal measure, is given to a man only
here and there over the range of centuries. It is given to a Titian, it
is given to a Rembrandt, and of course to a Turner; it is given in the
days of the Grand Monarch to a Watteau, and in the days of the Second
Empire to a Méryon. But so notable and rare a union is denied—is it
not?—even to a Velasquez; while what we praise most in Moreau le Jeune
is by no means a facility of vigour, and what is characteristic of David
Cox is certainly no charm of exquisiteness. To unite the two qualities—I
mean always, of course, in the fulness and equality first spoken
of—demands not a rich temperament alone. The full display of either by
itself demands that. It demands a temperament of quite exceptional
variety: the presence, it sometimes seems, almost of two
personalities—so unlike are the two phases of the gift which we call
genius.
With the artists of energy and vigour I class Mr. Seymour Haden. Theirs
is the race to which, indeed, quite obviously, he belongs. Alive,
undoubtedly, to grace of form, fire and vehemence of expression are yet
his dominant qualities. With him, as the artistic problem is first
conceived, so must it be executed, and it must be executed immediately.
His energy is not to be exhausted, but of patience there is a smaller
stock. For him, as a rule, no second thought is the wisest; there is no
fruitful revision, no going back to-day upon yesterday’s effort; little
of careful piecing and patching, to put slowly right what was wrong to
begin with. He is the artist of the first impression. Probably it was
just and justly conveyed; but if not, there the failure stands, such as
it is, to be either remembered or forgotten, but hardly to be retrieved.
Such as it is, it is done with, no more to be recalled than the player’s
last night’s performance of Hamlet or Macbeth. Other things will be in
the future: the player is looking forward to to-night; but last
night—that is altogether in the past.
There is no understanding Seymour Haden’s work, its virtues and
deficiencies, unless this note of his temperament, this characteristic
of his productions, is continually borne in mind. It is the secret of
his especial delight in the art of etching; the secret of the particular
uses to which he has so resolutely applied that art. With the admission
of the characteristic, comes necessarily the admission of the limitation
it suggests. Accustomed to labour and patience, not only in the
preparation for the practice of an art, but in the actual practice of
it, one may possibly be suspicious of the art which substantially
demands that its work shall be done in a day if it is to be done at all.
Such art, one says, forfeits, at all events, its claim to the rank that
is accorded to the _œuvre de longue haleine_, when that is carried to a
successful issue and not to an impotent conclusion. To flicker bravely
for an hour; to burn continuously at a white heat—they are very
different matters. The mental powers which the two acts typify must be
differently valued. And the art that asks, as one of its conditions,
that it shall be swift, not only because swiftness is sometimes
effective, but because the steadiness of sustained effort has a
difficulty of its own—that art, to use an illustration from poetry and
from music, takes up its place, voluntarily, with the lyrists, and with
Schubert, as we knew him of old—foregoes voluntarily all comparison with
the epic, and with Beethoven.
Well, this remark—a remonstrance we can hardly call it—has undoubtedly
to be accepted. Only it must be laid to Mr. Seymour Haden’s credit that
he has shown a rare sagacity in the choice of his method of expression.
The conditions of the art of etching—a special branch of the engraver’s
art, and not to be considered wholly alone—are fitted precisely to his
temperament, and suit his means to perfection. Etching is qualified
especially to give the fullest effect to the mental impression with the
least possible expenditure of merely tedious work. Etching is for the
vigorous sketch—and it is for the exquisite sketch likewise. It is for
the work in which suggestion may be ample and unstinted, but in which
realisation may, if the artist chooses, hardly be pursued at all. To say
that, has become one of the commonplaces of criticism. We are not all of
us so gifted, however, that commonplaces are to be dispensed with for
the remainder of time.
Of the great bygone masters of the art, some have pursued it in Mr.
Haden’s way, and others have made it approach more nearly to the work of
the deliberate engraver. Vandyke etched as a speedy and decisive
sketcher; the later and elaborate work added to his plates was added by
other hands, and produced only a monotonous completeness destructive of
the first charm, the charm of the vivid impression. Méryon, whose noble
work Mr. Haden has rightly felt and pronounced to be “not impulsive and
spontaneous, but reflective and constructive, slow and laborious,” used
etching evidently in a different method and for different ends. With
something of the patience of a deliberate line-engraver, he built up his
work, piece by piece and stroke by stroke: touching here, and tinkering
there—he says so himself—and the wonder of it is, that for all his
slowness and delay, the work itself remains simple and broad, and the
poetical motive is held fast to. This Mr. Haden has expressly
recognised. Nothing eluded Méryon. The impressions that with some men
come and go, he pertinaciously retained. Through all mechanical
difficulties, his own quality of concentrativeness preserved to his work
the quality of unity. Then, again, it must be said that the greatest
etcher of old time, Rembrandt, and one of the greatest, Claude, employed
the two methods, and found the art equal to the expression both of the
first fancy and of the realised fact. To see which, one may compare the
first state of Rembrandt’s _Clément de Jonghe_—with its rapid seizure of
the features of a character of extraordinary subtlety—and the _Ephraim
Bonus_, with its deliberate record of face and gesture, dress and
environment; and in Claude the exquisite free sketching in the first
state of _Shepherd and Shepherdess_ with the quite final work of the
second state of _Le Bouvier_. Mr. Haden, then, has full justification
for his view of etching; yet Mr. Haden’s view of etching is not the only
one that can be held with fairness.
For all but forty years now Seymour Haden has been an etcher, so that we
may naturally see in his work the characteristics of youth and those of
an advanced maturity, in which, nevertheless, the eye is not dimmed nor
the natural fire abated. That is to say, the mass of his labour—over a
hundred and eighty etchings—already affords the opportunity of
comparison between subjects essayed with the careful and delicate
timidity of a student of twenty, and subjects disposed of with the
command and assurance that come of years, of experience, and—may I
add?—of recognition. But in his early time Mr. Haden did but little on
the copper, and then he would have had no reason to resent the title of
“amateur,” now somewhat unreasonably bestowed on a workman who has given
us the _Agamemnon_, the _Sunset on the Thames_, the _Sawley_, and the
_Calais Pier_. Somewhere, perhaps, knocking about the world are the six
little plates, chiefly of Roman subjects, which Mr. Haden painfully and
delicately engraved in the years 1843 and 1844. All that remains of
them, known to the curious in such matters, is a tiny group of
impressions cherished in the upper chambers of a house in Hertford
Street—a scanty barrier, indeed, between these first tentative efforts
and oblivion.
But in 1858 and 1859 Mr. Haden began to etch seriously; he began to give
up to the practice of this particular way of draughtsmanship a measure
of time that permitted well-addressed efforts and serious
accomplishments. Fine conceptions in all the Arts ask, as their most
essential condition, some leisure of mind, some power of acquisition of
the happy mood in which one sees the world best, and in which one can
labour joyously at passing on the vision. The best Art may be produced
with trouble, but it must be with the “joyful trouble” of Macduff.
Nothing is more marked in the long array of Mr. Haden’s mature work than
the sense of pleasure he has had in doing it. How much, generally, has
it been the result of pleasant impressions! How much the most
satisfactory and sufficient has it been when it has been the most
spontaneous! Compare the absolute unity, the clearly apparent motive, of
such an etching as _Sunset on the Thames_ with the more obscure aim and
more limited achievement of the _Windsor_. The plates of the fruitful
years 1859, 1860, 1863, 1864, and so onward, were done, it seems, under
happy conditions.
Any one who turns over Seymour Haden’s plates in chronological order,
will find that though, as it chanced, a good many years had passed, yet
very little work in etching had been done before the artist had found
his own method and was wholly himself. There were first the six dainty
little efforts of 1843 and 1844; then, when etching was resumed in
1858—or, rather, when it was for the first time taken to seriously—there
were the plates of _Arthur_, _Dasha_, _A Lady Reading_, and _Amalfi_. In
these he was finding his way; and then, with the first plates of the
following year, his way was found; we have the _Mytton Hall_, the
_Egham_, and the _Water Meadow_, perfectly vigorous, perfectly
suggestive sketches, still unsurpassed. In later years we find a later
manner, a different phase of his talent, a different result of his
experience; but in 1859 he was already, I repeat, entirely himself, and
doing work that is neither strikingly better nor strikingly worse than
the work which has followed it a score of years after. In the work of
1859, and in the work of the last period, there will be found about an
equal measure of beautiful production. In each there will be something
to admire warmly, and something that will leave us indifferent. And in
the etchings of 1859, in the very plates that I have mentioned, there is
already enough to attest the range of the artist’s sympathy with nature
and with picturesque effect. _Mytton Hall_, seen or guessed at through
the gloom of its weird trees, is remarkable for a certain garden
stateliness—a disorder that began in order, a certain dignity of nature
in accord with the curious dignity and quietude of Art. The _Egham_
subject has the silence of the open country; the _Water Meadow_ is an
artist’s subject quite as peculiarly, for “the eye that sees” is
required most of all when the question is how to find the beautiful in
the apparently commonplace.
Next year, amongst other good work, we have the sweet little plate of
_Combe Bottom_, which, in a fine impression, more than holds its own
against the _Kensington Gardens_, and gives us at least as much
enjoyment by its excellence of touch as does the more intricate beauty
of the _Shore Mill Pond_, with its foliage so varied and so rich. In the
next year to which any etchings are assigned in Sir William Drake’s
catalogue—a thoroughly systematic book, and done with the aid of much
information from the author of the plates—we find Mr. Haden departing
from his usual habit of recording his impression of nature, for the
object, sometimes not a whit less worthy, of recording his impression of
some chosen piece of master’s art. This is in the year 1865, and the
subject is a rendering of Turner’s drawing of the _Grande Chartreuse_,
and it is an instance of the noble and artistic translation of work to
which a translator may hold himself bound to be faithful. And here is
the proper place, I think, to mention the one such other instance of a
subject inspired, not by nature, but by the art of Turner, which Seymour
Haden’s work affords—the large plate of the _Calais Pier_, done in 1874.
Nothing shows Mr. Haden’s sweep of hand, his masculine command of his
means, better than that. Such an exhibition of spontaneous force is
altogether refreshing. One or two points about it demand to be noted. In
the first place, it makes no pretence, and exhibits no desire, to be a
pure copy. Without throwing any imputation on the admirable craft of the
pure interpreter and simple reproducer who enables us to enjoy so much
of an art that might otherwise never come near to many of us, I may yet
safely say that I feel sure that Mr. Haden had never the faintest
intention of performing for the _Calais Pier_ this copyist’s service. To
him the _Calais Pier_ of Turner—the sombre earlyish work of the master,
now hanging in the National Gallery—was as a real scene. It was not to
be scrupulously imitated; what was to be realised, or what was to be
suggested, was the impression that it made. With a force of expression
peculiar to him, Seymour Haden has succeeded in this aim; but, I think,
he has succeeded best in the rare unpublished state which he knows as
the “first biting,” and next best in the second state—the first state
having some mischief of its own to bear which in the preparatory proofs
had not arisen, and in the second state had ceased. The plate is
arranged now with a ground for mezzotint—it lies awaiting that work—and
if Mr. Haden, having now retraced to the full such steps as may have
been at least partially mistaken, is but master of the new method—can
but apply the mezzotint with anything of that curious facility and
success with which Turner applied it to a few of his plates in _Liber
Studiorum_, in which the professional engraver had no part—then we shall
have a _chef-d’œuvre_ of masculine suggestion which will have been worth
waiting for.
To go back to the somewhat earlier plates. The _Penton Hook_, which is
one of many wrought in 1864, is another instance—and we have had several
already—of the artist’s singular power in the suggestion of tree form.
Of actual leafage, leafage in detail, he is a less successful
interpreter, as is indeed only natural in an etcher devoted on the whole
to broad effects, looking resolutely at the _ensemble_. Detail is
nothing to him—_ensemble_, balance, is all. But the features of trees,
as growth of trunk and bend of bough reveal them, he gives to us as no
other contemporary etcher can. And in old Art they are less varied in
Claude and in Ruysdael. Mere leafage counted for more with both of
these. And if it is too much to compare Mr. Haden as a draughtsman of
the tree with a master of painting so approved as Crome—the painter
especially of oak and willow—as an etcher of the tree he may yet be
invited to occupy no second place, for Crome’s rare etchings are
remarkable for draughtsmanship chiefly. Crome knew little of technical
processes in etching, and so no full justice can ever be done to his
etched work, which passed, imperfect, out of his own hands, and was then
spoilt in the hands of others—dull, friendly people, who fancied they
knew more than he did of the trick of the craft, but who knew nothing of
the instinct of the art. Crome himself in etching was like a soldier
unequipped. Mr. Haden has a whole armoury of weapons.
Seymour Haden has been a fisherman; I do not know whether he has been a
sailor. But, at all events, purely rural life and scene, however varied
in kind, are discovered to be insufficient, and the foliage of the
meadow and the waters of the trout stream are often left for the great
sweep of tidal river, the long banks that enclose it, the wide sky that
enlivens every great flat land, and by its infinite mobility and
immeasurable light gives a soul, I always think, to the scenery of the
plain. Then we have _Sunset on the Thames_ (1865), _Erith Marshes_
(1865), and the _Breaking Up of the Agamemnon_ (1870), the last of them
striking a deep poetic note—that of our associations with an England of
the past that has allowed us the England of to-day—a note struck by
Turner in the _Fighting Téméraire_, and struck so magnificently by
Browning and by Tennyson[1] in verse for which no Englishman can ever be
too thankful.
Footnote 1:
I mean, of course, in “Home Thoughts from Abroad,” and in the
“Revenge: a Ballad of the Fleet.”
In the technique of these later etchings there is, perhaps, no very
noticeable departure from that of the earlier but yet mature work. But
in composition or disposition of form we seem to see an increasing love
of the sense of spaciousness, breadth, potent effect. The work seems, in
these best examples, to become more dramatic and more moving. The hand
demands occasion for the large exercise of its freedom. These
characteristics are very noticeable in the _Sawley Abbey_ of 1873. Nor
are they absent from our _Dusty Millers_.
[Illustration]
_Sawley Abbey_ is etched on zinc, a substance of which Mr. Haden has of
late become fond. It affords “a fat line”—a line without rigidity—and so
far it is good. But the practical difficulty with it is that the
particles of iron it contains make it uncertain and tricky, and we may
notice that an etching on zinc is apt to be full of spots and dots. It
succeeds admirably, however, where it does not fail very much. Of course
its frequent failure places it out of the range of the pure copyist who
copies or translates as matter of business. He cannot afford its risk.
In 1877—a year in which Mr. Haden made a number of somewhat undesirable
etchings in Spain, and a more welcome group of sketches in Dorsetshire,
on the downs and the coast—Mr. Haden worked much upon zinc. And it is in
this year that a change that might before have been foreseen is clearly
apparent. Dry point before this had been united with etching, but not
till now have we much of what is wholly dry point; and from this date
the dry-point work is almost, though not altogether, continuous, the
artist having rejoiced, he tells me, in its freedom and rapidity.
The Dorsetshire etchings, _Windmill Hill_, _Nine Barrow Down_, and the
like, are most of them dry points. In them, though the treatment of
delicate distances is not evaded, there is especial opportunity for
strong and broad effects of light and shade. Perhaps it is to these that
a man travels as his work continues, and as, in continuing, it develops.
At least it may be so in landscape.
Here, for the present, is arrested the etched work of an artist
thoroughly individual, thoroughly vigorous, but against whom I have
charged, by implication, sometimes a lack of exquisiteness, the only too
frequent but not inevitable drawback of the quality of force. So much
for the work of the hand. For the process of the mind—the character
which sets the hand upon the labour, and pricks it on to the execution
of the aim—the worst has been said also, when I said, at the beginning,
that Mr. Haden lacked that power of extremely prolonged concentration
which produced the epic in literature and the epic in painting. These
two admissions made, there is little of just criticism of Seymour
Haden’s work that must not be admiring and cordial—the record of
enjoyment rather than of dissatisfaction—so much faithful and free
suggestion does the work contain of the impressions that gave rise to
it, so much variety is compassed, so much are we led into unbroken
paths, and so much evidence is there of eager desire to enlarge the
limits of our Art, whether by plunge into a new theme, or by application
of a new process.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II.
JULES JACQUEMART.
THERE died, in September, 1880, at his mother’s house in the high road
between the Arc de Triomphe and the Bois, a unique artist whose death
was for the most part unobserved by the frequenters of picture
galleries. He had contributed but little to picture galleries. There had
not been given to Jules Jacquemart the pleasure of a very wide
notoriety, but in many ways he was happy, in many fortunate. He was
fortunate, to begin with, in his birth; for though he was born in the
_bourgeoisie_, it was in the cultivated _bourgeoisie_, and it was in the
_bourgeoisie_ of France. His father, Albert Jacquemart, the known
historian of pottery and porcelain, and of ancient and fine furniture,
was of course a faithful and diligent lover of beautiful things, so that
Jules Jacquemart was reared in a house where little was ugly and much
was precious; a house organized, albeit unconsciously, on William
Morris’s admirable plan, “Have nothing in your home that you do not know
to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Thus his own natural
sensitiveness, which he had inherited, was highly cultivated from the
first. From the first he breathed the liberal and refining air of Art.
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
comparatively rare exceptions, he did precisely the things which 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 the most when we are most tired in
cities—and so there came to him towards the end a surprise of pleasure
in so beautiful a world. He was happy in being surrounded all his life
long by passionate affection in the narrow circle of his home. His
mother survives him—the experience of bereavement being hers, when it
would naturally have been his. For himself, he was happier than she, for
he had never suffered any quite irreparable loss. And in one other way
he was probably happy—in that he died in middle age, his work being
entirely done. The years of deterioration and of decay, in which first
the 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 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, does,
unfortunately, by no means imply the power to appreciate the art by
which they are retained and diffused. “Still-life,” using the expression
in its broadest sense—the pourtrayal 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. Here and there a professed
connoisseur has had pleasure from some piece of exquisite workmanship; a
rich man has looked with idly caressing eye upon the skilful record of
his gold plate or of the grapes of his forcing-house. There has been
praise for the adroit Dutchmen, and for Lance and Blaise Desgoffe. But
the public generally—save perhaps in the case of William Hunt, his
birds’ nests and his primroses—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 nothing to do. But there are
exceptions, and there is a better way of looking at these things.
William Hunt was often one of these exceptions; Chardin was always—save
in a rare instance or so of dull pomposity of rendering—Jules
Jacquemart, take him for all in all, was of these exceptions the most
brilliant and the most peculiar. He, in his best art of etching, and his
fellows and forerunners in the art of painting, have done something to
endow the beholders of their work with a new sense, with the capacity
for new experiences of enjoyment—they have pourtrayed not so much matter
as the very soul of matter. They have put matter in its finest light: it
has got new dignity. Chardin did this with his peaches, his pears, his
big coarse bottles, his copper saucepans, his silk-lined caskets. Jules
Jacquemart did it—we shall see in more of detail presently—very
specially 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, with his
precious vessels of crystal and jade and jasper. But when he was most
fully himself, his work most characteristic and individual, he shut
himself off from popularity. Even untrained observers could accept the
agile engraver as an interpreter of other men’s pictures—of Meissonier’s
inventions, or Van der Meer’s, or Greuze’s—but they could not accept him
as the interpreter at first hand of the treasures which were so
peculiarly his own that he may almost be said to have discovered them
and their beauty. 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?
On September 7th, 1837, Jacquemart was born, in Paris, and the
profession of Art, in one or other of its branches, came naturally to a
man of his race. A short period of practice in draughtsmanship, and only
a small experience of the particular business of etching, sufficed to
make him a master. As time proceeded, he of course developed; he 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 is not, perhaps, so noteworthy
as in the _Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne_—the touch is not so large,
so energetic, and so free—there is evident already the hand of the
delicate artist and the eye that can appreciate and render almost
unconsidered beauties. Exquisite matter and the forms that Art has given
to common things have found their new interpreter. The _Histoire de la
Porcelaine_ contains twenty-six plates, most of which are devoted to
Oriental china, of which the elder Jacquemart possessed a magnificent
collection at a time when the popular rage for “blue and white” was
still unpronounced. Many of Albert Jacquemart’s pieces figure in the
book; they were pieces the son had lived with and which he knew
familiarly. Their charm, their delicacy, he perfectly represented, and
of each individual piece he appreciated the characteristics, passing
too, 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 pretty boudoir
graces and airs of light luxury fit for the Marquise of Louis Quinze and
the sleek young _abbé_, her pet and her counsellor, we find, rendered
with just as thorough an appreciation, 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 lines of the
_arabesque_—no mass or splash of colour—is patterned with measured
exactitude, with rhythmic completeness, over the smoothish surface. It
is wonderful how little work there is in the etching, and how much is
suggested. The actual touches are almost as few as those which
Jacquemart employed afterwards in some of his light effects of
rock-crystal, the material which he has interpreted perhaps best of all.
One counts the touches, and one sees how soon and how strangely he has
got the power of suggesting all that he does not actually give, of
suggesting all that is in the object by the little that is in the
etching. On such work may be bestowed, amongst much other praise, that
particular praise which, to fashionable French criticism, delighted
especially with the feats of adroitness, and occupied with the evidence
of the artist’s dexterity, seems the highest—_Il n’y a rien, et il y a
tout._
[Illustration]
Execution so brilliant can hardly also be faultless, and without
mentioning many instances among his earlier work, where the defect is
chiefly noticeable, it may be said that the roundness of round objects
is more than once missing in his etchings. Strange that the very quality
first taught to, and first acquired by, the most ordinary pupil of a
Government School of Art should have been wanting to an artist often as
adroit in his methods as he was individual in his vision! The _Vase de
Vieux Vincennes_, from the collection of M. Léopold Double, is a case to
the point. It has the variety of tone, the seeming fragility of texture
and ornament, the infinity of decoration, the rendering of the subtle
curvature of a flower, and of the transparency of the wing of a passing
insect. It has everything but the roundness—everything but the quality
that is the easiest and the most common. But so curious a deficiency,
occasionally displayed, could not weigh against the amazing evidence of
various cleverness, and Jacquemart was shortly engaged by the publishers
and engaged by the French Government.
The difference in the commissions accorded by those two—the intelligent
service which the one was able to render to the nation in the act of
setting the artist about his appropriate work, and, broadly speaking,
the hindrance which the other opposed to his individual
development—could nowhere go unnoticed, and least of all could go
unnoticed in a land like ours, too full of a dull pride in _laissez
faire_, in private enterprise, in Government inaction. To the initiative
of the Imperial Government, as Mr. Hamerton well pointed out when he was
appreciating Jacquemart as long as twelve years ago, was due the
undertaking by the artist of the colossal task, by the fulfilment of
which he secured his fame. Moreover, if the Imperial Government had not
been there to do this thing, this thing would never have been done, and
some of the noblest and most intricate objects of Art in the possession
of the State would have gone unrecorded—their beauty unknown and
undiffused. Even as it is, though the task definitely commissioned was
brought to its proper end, a desirable sequel that had been planned
remained untouched. The hand that recorded the ordered grace of
Renaissance ornament would have shown as well as any the intentions of
more modern craftsmen—the decoration of the Eighteenth Century in
France, with its light and luxurious elegance.
The _Histoire de la Porcelaine_, then—begun in 1860, and published in
1862 by Techener, a steady friend of Jacquemart—was followed in 1864 by
the _Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne_. The _Chalcographie_ of the
Louvre—the department which concerns itself with the issue of
commissioned prints—undertook the publication of the _Gemmes et Joyaux_.
In the series there were sixty subjects, or at least sixty plates, for
sometimes Jacquemart, seated by his window in the Louvre (which is
reflected over and over again at every angle in the lustre of the
objects he designed), 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; to oppose, say, the
brilliant transparency of the rock-crystal ball to the texture, sombre
and velvety, of the vase of ancient sardonyx. Of all these plates M.
Louis Gonse has given an account, sufficiently detailed for most
people’s purposes, in the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ for 1876. The
catalogue of Jacquemart’s etchings there contained was a work of
industry and of very genuine interest on M. Gonse’s part, and its
necessary extent, due to the artist’s own prodigious diligence in work,
sufficiently excuses, for the time at least, an occasional
incompleteness of description, making absolute identification sometimes
a difficult matter. The critical appreciation was warm and intelligent,
and the student of Jacquemart must always be indebted to Gonse. But for
the quite adequate description of work like Jacquemart’s, there was
needed not only the French tongue—the tongue of criticism—but a Gautier
to use it. Only a critic whose intelligence gave form and definiteness
to the impressions of senses preternaturally acute, could have given
quite adequate expression to Jacquemart’s dealings with beautiful
matter—to his easy revelry of colour and light over lines and contours
of selected beauty. 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 work represents
his strength, and hardly ever betrays his weakness. He was never 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 a wonderful feeling for the unbroken flow of its line,
for its suppleness, for the figure’s harmonious movement. Perhaps 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._
And as nothing in his 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 accidents of line to the fixed and invariable ornament of
Renaissance decoration—an ornament as orderly as well-observed verse,
with its settled form, its repetition, its refrain. I will mention two
or three instances which seem the most notable. One of them occurs in
the drawing of a Renaissance mirror—_Miroir Français du Seizième
Siècle_—elaborately carved, but its chief grace, after all, is in its
fine proportions; not so much in the perfection of the ornament as in
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, quite sufficiently, that it has
been best solved by the Japanese; and they indeed have solved it, and
sometimes with a singular 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 quite 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 “an
Athenian tribunal” to understand Ingres and Flaxman, it needs, at all
events, some education in beautiful line to understand the art of
Renaissance ornament. Such art Jacquemart of course understood
absolutely, and against its ordered lines the 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 landscape atmosphere in the plate No. 27 of the _Gemmes et
Joyaux_, representing scenes from Ovid, as an artist of the Renaissance
had pourtrayed them on the delicate liquid surface of _cristal de
roche_. And, not confining our examination wholly to the _Gemmes et
Joyaux_—of which obviously the mirror just spoken of cannot form a
part—we observe there or elsewhere in Jacquemart’s work how his
treatment of the figure takes constant note of the material in which the
first artist, his original, was working. Is it raised porcelain, for
instance, or soft ivory, or smooth cold 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 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 instance, the
_Vénus Marine_, lying half extended, with slender legs, long a
possession of M. Thiers, I believe. You cannot insist too much on
Jacquemart’s mastery over his material—_cloisonné_, with its many low
tones, its delicate patterning outlined by metal ribs; the coarseness of
rough wood, as in the _Salière de Troyes_; the sharp clear sword-blade,
as the sword of François Premier, 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, the 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 rearranged, and so the
church completed—Antiquity pressed into the service of the Middle Age.
Jacquemart, dealing with the precious objects he had to pourtray, came
often upon 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 imitation, 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. He loved an effective contrast of
them, a comely juxtaposition; a legitimate accessory he could not
neglect—that window, by which he sat as he worked, flashed its light
upon a surface that caught its reflection; in so many different ways the
simple expedient helps the task, gives the object roundness, betrays its
lustre. 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 care
for it for its own sake. And the thing that his first critics blamed him
for doing—the composition of his 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
will always continue to do, and for this most simple reason, that the
doing of it is Art.
Not very long after the _Gemmes et Joyaux_ was issued, as we now have
it, the life of Frenchmen was upset by the war. Schemes of work waited
or were abandoned; at last men began, as a distinguished Frenchman at
that time wrote to me, “to rebuild their existence out of the ruins of
the past.” In 1873, Jacquemart, for his part, was at work again on his
own best work of etching. The _Histoire de la Céramique_, a companion to
the _Histoire de la Porcelaine_, was published in that year. To an
earlier period (to 1868) belong the two exquisite plates of the light
porcelain of Valenciennes, executed for Dr. Le Jeal’s monograph on the
history of that fabric. And to 1866 belongs an etching already
familiarly known to the readers of the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ and to
possessors of the first edition of _Etching and Etchers_—the Tripod—a
priceless thing of jasper, set in golden carvings by Gouthière, and now
lodged among the best treasures of the great house in Manchester Square.
But it is useless to continue further the chronicle of the triumphs that
Jacquemart won in the translation, in his own free fashion of black and
white, of all sorts of beautiful matter. Moreover, in 1873, the year of
the issue of his last important series of plates, Jules Jacquemart,
stationed at Vienna, as one of the jury of the International Exhibition
there, caught a serious illness, a fever of the typhoid kind, and this
left him a delicacy which he could never overcome; and thenceforth his
work was limited. Where it was not a weariness, it had to be little but
a recreation, a comparative pause. That was the origin of his
performances in water colour, undertaken in the South, whither he
repaired at each approach of winter. There remains, then, only to speak
of these drawings and of such of his etched work as consisted in the
popularisation of painted pictures. As a copyist of famous canvasses he
found remunerative and sometimes fame-producing labour.
As an interpreter of other men’s pictures, it fell to the lot of
Jacquemart, as it generally falls to the lot of professional engravers,
to engrave the most different 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 always of
equal value. Once or twice he was very strong in the reproduction of the
Dutch portrait painters; but as far as Dutch painting is concerned, he
is strongest of all when he interprets, as in one now celebrated
etching, Jan van der Meer of Delft. _Der Soldat und das lachende
Mädchen_ was one of the most noteworthy pieces in the rich cabinet of M.
Léopold Double. The big and somewhat blustering trooper common in Dutch
Art, sits here engaging the attention of that pointed-faced, subtle, but
vivacious maiden peculiar to Van der Meer. Behind the two, who are
occupied in contented gazing and contented talk, is the bare sunlit
wall, spread only with its map or chart—the Dutchman made his wall as
instructive as Joseph Surface made his screen—and by the side of the
couple, throwing its brilliant, yet modulated light on the woman’s face
and on the background, is the intricately patterned window, the airy
lattice. Rarely was a master’s subject or a master’s method better
interpreted than in this print. Frans Hals once or twice is just as
characteristically rendered. But with these exceptions it is
Jacquemart’s own fellow-countrymen whom he renders the best. Seldom was
finish so free from pettiness or the evidence of effort as it is in the
_Défilé des populations lorraines devant l’Impératrice à Nancy_. _Le
Liseur_ is even finer—Meissonier again; this time a solitary figure,
with bright, soft light from window at the side, as in the Van der Meer
of Delft. The suppleness of Jacquemart’s talent—the happy speed of it,
rather than its patient elaboration—is shown by his renderings of
Greuze, the _Rêve d’amour_, a single head, and _L’Orage_, a sketchy
picture 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—is entirely there. So, too, Fragonard, the
whole ardent and voluptuous soul of him, in _Le Premier Baiser_. Labour
it is possible to give in much greater abundance; but intelligence in
interpretation cannot go any further or do anything more.
Between the etchings of Jacquemart and his water-colour drawings there
is little affinity. The subjects of the one hardly ever recall the
subjects of the other. The etchings and the water colours have but one
thing in common—an extraordinary lightness of hand. Once, however, the
theme is the same. Jacquemart etched some compositions of flowers; M.
Gonse has praised them very highly: to me, elegant as they are, fragile
of substance and dainty of arrangement, they seem inferior to that
last-century flower-piece which we English are fortunate enough to know
through the exquisite mezzotint of Earlom. But in the occasional
water-colour painting of flowers—especially in the decorative
disposition of them over a surface for ornament—Jacquemart is not easily
surpassed; the lightness and suggestiveness of the work are almost equal
to Fantin’s. A painted fan by Jacquemart, which is retained by M. Petit,
the dealer, is dexterous, yet simple in the highest degree. The theme is
a bough of the apple-tree, where the blossom is pink, white, whiter,
then whitest against the air at the branch’s end.
But generally his water colour is of landscape, and a record of the
South. Perhaps it is the sunlit and flower-bearing coast, his own refuge
in winter weather. Perhaps, as in a drawing of M. May’s, it is the
mountains behind Mentone—their conformation, colours, and tones, and
their thin wreaths of mist—a drawing which M. May, himself an habitual
mountaineer in those regions, assures me is of the most absolute truth.
Or, perhaps, as in another drawing in the same collection, it is a view
of _Marseilles_; sketchy at first sight, yet with nothing unachieved
that might have helped the effect; not the Marseilles, sunny and
brilliant, parched and southern, of most men’s observation—the
Marseilles even of the great observer, the Marseilles of _Little
Dorrit_—but the busy port, with its ever-shifting life, under an effect
less known; the Marseilles of an overcast morning: all its houses, its
shipping and its quays, grey or green and steel-coloured. Such a work is
a masterpiece, with the great quality of a masterpiece, that you cannot
quickly exhaust the restrained wealth of its learned simplicity. To
speak about it one technical word, we may say that while it belongs by
its frank sketchiness to the earlier order of water-colour art, an art
of rapid effect, as practised best by Dewint and David Cox, it belongs
to the later order—to contemporary art—by its unhesitating employment of
body colour.
The true source of the diversity of Jacquemart’s efforts, which I have
now made apparent, is perhaps to be found in a vivacity of intellect, a
continual alertness to receive all passing impressions. That alone makes
a variety of interests easy and even necessary. That pushes men to
express themselves in art of every kind, and to be collectors as well as
artists, to possess as well as to create. Jacquemart inherited the
passion of a collector; it was a queer thing that he set himself to
collect. He was a collector of shoe-leather; foot-gear of every sort and
of every time. His father, Albert Jacquemart, had held that to know the
pottery of a nation was to know its history. Jules saw many histories,
of life and travel, and the aims of travel, in the curious objects of
his collection. Their ugliness—what would be to most of us the extreme
distastefulness of them—did not repel him. Nor were his attentions
devoted chiefly to the dainty slippers of a dancer—souvenirs, at all
events, of the art of the ballet, very saleable at fancy fairs of the
theatrical profession. He etched his own boots, tumbled out of the worst
cupboard in the house. He looked at them with affection—_souvenirs de
voyage_. The harmless eccentricity brings down, for a moment, to very
ordinary levels, this watchful and exquisite artist, so devoted
generally to high beauty, so keen to see it.
What more would he have done had the forty-three years been greatly
prolonged, a spell of life for further work accorded, Hezekiah-like, to
a busy labourer upon whom Death had laid its first warning hand? We
cannot answer the question, but it must have been much, so variously
active was his talent, so fertile his resource. As it is, what may he
hope to live by, now that the most invariably fatal of all forms of
consumption, the most fatal while the least suspected, _la phthisie
laryngée_, has arrested his effort? A very gifted, a singularly agile
and supple translator of painters’ work, he may surely be allowed to be,
and a water-colour artist, perfectly individual, yet hardly actually
great; his strange dexterity of hand at the service of fact, not at the
service of imagination. He recorded nature; he did not exalt or
interpret it. But 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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III.
J. A. M. WHISTLER
YEARS ago James Whistler was a person of high promise: he has since been
an artist often of agreeable and exquisite, though sometimes of
incomplete and apparently wayward, performance. He has the misfortune to
have been greatly known to a large public as the painter of his least
desirable works, these having reached an easy notoriety, while the
others have thus far too much escaped a general fame. Much of Mr.
Whistler’s art has the interest of originality, and some of it the charm
of beauty; and yet the measure of originality has at times been
over-rated, through the innocent error of the budding amateur, who, in
the earlier stage of his enlightenment, confuses the beginning with the
end, accepts the intention for the adequate fulfilment, and exalts an
adroit sketch into the rank of a permanent picture. _Mr. Irving as
Philip of Spain_—three years ago at the Grosvenor—was a murky caricature
of Velasquez; the master’s sketchiness remained, but his decisiveness
was wanting. And in some of the _Nocturnes_ the absence, not only of
definition, but of gradation, would point to the conclusion that they
are but engaging sketches. In them we look in vain for all the delicate
differences of light and hue which the scenes depicted present. Like the
landscape art of Japan, they are harmonious decorations, and a dozen or
so of such engaging sketches placed in the upper panels of a lofty
apartment would afford a justifiable and welcome alternative even to
noble tapestries or Morris wall-papers. But, on the large scale on which
they are painted—a scale in which their well-considered sketchiness is
carefully emphasized—it is in vain that we endeavour to receive them as
cabinet pictures. They suffer curiously when placed against work not of
course of petty and mechanical finish, but of patient achievement. But
they have merits of their own; nor are their merits too common. So short
a way have they proceeded into the complications of colour, that they
avoid the incompatible: they avoid it cleverly; they say little to the
mind, but they are restful to the eye, in their agreeable simplicity and
limited suggestiveness. They are the record of impressions. So far as
they go, they are right; nay, in one sense they are better than right,
for they are charming.
And, moreover, there is evidence enough elsewhere that Mr. Whistler,
confined to colour alone, can produce more various and more intricate
harmonies than those of a _Nocturne_ in silver and blue, than those of a
_scherzo_ in blue, or than those even in that fascinating portrait of
Mrs. Meux, in which it was not so much the face as the figure and the
movement that came to be deftly suggested, if hardly elaborately
expressed. A great apartment in the house of Mr. Leyland, which Mr.
Whistler has decorated, has shown that a long and concentrated effort at
the solution of the problems of colour is not beyond the scope of an
artist who has rarely mastered the subtleties of the intricate human
form. It has shown, moreover, that his solution of such problems can be
strikingly original. As a decorative painter—as a painter of large or
brilliant sketches—Mr. Whistler has had few superiors in any time or
land. His skill is sometimes genius here. Why, in the Grosvenor Gallery,
the very year in which the irrepressible painter proffered the most
unwelcome of his _Nocturnes_, there was a quite delightful picture,
suggested, indeed, by Japanese Art, but itself not less subtle than the
art which prompted it—_A Variation in Flesh-colour and Green_—bare-armed
damsels of the farthest East, lounging in attitudes of agreeable
abandonment in some balcony or court open to the genial sunlight and to
the soft air. The damsels—they were not altogether meritorious. The
draughtsmanship displayed in them was anything but “searching.” But the
picture had a quality of cool refreshment such as the gentle colour and
clean-shining material of Luca della Robbia affords to the beholder of
Tuscan Art, as he comes upon Tuscan Art under Tuscan skies.
The interest of life—the interest of humanity—has confessedly occupied
Mr. Whistler but little; yet in spite of his devotion to the art
qualities of the peacock, it has not been given to him to be quite
indifferent to the race to which he belongs. His portraits, sometimes,
whatever may be his theories, have not been very obviously considered as
arrangements of colour only for colour’s sake. They may even have
profited by the adoption of hues such as suited their themes, and here
Mr. Whistler may have delivered, through his language of colour, a
message which some men would have intrusted to line alone. Anyhow he has
been able to paint with admirable expressiveness a portrait of his
mother, and to have recorded on a doleful canvas the head and figure of
Carlyle, and in both, the simplicity and veracity of effect are things
to be noted. Not indeed that the pictures are without mannerism: the
straight and stiffish disposition of the lines in the first is not so
much a merit as a peculiarity. But a certain dignified quietude and a
certain reticent pathos are apparent in the portrait of the lady, and
the rugged simplicity of Carlyle—a simplicity which his own generation
received with so naive an admiration—is suggested not only with skill of
hand, but with the mental skill that discovers quickly, in presence of a
subject, wherein lies the best opportunity for high success in treating
it.
But I take it to be admitted by those who do not conclude that the art
is necessarily great which has the misfortune to be unacceptable, that
it is not by his paintings so much as by his etchings that Mr.
Whistler’s name may aspire to live. In painting, his success is
infrequent and it is limited—though when it occurs, its very peculiarity
gives us a keen relish for it—in etching, it is neither limited nor
rare, though of course it is not uninterrupted nor unbroken. In
painting, Mr. Whistler is an impressionist—he is an impressionist in
etching, but etching permits the record of the impression only, while
painting demands at all events the occasional capacity to realise with
weeks of labour what a few hours might happily enough suggest.
Moreover—and the circumstance is odd and noteworthy—it is in his
etchings that Mr. Whistler has reached realisation the best, and he has
reached it, in the earlier Thames-side work of twenty years ago, with no
sacrifice whatever of freedom and of frankness in treatment. His best
painting betrays something of that exquisite sensitiveness, that almost
modern sensitiveness, to pleasurable juxtapositions of delicate colour
which we admire in Orchardson, in Linton, and in Albert Moore; it
betrays sometimes, as in a portrait of Miss Alexander, a deftness of
brushwork, in the wave of a feather, in the curve of a hat, that recalls
for a moment even the great names of Velasquez and of Gainsborough; and
of high art qualities it betrays not much besides—though these, which
are very rare, we are properly grateful for. But the etchings—that is
indeed another matter. They must be considered in detail. No criticism
is wasted that concerns itself carefully with them, and that points out
from the many, which are fair, and which are exquisite, and which are
flagrantly offensive.
In some of his prints, Mr. Whistler makes good a claim to live by the
side of the finest masters of the etching needle, and a familiarity with
Rembrandt and with Méryon increases rather than lessens our interest in
the American of to-day. But Mr. Whistler has etched too much for his
reputation, or at least has published too much. No one who can look at
work of Art fairly, demands that it shall be faultless; least of all can
that be demanded of work of which the very virtue lies sometimes in its
spontaneousness; but one has good reason to demand that the faults shall
not outweigh the merits. Now in some of Mr. Whistler’s figure-pieces,
executed with the etching-needle, and offered to the public
indiscreetly, the commonness and vulgarity of the person pourtrayed find
no apology in perfection of pourtrayal—the design is uncouth, the
drawing is intolerable, the light and shade an affair of a moment’s
impressiveness, with no subtlety of truth to hold the interest that is
at first aroused. See, as one instance, the etching numbered 3 in Mr.
Thomas’s published catalogue—notice the size of the hands. And see again
No. 56, in which the figure is one vast black triangle, in which there
is apparently not a single quality which work of Art should have. The
portraits of Becquet, the violoncello player, of one Mann, and of one
Davis, have character, with no mannerism, but with a good simplicity of
treatment. But neither face pourtrayed, nor Art pourtraying it, is of a
kind to command a prolonged enjoyment. On the other hand, in some of the
etchings or dry points, not, it seems, included in the catalogue, and in
the refined and sensitive little etching of _Fanny Leyland_ there is
apparent a distinct feeling for grace of contour—for the undulations of
the figure and its softness of modelling. These are but the briefest
sketches—they have a quality of their own. It is not ungenerous to
suggest that carried further they might have failed. For the true genius
of etching is in them as they are. As they are they have not failed.
Many have been the themes which, in the art of the aquafortist, Mr.
Whistler has essayed. He has essayed landscape; he has drawn a tree in
_Kensington Gardens_, and a tree in the foreground of the _Isle St.
Louis, Paris_; but that tree at least seems of no known form of
vegetable growth—it has the air of an exploding shell. Here and
there—occupied with those juxtapositions of light and shade which
fascinated the masters of Holland—Mr. Whistler has drawn interiors, and
in one of his interiors we note a success second only to the very
highest these Dutchmen attained. This is the interior described as _The
Kitchen_. Only the finest, the most carefully printed impressions
possess the full charm; but when such an impression presents itself to
the eye, the Dutch masters, who have followed most keenly the glow and
the gradation of light on chamber-walls, are seen to be almost rivalled.
The kitchen is a long and narrow room, at the far end of which, away
from the window and the keen light, stand artist and spectator. Farthest
of all from them the light vine leaves are touched in with a grace that
Adrian van Ostade—a master in this matter—would not have excelled. By
the embrasure of the window, just before the great thickness of the
wall, stands a woman, angular, uncomely, of homely build, busied with
“household chares.” In front of her comes the sharp sunlight, striking
the thick wall-side, and lessening as it advances into the shadow and
gloom of the humble room; wavering timidly on the plates of the dresser,
in creeping half gleams which reveal and yet conceal the objects they
fall upon. The meaningless scratch and scrawl of the bare floor in the
foreground is the only fault that at all seriously tells against the
charm of work otherwise beautiful and of keen sensitiveness; and the
case is one in which the merit is so much the greater that the fault may
well be ignored or its presence permitted. Again, _La Vieille aux
Loques_—a weary woman of humblest fortunes and difficult life—shows, I
think, that Mr. Whistler has now and then been inspired by the pathetic
masters of Dutch Art.
We have seen already that two things have much occupied Mr. Whistler—the
arrangement of colours in their due proportions, the arrangement of
light and shade. And the best results of the life-long study which, by
his own account, he has given to the arrangement of colour are seen in
the work that is purely, or the work that is practically, decorative—the
work that escapes the responsibility of a subject. And the best results
of the study of the arrangements of light and shade are seen in a dozen
etchings, most of which—but not _The Kitchen_ and not the _Vieille aux
Loques_—belong to that series in which the artist has recorded for our
curious pleasure the common features of the shores of the Thames. Here
also there is evident his feeling, not exactly for beauty, but at all
events for quaintness of form, for form that has character. It had
occurred to no one else to draw with realistic fidelity the lines of
wharf and warehouse along the banks of the river; to note down the
pleasant oddities of outline presented by roof and window and crane; to
catch the changes of the grey light as it passed over the front of
Wapping. Mr. Whistler’s figure-drawing, generally defective and always
incomplete, has prevented him from seizing every characteristic of the
sailor-figures that people the port. The absence, seemingly, of any
power such as the great marine painters had, of drawing the forms of
water, whether in a broad and wind-swept tidal river or on the high
seas, has narrowed and limited again the means by which Mr. Whistler has
depicted the scenes “below Bridge.” But his treatment of these scenes is
none the less original and interesting. By wise omission, he has managed
often to retain the sense of the flow of water or its comparative
stillness. Its gentle lapping lifts the keels of the now emptied boats
of his _Billingsgate_. It lies lazy under the dark warehouses of his
_Free Trade Wharf_. It frets and flickers and divides in pleasant light
against the woodwork of the bridge in the larger _Putney_.
The limitations of Mr. Whistler’s art are very conspicuous in a more
recent experiment than the original Thames-side series—the series of
_Venice_. So evident, indeed, are they in that set that the set has been
undervalued by many amateurs of taste, who have exacted too much that
Mr. Whistler should give them, not what he was best able to see in
Venice, but what cultivated readers of Art history have been most
accustomed to see there. The Venice series is in the etcher’s later
manner—a style in which ever-increasing reliance is placed on the
faculty of slight and suggestive sketching. Now etching, even when
practised with the greatest possible union of fidelity and freshness, is
hardly the appropriate medium for conveying the charm of delicate
architecture. Of such architecture Méryon himself only now and then
essayed to give the charm, and he essayed it, deliberately, at the cost
of abandoning not a little of the etcher’s freedom—he became, for the
nonce at least, a “great original engraver;” he took his art beyond its
habitual bounds. His triumph justified him. But Mr. Whistler, even in
his earlier manhood, when those of the Thames etchings which are the
fullest of detail were wrought with sureness and precision of hand,
never betrayed either the capacity or the will to reproduce the charm of
delicate architecture. Yet in an art to which colour is denied, the
charm of delicate architecture must be the charm of Venice. It remained,
however, for Mr. Whistler to see whether the place had yet some aspects
which his etching could record—an impression, not a reproduction: that
was all that could be looked for. And Mr. Whistler etched his
impressions with curious uncertainty and curious inequality. He was now
adroit, now wavering. He took from London to Venice his happy fashion of
suggesting lapping water. He looked at Venice as a whole, keenly,
delicately, but never in detail—we had bird’s-eye views of it. It had
been interesting to wonder what would be the vision granted to a
fantastic genius of a fantastic city. Well, little new came of it, in
etching—nothing new that was beautiful. Afterwards, in a series of
pastels, it became clear who it was that had seen Venice. It was Mr.
Whistler the exquisite colourist, not the exquisite etcher.
[Illustration]
Mr. Whistler’s fame as an aquafortist, then, rests chiefly still on his
Thames-side work; and, even there, less on the faint agreeable sketches
done of later years, though these have their charm, like the better of
his painted _Nocturnes_, than on the work of his first maturity. The
_London Bridge_ and the _Free Trade Wharf_ and one or two _Putneys_—one
of them is in this book—may be named, however, among the happiest
examples of the later art that is specially brief in recording an
impression. The spring of the great arch in _London Bridge_, as seen
from below, from the water-side, is rendered, it seems, with a
suggestion of power in great constructive work, such as is little
visible in the tender handling of so many of the prints of the river.
The _Free Trade Wharf_ is a very exquisite study of gradations of tone
and of the receding line of murky buildings that follows the bend of the
stream. It is, in its best printed impressions, a thing of faultless
delicacy. A third river-piece, not lately done, has been rather lately
retouched—the _Billingsgate: Boats at a Mooring_. In the retouch is an
instance of the successful treatment of a second “state” or even a later
“state” of the plate, and such as should be a warning to the collector
who buys “first states” of everything—the _Liber Studiorum_ included—and
“first states” alone, with dull determination. Of course the true
collector knows better: he knows that the impression is almost all, and
the “state” next to nothing, except as indicating what is probable as to
the condition of the plate, and he must gradually and painfully acquire
the eye to judge of the impression.
A few years ago Mr. Whistler retouched his _Billingsgate_ for the
proprietors of the _Portfolio_, and the proof impressions of the state
issued by them reach the highest excellence of which the plate has been
capable. Not sheltering itself under the extreme simplicity and
singleness of aim kept so adroitly in the _Free Trade Wharf_ and in the
_London Bridge_, it falls into faults which these avoid. The ghostliness
of the foreground figures demands an ingenious theory for its
justification, and this theory no one has advanced. But the solidity of
the buildings introduced into this plate—the clock-tower and the houses
upon the quay—are a rare achievement in etching. For once the houses are
not drawn, but built, like the houses and the churches and the bridges
of Méryon. The strength of their realisation lends delicacy to the
thin-masted fishing boats with their yet thinner lines of cordage, and
to the distant bridge in the grey mist of London, and to the faint
clouds of the sky. Perhaps yet more delicate than the _Billingsgate_ is
the _Hungerford Bridge_, so small, yet, in a fine proof, so spacious and
airy. It lacks substance, of course, and solidity—and so does the
impression of landscape in a dream.
Finally, there are the _Thames Police_, the _Tyzack Whiteley_, and the
_Black Lion Wharf_. These, which were executed a score of years since,
are the most varied and complete studies of quaint places now
disappearing—nay, many of them already disappeared—of places with no
beauty that is very old or very graceful, but with interest to the
every-day Londoner and interest, too, to the artist. Here are small
warehouses falling to pieces, or poorly propped even when they were
sketched, and vanished now to make room for a vaster and duller
uniformity of storehouse front. Here are narrow dwelling-houses of our
Georgian days, with here a timber facing and there a quaint bow window,
many-paned—narrow houses of sea-captains, or the riverside tradesfolk,
or of custom-house officials, the upper classes of the Docks and the
East-end. These too have been pressed out of the way by the aggressions
of great commerce, and the varied line that they presented has ceased to
be. Of all these riverside features, _Thames Police_ is an illustration
interesting to-day and valuable to-morrow. And _Black Lion Wharf_ is yet
fuller of happy accident of outline and happy gradation of tone, studied
amongst common things which escape the common eye.
It is a pleasure to possess such faithful and spirited records of a
departing quaintness, and it is an achievement to have made them. It
would be a pity to remove the grace from the achievement by insisting
that, as in _Nocturne_ and _Arrangement_, the art was burdened by a here
unnecessary theory; that the study of the “arrangement of line and form”
was all, and the interest of the association nothing. When Dickens was
tracing the fortunes of Quilp on Tower Hill, and on that dreary night
when the little monster fell from the wharf into the river, he did not
think only of the cadence of his sentences, or his work would never have
lived, or lived only with the lovers of curious patchwork of mere words.
Perhaps, without his knowing it, some slight imaginative interest in the
lives of Londoners prompted Mr. Whistler, or strengthened his hand, as
he recorded the shabbiness that has a history, the slums of the eastern
suburb, and the prosaic service of the Thames. Here, and often
elsewhere, his work, if it has shown some faults to be forgiven, has
shown, in excellence, qualities that fascinate. The Future will forget
his failures, to which in the Present there has somehow been accorded,
through the activity of friendship or the activity of enmity, a
publicity rarely bestowed upon failures at all; but it will remember the
success of work that is peculiar and personal. These best things we have
dwelt upon are not to be denied that length of days which is the portion
of exquisite Art.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV.
ALPHONSE LEGROS.
ANY generation since the brilliant times of Art—since the sixteenth
century in Italy, the seventeenth in Holland, the eighteenth in England
and in France—has had to deem itself fortunate if it has produced three
or four artists of individuality united with large attainment; and it is
much to be surmised that no generation will have greater cause than our
own to think it has done well if it has produced even as many.
Notorieties of the moment may always be counted by the score, but fame
remains so rarely for the most popular, that the serious student of the
work of a master in any art has no reason to question his own judgment
when it points him to admiration, merely because the object of his
admiration is not to be counted among the immediate successes of the
hour. Legros is not an immediate success. He has worked for
five-and-twenty years, and there are intelligent people who see little
in his pictures beyond their first ugliness. Each to his taste—we cannot
always blame them; and Legros has been ugly sometimes gratuitously,
sometimes with wantonness. But Legros is also a very grave and enduring
master, whose work is now full of mistake, and now of power, and now
again is certainly touched with that higher and keener faculty we call
inspiration.
The etchings of Legros range already, however, over a period of
seven-and-twenty years; and that he began so young, and at a time when
etching was not popular and the art had not become a trade, is a proof
at least of the spontaneity of his pursuit of it. By temperament and
instinct he was as much etcher as painter, perhaps even more. The
process of etching being—always in skilled hands, of course—perhaps the
readiest for the rendering of impressions and the expression of artistic
thought, it is natural that Legros, whose art, whatever it may lack in
immediate attractiveness, is one undoubtedly of impressions and of
thoughts, should have turned to this process. And so well, indeed, has
he increased his command of it—always with reference to his own
particular business, to the order of impressions it is his own task to
convey—that, though there are, indeed, several of his paintings which
have the qualities of a master’s work, we get the best of him in his
etchings. Great is the technical progress he has made in these since
some of the first plates catalogued so well by M. Poulet-Malassis and
Mr. Thibaudeau, but it is not to be imagined that the progress has been
uninterrupted. Incompleteness and uncertainty are still likely to be
visible. His execution, skilful at one time, and entirely responsive to
his desire, is at another time halting, wayward, insufficiently
controlled and directed. Therefore, though, as I say, the execution is
not seldom excellent—economical of means and yet rich in the possession
of various means—it would rarely be in itself the occasion of attracting
notice to his work. With Legros, it is the conception that dominates.
The conception is often such as recalls the highest achievements of Art.
[Illustration]
But the imagination of Legros, in virtue of which, quite as much as by
occasional mannerisms of handling, he recalls that older and more
pregnant Art which has well nigh passed from the very ken of the
producers of our own day’s trivial array, is not in any sense derived
from this or that past master; it is charged, on the contrary, in his
most considerable pieces with a serious and pathetic poetry quite his
own. Here and there, indeed, as in one early work—_Procession dans les
Caveaux de Saint-Médard_—it is not imagination at all, as that is
generally understood, but the keen observation of an artist content to
reproduce, that alone is remarkable; and here there is a certain amount
of audacity in the fidelity with which he has rendered the commonplace,
the mean, the narrow faces of a certain section of the Parisian lower
_bourgeoisie_ engaged in devotions which there is no beauty of form or
of thought to make interesting to the beholder. It is a piece of pure
realism—the hideous flounces and more hideous crinolines, the squat
figures, the slop-shop fashions, the common faces empty of records. And
in this pure and unrelieved realism there is a certain value, if there
is no charm. But the pieces to which Legros will owe such fame as the
better-judging connoisseurs and critics shall eventually accord him are
those in which the artistic instinct and desire of beauty, either of
form or of thought, has found some expression. It will be in part by
such masculine, yet refined and graceful, portraits as those of M. Dalou
and Mr. Poynter, such subtle ones as that of Cardinal Manning, such
pathetic ones as that of M. Rodin here, that Legros will stand high. It
will be in part by the etchings in which the pourtrayal of actual life
has been guided by the research for beauty, as, for instance, in the
_Chœur d’une Eglise Espagnole_, where not only is the head firm and
dignified and the lighting more intricate than is usual with this
master, but where the composition of bent figure and curved violoncello
is of great repose and refinement of beauty. A more various specimen of
the same type is to be found in a fine impression of _Les Chantres
Espagnols_. They are eight in the choir of a church—four sit in the
stalls, the others stand, of whom one turns the page of a missal placed
on a lectern. The scene is mostly dark—mostly even very dark—but the
light, by a very skilled treatment of it, falls here and there on
lectern, missal, and hand of the old man sitting in the choir. The
observation of reality in this plate has been at the same time keen and
poetical, for nothing can be truer and nothing more impressive than the
study of old faces out of which so much of the desire of life has gone,
and the study of gestures which are those of hand and will waxing
feeble. Two men, at least, are placed together in a pathetic harmony of
weakness: the drooping hand of one and his drooped head, as he sits in
his long-accustomed place; the open mouth of the other—his mouth opened
with the feebleness of a decayed intelligence, with the slow
understandings of a departing mind. Or, not to insist too much on a
picturesqueness in which pathos predominates, notice, when the occasion
presents itself, the first rendering of the subject known as the
_Lutrin_, with its acolyte of rare youthful dignity; or as an example of
work in which some little beauty of modelling has been sought to be
united even with every-day realism, see the design of the bare knee in
_L’Enfant Prodigue_.
But where Legros is most apart and alone is, after all, in the subjects
which owe most to the imagination, and of these the very finest are _La
Mort du Vagabond_, _La Mort et le Bûcheron_, and _Le Savant endormi_.
Something of the art that gives interest to these pieces is contained in
the careful persistence with which the etcher brings the realism of
physical ugliness into close contact and contrast with the spiritual and
supernatural. A comely and well-to-do youth slumbering in his chair at
the Marlborough could have no dreams an artist of Legros’s nature would
think worthy of recording, but the ugly votary of science and
intellectual speculation, who sleeps, from sheer weariness, in the
armchair before which are still the implements of his study and
research, has the dignity of strained endeavour; and M. Legros, in
pourtraying him and suggesting the subjects of his dream, has reached an
elevation which separates him from most of his contemporaries, by as
much as the _Melancholia_ of Dürer is separated from the _Melancholia_
of Beham. _La Mort du Vagabond_ is not a whit less suggestive in its
contrast between the feebleness of the worn-out beggar now stretched out
lonely on the pathside—his head raised, gasping, and his hat knocked
away—and the force and fury of the storm that beats over dead tree and
desolate common. The unity of tragic impression in homely life,
preserved in this plate, will give it a permanent value among the great
things of Art. _La Mort et le Bûcheron_ is more tender, not more nor
less poetical, but less weird; and nothing short of a high and vigorous
imagination could have saved from chance of ridicule, in days in which
the symbolical has long ceased to be an habitual channel of expression,
this etching of the veiled skeleton of Death appearing to the old man
still busy with his field-work, and beckoning him gently, while he, with
simple and ignorant yet not insensitive face, touched with awe and
surprise, looks up under a sudden spell it is vain to hope to cast off,
since for him, however unexpectedly, the hour has plainly come. Of this
very fascinating subject, there exist impressions from two different
plates: one of the plates, and in some respects the better and more
pathetic one—the one in which the figure of Death is gentler and more
persuasive, and in which the face of the woodman is the more mildly
expressive—having suffered an accident after only about a dozen
impressions had been taken from it. The second was then executed, with
something less at first than the success of the earlier one, so that the
almost unique and very rare impressions of the plate—whatever may chance
to be their money value—represent it to the least advantage. It was
retouched and retouched, and at length with more of reward for the
trouble than Legros has generally been able to meet with when
laboriously modifying his work in the attempt to realise his conception
more fully; until at last the enterprising management of _L’Art_ was
enabled to offer its readers for about three shillings a work of art not
rare, indeed, but of exquisite beauty. The success of the first plate,
which the acid had covered in a moment of neglect, had been almost
refound.
A final word about the landscapes. As a painter of landscape M. Legros
is little known, but there exist, I believe, in London one or two
considerable collections of water colours which exhibit almost
exclusively his art in landscape. As far as the etchings show it at all,
it is of the most account when it is called in for the accompaniment of
one of those impressive and doleful ditties I have just been speaking
of. Sometimes, however, it is good without this mission and
significance, as in the _Pécheur_, where a delicate effect of early
morning is given with exquisite refinement. But at other times, in which
the artist is dealing with landscape charged for him with no especial
meaning, his very observation of it seems to have been lacking in
interest and acuteness, as in the broad slope of grass by the
stream-side in his big print _Les Bûcherons_—a whole surface of ground
that is treated mechanically and without any worthy apprehension. And
yet this print, despite certain unpleasantness, contains in the heads of
the woodcutters some of his finest work. A much more sketchy subject,
_Paysage aux Meules_, has greater unity of impression. Like a good deal
of Legros’s landscape, it is distinctively French, this particular
glimpse of field and farm and rounded hill reminding one of the
wide-stretching uplands of the Haut Boulognais. Other landscapes are of
England. Others, again, are neither of England nor of France, nor of any
land which may be read of in the guide-book or visited by the
enterprising tourist, but of that land alone that rises in the
imagination of artistic men.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INDEX.
BRACQUEMOND. His originality and limitation, p. iii.
CLAUDE. His _Bouvier_ and _Shepherd and Shepherdess conversing_, p. 4.
CROME. His etchings, p. 9.
EARLOM. His flower-pieces in mezzotint, p. 25.
GONSE. His catalogue of Jacquemart’s etchings, p. 18.
HADEN. His quality of vigour, p. 2;
his judgment of Méryon, p. 4;
his earliest etchings, p. 5;
_Mytton Hall_, p. 7;
_Egham_, p. 7;
_Water Meadow_, p. 7;
_Calais Pier_, p. 7;
_Penton Hook_, p. 8;
_Sunset on the Thames_, p. 9;
_Erith Marshes_, p. 9;
_Agamemnon_, p. 10;
_Sawley Abbey_, p. 10;
_Dusty Millers_, p. 10;
his Dorsetshire etchings, p. 11.
HAMERTON, p. iii. and p. 17.
JACQUEMART. His happy circumstances, p. 12;
he renders the soul of matter, p. 14;
his etchings of Oriental and _Sèvres_ porcelain, p. 15;
_Brocca Italienne_, p. 16;
_Vase de Vieux Vincennes_, p. 17;
_Miroir Français_, p. 20;
_Vénus Marine_, p. 21;
_Salière de Troyes_, p. 21;
his etchings after pictures, p. 23;
his flower-pieces, p. 25;
his work in water colour, p. 25;
his concern with Art, not nature, p. 27.
LEGROS. Essentially an etcher, p. 41;
his _Procession dans les Caveaux de Saint-Médard_, p. 42;
_Dalou_, p. 42;
_Poynter_, p. 42;
_Manning_, p. 42;
_Rodin_, p. 42;
_Les Chantres Espagnols_, p. 43;
_Le Lutrin_, p. 43;
_La Mort du Vagabond_, p. 44;
_La Mort et le Bûcheron_, p. 44;
his etched landscapes, p. 45.
MACBETH, p. iii.
MÉRYON. His method with architecture, p. 35.
REMBRANDT. His _Ephraim Bonus_ and _Clément de Jonghe_, p. 4;
his _Portrait of a woman lightly etched_, p. 15.
THIBAUDEAU. His catalogue of Legros’s etchings, p. 41.
TISSOT, p. iii.
VANDYKE. A decisive sketcher, p. 3.
WHISTLER. His quality of exquisiteness, p. 28;
his decorative arrangements, p. 29;
painted portraits, p. 30;
his etched portraits, p. 32;
_Fanny Leyland_, p. 33;
_The Kitchen_, p. 33;
_La Vieille aux Loques_, p. 34;
his _Venice_ series, p. 35;
_Free Trade Wharf_, p. 37;
_Billingsgate_, p. 37;
_Hungerford Bridge_, p. 38;
_Thames Police_, p. 38;
_Tyzack Whiteley_, p. 38;
_Black Lion Wharf_, p. 38.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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_ETCHINGS_
ON SALE BY THE FINE ART SOCIETY.
BY FRANCIS SEYMOUR HADEN.
£. s. d.
A By-road in Tipperary 6 6 0
A Water Meadow 4 4 0
Amalfi 1 11 6
Amstelodam 1 11 6
A Cottage Window 2 12 6
Battersea 4 4 0
Breaking up of the Agamemnon. First 5 5 0
State £7 7 0 Second State
Barque Refitting 1 1 0
Brentford Ferry 2 12 6
By Inveraron 3 3 0
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Cranbrook 3 3 0
Cardigan Bridge 2 12 6
Combe Bottom 4 4 0
Calais Pier. Second State 21 0 0
Do. Small 1 11 6
Dusty Millers 3 3 0
Evening 1 1 0
Early Morning—Richmond Park 2 12 6
Egham 2 2 0
Egham Lock 2 2 0
Erith Marshes 4 4 0
Fulham 2 12 6
Greenwich 8 8 0
Grim Spain—Burgos 3 3 0
House of the Smith 2 12 6
Hic Terminus Hæret 1 11 6
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O Laborum! 1 11 6
Out of Study Window 2 2 0
On the Test. First State 5 5 0
Purfleet 3 3 0
Penton Hook 4 4 0
Puff Asleep —
Railway Encroachment 2 2 0
Ruins in Wales 1 11 6
Sub Tegmine 3 3 0
Sonning Almshouses 2 2 0
Shepperton 2 2 0
Shere Millpond 5 5 0
Sunset on the Thames. First State £3 3 0 3 3 0
Second State
Sketch on Back of Zinc Plate 1 11 6
Sunset in Ireland 4 4 0
Sonning 3 3 0
Study of Stems 1 11 6
Twickenham Bushes 0 10 6
The Mill-Wheel. First State £3 3 0 3 3 0
Second State
Thomas Haden of Derby 2 2 0
Thames Fishermen 4 4 0
The Herd 4 4 0
The Two Sheep 1 11 6
The Holly Field 1 1 0
Twickenham Church 3 3 0
Towing-Path. First State £4 4 0 4 4 0
Second State
The Three Sisters 4 4 0
The Inn at Sawley. (Unfinished) 4 4 0
The Grande Chartreuse. (From Drawing by 2 2 0
Turner)
The Moat House 3 3 0
The Two Asses 1 11 6
The Turkish Bath, with One Figure 2 12 6
The Turkish Bath, with Two Figures 3 3 0
The Assignation 3 3 0
Thames Ditton 4 4 0
Willow Bank 2 2 0
Windmill Hill 3 3 0
Windsor 8 8 0
Ye Compleate Angler 3 3 0
Yacht Tavern, Erith 4 4 0
THE VOLUME OF “ÉTUDES” 36 15 0
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BY J. A. MCN. WHISTLER.
_VENICE._ A SERIES OF TWELVE ETCHINGS.
Limited to 100 Sets, 50 Guineas the Set; or separately as follows:—
The Little Venice £4 4 0
The Two Doorways 6 6 0
The Beggars 8 8 0
The Nocturne 5 5 0
The Doorway 8 8 0
The River 5 5 0
The Little Mast 5 5 0
The Little Lagoon 4 4 0
The Palaces 8 8 0
The Mast 5 5 0
The Traghetto 8 8 0
The Piazzetta 4 4 0
-------
_SIXTEEN THAMES ETCHINGS._
Price 14 Guineas the Set in Portfolio; or separately as follows—
1. Black Lion Wharf £1 15 0
2. Wapping Wharf 1 11 6
3. The Forge 2 2 0
4. Old Westminster Bridge 1 5 0
5. Wapping 2 12 6
6. Old Hungerford 1 11 6
7. The Pool 1 11 6
8. The Fiddler 1 11 6
9. The Limeburners 2 2 0
10. The Little Pool 1 5 0
11. Eagle Wharf 1 15 0
12. Limehouse 1 11 6
13. Thames Warehouses 1 5 0
14. Millbank 1 5 0
15. Early Morning (Battersea) 1 1 0
16. Chelsea Bridge and Church 0 10 6
-------
_THE LITTLE LIMEHOUSE._ One Hundred £1 11 6
Proofs Only
_HURLINGHAM._ Sixty Artist’s Proofs £3 3 0
_FULHAM._ Sixty Artist’s Proofs £3 3 0
_PUTNEY._ Sixty Artist’s Proofs £3 3 0
_PUTNEY BRIDGE._ Proofs £6 6 0
_BATTERSEA BRIDGE._ Proofs £6 6 0
-------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BY SAMUEL PALMER.
_THE LONELY TOWER._ From “Il Penseroso.”
-------
_THE HERDSMAN’S COTTAGE_ (1850). Plate destroyed.
-------
_THE BELLMAN._ From “Il Penseroso” (1879). Sixty Remarque Proofs (of
which few remain unsold) £4 4 0
Plain Impressions 2 2 0
-------
_THE SKYLARK_ (1850). Plate destroyed £4 4 0
-------
_CHRISTMAS; or, Folding the Last Sheep._ From Bampfylde’s “Sonnet”
(1850). A few Fine Proofs £3 3 0
-------
_THE WILLOW_ (1850). Mr. Palmer’s First Etching £0 10 6
-------
_THE SLEEPING SHEPHERD._ Plate destroyed £4 4 0
-------
_EARLY MORNING—Opening the Fold._ Remarque Proofs all sold. Artist’s
Proofs £2 2 0
-------
_THE VINE._ Two Subjects on one Plate. Plate destroyed £5 5 0
-------
_THE EARLY PLOUGHMAN_ £2 2 0
-------
_THE HERDSMAN._ Plate destroyed £6 6 0
-------
_THE MORNING OF LIFE._ Plate destroyed £5 5 0
-------
_THE RISING MOON._ Plate destroyed £5 5 0
-------------------------------------------
_In addition to these, a large number of examples of Etchings by J.
C. Hook, R.A., Rajon, Flameng, Unger, Gaillard, Waltner,
Brunet-Debaines, F. Bracquemond, Jacquemart, Chifflart, Daubigny, Le
Rat, Veyrassat, Appian, Tissot, Legros, Herkomer, &c., &c._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_ART BOOKS_
PUBLISHED BY THE FINE ART SOCIETY.
-------
NOTE.—The rule of the Society in publishing Books is to make an issue
sufficient only to meet the demand at the time of publication. By so
doing they find the subscribers are materially benefited, as their
books quickly increase in value.
-------
_Mr. Ruskin’s Notes on his Turner Drawings._ Exhibited at The Fine Art
Society’s Galleries, 1878. Illustrated Large-paper Edition,
consisting of 750 copies. Published £2 2s. Edition exhausted. A copy
sold at Christie’s, in April, 1881, for £4 4s.
The same, small paper, unillustrated, 2s. 6d.[2]
The type of these editions has been distributed.
-------
_Mr. Ruskin’s Notes on Samuel Prout and William Hunt._ In illustration
of a Loan Collection of Drawings exhibited at The Fine Art Society’s
Galleries in 1879. Edition nearly exhausted. Large Paper,
Illustrated Edition, consisting of 500 copies, £2 2s.
The same, small paper, unillustrated, 2s. 6d.[2]
The type of these editions has been distributed.
-------
_Mr. Seymour Haden’s Notes on Etching._ In illustration of the Art, and
of his Collection of Etchings and Engravings of the Old Masters,
exhibited at The Fine Art Society’s Galleries, 1879. Large Paper,
Illustrated Edition, limited to 500 copies, £2 2s.
The same, small paper, unillustrated, 1s.[2]
The type of these editions has been distributed.
-------
_J. F. Millet—A Biography by W. E. Henley._ Illustrated with Twenty
Etchings and Woodcuts, reproduced in facsimile. Large-paper Edition,
limited to 500 copies, £1 1s.
-------
_Samuel Palmer: A Biography by his Son, Mr. A. H. Palmer._ Illustrated
with an Original Etching by Samuel Palmer, entitled “Christmas,” and
several Autotypes and Wood Engravings. The Edition will be limited
to 500 copies. Price 31s. 6d.
[_In the Press._
-------
_The Year’s Art, 1882._ A concise Epitome of all matters relating to
Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, which have occurred during
the year 1881, in the United Kingdom, together with Information
respecting the events of 1882. By MARCUS B. HUISH. Price 2s. 6d.
-------
_Notes by Mr. F. G. Stephens on a Collection of Drawings and Woodcuts by
Thomas Bewick._ Exhibited at the Fine Art Society’s Rooms, 1880.
Large Paper, Illustrated Edition, limited to 300 copies. Published
at 21s.; price 31s. 6d. Edition exhausted.
The same, small paper, unillustrated, 1s.[2]
The type of these editions has been distributed.
-------
_Memoir and Complete Descriptive Catalogue of the Works of Charles
Méryon._ By PHILIP BURTY and MARCUS B. HUISH. 1879. Limited to 125
copies; type distributed. Published at 16s.; price 21s.
-------
Footnote 2:
These Handbooks, together with “John Everett Millais, R.A.,” by
Andrew Lang; “Samuel Palmer,” by F. G. Stephens; and “The Sea
Painters,” are sold bound in half calf, complete in one Volume,
price 10s. 6d.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that:
was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
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