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Title: Etching in England: With 50 illustrations.
Author: Wedmore, Frederick, Sir
Language: English
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Etching in England
[Illustration: TURNER. “TWICKENHAM."]
Etching in England
by
Frederick Wedmore
With 50 Illustrations
[Illustration: colophon]
London
George Bell and Sons
1895
CHISWICK PRESS:--CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
_PREFACE._
_I read, the other day, in a note of Abraham Haywar to his
translation of “Faust,” how Schlegel wrote of Gœthe--to M. de
Rémusat,--“Il imait guère à donner des explications, et il jamais
voulu faire des préfaces.” It would not be seemly, perhaps, that in the
present volume of brief historical and critical record, I should
endeavour to imitate so august a silence._
_Twenty-seven years have passed since one of the most interesting and
judicial of English writers upon Fine Art published the book which did
amongst us the service of popularising, in some degree at least, the
knowledge of Etching. The craft of the aquafortist has, since then,
become a medium of expression generally accepted, if not precisely
understood; and the half-educated young woman of our period, far from
considering the art of whose achievements I treat, as “a form of elegant
pen-drawing,” (as she did in Mr. Hamerto first days), is likely
perhaps to hold--with “Carry,” in my own little story--that there is
“nothing in the world so artistic as a very large etching.” The public,
if it has not become properly instructed in the technique of Etching,
has at least had the opportunity of becoming so. Hence I have conceived
it to be no part of my business to discourse much upon methods. For them
the reader may turn now, not only to Mr. Hamerton, but to Sir Seymour
Haden, with his great practical experience, his native endowments, and
his finely trained taste; to Mr. Herkomer, with his frank and
interesting personal record; to M. Maxime Lalanne; to Mr. Frank
Short--but the list is too long for me to attempt to exhaust it._
_What is done here--and done I think for the first time--is to devote a
book to the survey, not of good etched work generally, nor of all etched
work--all popular etched work--wrought in England, but of such work as
has been wrought in England of the finer and truer kind. That has led to
many omissions; for, in the last generation and before it, people were
popular--as many are to-day--who were clever draughtsmen, perhaps, but
bad etchers. It has led, too, to many inclusions--inclusions not
possible to Mr. Hamerton. Much of the best work done in England has been
done since he wrote; and a little excellent work, done long before he
wrote, he happened to pass over._
_This present book, then, is devoted to the best English art. It treats
of the foreigner only when he has laboured much in our land, or--I am
thinking perhaps of M. Helleu--has at least been much associated with
it. It includes necessarily a great American--Mr. Whistler--who was
amongst us for more than thirty years--and a man of French birth who has
been half his life with us--M. Legros. The art of Etching is not, it may
be, like the art of Water-Colour, essentially English; but I suppose
that nowhere more than here has it been practised with excellence and
with legitimate variety. And this I say with the full knowledge that the
achievements of Rembrandt have made Holland classic ground for ever for
the lover of Etching, and that the history of that art in France
includes two names, at least, which are inevitably illustrious--Méryo
name and Jacquemar._
RIGHT
_F. W._
_LONDON: October, 1895._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. TWO CLASSES OF ETCHING 1
II. TURNER 3
III. GIRTON 6
IV. WILKIE 10
V. GEDDES 14
VI. CROME 20
VII. COTMAN 22
VIII. SAMUEL PALMER 26
IX. JAMES MCNEIL WHISTLER 30
X. SIR SEYMOUR HADEN 45
XI. ALPHONSE LEGROS 62
XII. WILLIAM STRANG 71
XIII. CHARLES HOLROYD 87
XIV. FRANK SHORT 95
XV. C. J. WATSON 103
XVI. OLIVER HALL 115
XVII. COLONEL GOFF 119
XVIII. D. Y. CAMERON 137
XIX. JOSEPH PENNELL 140
XX. MORTIMER MENPES 144
XXI. L. RAVEN-HILL 148
XXII. R. W. MACBETH, HUBERT HERKOMER, R.A., AND AXEL HAIG 152
XXIII. SOME OTHER ETCHERS 159
XXIV. HELLEU 172
ILLUSTRATIONS.[1]
PAGE
1. TWICKENHAM (_Frontispiece_)....._Turner_
2. SEINE BRIDGE ....._Girtin_ 7
3. THE RECEIPT....._Wilkie_ 11
4. PECKHAM RYE....._Geddes_ 15
5. HALLIFORD ON THAMES....._” 17
6. NEAR WHITBY....._Cotman_ 23
7. THE HERDSMAN....._Samuel Palmer_ 27
8. THAMES POLICE....._Whistler_ 33
9. THE PIAZZETTA....._” 39
10. TREE STUDY....._Seymour Haden_ 43
11. THOMAS HADEN, AFTER WRIGHT OF DERBY....._Seymour Haden_ 47
12. KIDWELLY TOWN....._” “ 49
13. A WATER MEADOW....._” “ 53
14. WINDMILL HILL....._” “ 55
15. SCOTCH FIRS....._” “ 59
16. COMMUNION DANS GLISE ST. MÉDARD....._Legros_ 63
17. LA MORT ET LE BÛCHERON....._” 67
18. THE POTATO BASKET....._William Strang_ 73
19. THE BOOKSTALL....._” “ 75
20. LORD JUSTICE LINDLEY....._” “ 77
21. MIDNIGHT MASS, MONTE OLIVETO....._Charles Holroyd_ 81
22. FARM BEHIND SCARBOROUGH....._Charles Holroyd_ 83
23. ROUND TEMPLE....._” “ 85
24. WROUGHT NAILS....._Frank Short_ 89
25. SLEEPING TILL THE FLOOD....._” “ 91
26. QUARTER BOYS....._” “ 93
27. MILL BRIDGE, BOSHAM....._C. J. Watson_ 99
28. ST. ETIENNE DU MONT....._” “ 101
29. LANDSCAPE WITH TREES....._Oliver Hall_ 107
30. ROADSIDE TREES....._” “ 109
31. TREES ON THE HILL-SIDE....._” “ 111
32. THE EDGE OF THE FOREST....._” “ 113
33. CHAIN PIER, BRIGHTON....._Colonel Goff_ 117
34. NORFOLK BRIDGE, SHOREHAM....._” “ 123
35. PINE TREES, CHRISTCHURCH....._” “ 127
36. BORDER TOWERS....._D. Y. Cameron_ 131
37. THE PALACE, STIRLING CASTLE....._” “ 133
38. WINDMILLS, ZANDAAM....._” “ 135
39. LE PUY EN VELAY....._Joseph Pennell_ 141
40. JAPANESE GIRLS....._Menpes_ 145
41. WANDLE RIVER....._L. Raven-Hill_ 149
42. GWENYDD....._Herkomer_ 153
43. THE OPEN WINDOW....._Elizabeth Armstrong_ 157
44. AT THE LOOM....._Minna Bolingbroke_ 161
45. DORKING....._Percy Thomas_ 163
46. SUNRISE IN WALES....._W. Holmes May_ 167
47. A HURRYING WIND....._Alfred East_ 169
48. ETUDE DE JEUNE FILLE....._Helleu_ 173
49. FEMME À LA TASSE....._” 177
50. LE SALON BLANC....._” 181
ETCHING IN ENGLAND.
I.
TWO CLASSES OF ETCHING.
As in France and America, so, very specially, in England, the
productions of the etcher have to be divided broadly into two classes,
one of which is the result mainly of a commercial demand, and the other,
of an artistic impulse. The etcher whose employment of the
etching-needle is confined wholly, or confined in the main, to the work
of realizing and translating the conceptions of another, is, like the
reproductive line-engraver, or the reproductive engraver in mezzotint,
little more than the dexterous instrument which carries anothe
message. So artistic is his process, when it is properly used, that it
is preferable indeed that he be himself an artist as well as a
craftsman--it is indeed essential that he shall have some measure of
artistic feeling, as well as the flexibility of the executant. But our
demands upon him stop, in any case, at a comparatively early point; and
we find him more or less sharply cut off in our minds, and in our
estimation, from the artist who, when he employs the etching-needle, is
occupied with the spontaneous expression of his own thought and
fancy--of the particular things of beauty and of interest which may
strike him on his way through the world.
II.
TURNER.
Of fine original etchers within the confines of these realms, Turner was
almost the first to appear. He was the senior, considerably, of Wilkie
and Geddes, who will have to be spoken of soon after him. During twelve
years of his “early middle” period--between 1807 and 1819--he wrought
what were in some respects important etchings upon something like
seventy plates. But his etchings differed in aim, as well as in
execution, from almost all the others I shall speak of in this brief
general survey of the achievements, here in England, of the etche
art. They did so partly by reason of the fact that it was never intended
that they should be complete in themselves. They laid the basis of an
effect which had to be completed by the employment of another art. They
did hardly more than record--though always with an unequalled power and
an unerring skill--the leading lines of those great landscape
compositions which the mezzotint of the engraver (and the engraver was
often Turner himself) endowed with light and shade and atmosphere. For
it was by a union of these two arts that that noble publication was
produced whose business it was to surpass in variety and subtlety the
“Liber Veritatis” of Claude.
It is very possible that in some of the plates of his “Liber Studiorum,”
Turner did not undertake the “biting-in,” with acid, of those subjects
whose draughtsmanship was his own. Probably he did in all the best of
them. In an etching, the strength and the perfection of the result--the
relation of part to part--is dependent so much on the biting. It is
hardly conceivable that where the etchings of the “Liber Studiorum”
strike us as most noble, they were not wholly--in biting as well as in
draughtsmanship--Turne own.
They differ much in merit, apart, I think, from the necessary difference
in interest which arises from the opportunity given by one subject and
denied by another for the exercise of an etche skill. They have
generally, within their proper limits, perfect freedom of handling, and
an almost incomparable vigour, and a variety which liberates their
author from any charge of mannerism. There are few of them which could
not hold their own with any plate of Rembrand done under conditions
sufficiently resembling theirs. The etching of the “Severn and Wye,” or
the etching of “St. Catherin Hill, Guildford,” is carried very nearly
as far as the etching of the “Cottage with White Palings,” and with a
result very nearly as delightful and distinguished. And in regard to the
average etching of Turner, it may fairly be said that a hand put in to
pluck out of a portfolio by chance any one of the seventy, would
discover that it held a print which was at least the equal of that one
of Rembrand with which it is fairest of all to compare it--a print of
Rembrand done, like Turne, for “leading lines” alone--I mean the
famous little _tour de force_, the “Si Bridge.”
So much for the greatness of our English master. I pass from him with
this reminder, given again for final word. Wonderful as is his etching
for selection of line, wonderful for firmness of hand, we must never
allow ourselves to forget that it was not intended to present, that it
was not intended to be in any way concerned with, the whole of a
picture.
III.
GIRTIN.
The limitations which we have marked in Turne aim in Etching, are to
be noticed just as clearly in the aim of Girtin. Nay, they are to be
noticed yet more. For while Turner not infrequently gave emphasis to his
work by the depth and vigour of his bitten line, Girtin, in his few and
rare etchings--which, it is worth while to remember, just preceded
Turne--sought only to establish the composition and the outline. He
did this with a skill of selection scarcely less than Turne own, and
admirable, almost as in his water-colour work, is the quiet sobriety of
his picturesque record.
But though Girti etchings--many soft-ground, and about twenty--may
contain some lessons for the craftsman, some indeed for the artist, they
are scarcely for the portfolios of the collector. They were wrought, all
of them, towards the end of Girti life, that was cut short in 1802,
[Illustration: GIRTIN. “A SEINE BRIDGE.”]
when he was twenty-nine years old. They were the preparations for his
aquatinted plates of Paris, against which in their completed form there
is only this to be said--that the avoidance, generally, of any attempt
at atmospheric effects, involves a seeming monotony of treatment, though
as dignified visions of old Parisian architecture, of Parisian
landscape, so to speak, in its habitual setting of wide sky and noble
river, they have never been surpassed, and very seldom equalled.
The vision of Girtin, it must always be remembered--whatever be his
work--is not emphatically personal. With all his charm and breadth and
dignity, something of the pure architectural draughtsman lingered to the
end, in his labour. He had no _parti pris_ about the facts: no bias we
forgive, no prejudice we welcome. He sought to represent simply the
“view,” although no doubt the “view” was generally bettered by his
artistry.
IV.
WILKIE.
A famous Scotchman, David Wilkie, and his very distinguished friend and
fellow-countryman, Andrew Geddes, wrought, each of them, in the middle
period of Turne life, a certain number of etchings of independent
merit. Those of Sir David Wilkie, which were but few, happen to be the
best known, because Wilkie, much more than Geddes, was a leader of
painting. But, meritorious as are the etchings of Wilkie, in their
faithful record of character and picturesque effect, they are seldom as
admirable as the prints of his less eminent brother. They have,
generally, not so much freedom; and, while they follow great traditions
less, they are at the same time less individual. “Pope Examining a
Censer” has the dignity of the designer and the draughtsman, but not
much of the etche particular gift. “The Receipt”--or “A Gentleman
Searching in a Bureau,”
[Illustration: DAVID WILKIE. “THE RECEIPT.”]
for this second title explains the subject better--is the most
successful of Wilki. It is characteristic of his simpler and less
ambitious _genre_, and is indeed faultless, and more than
faultless--charming.
V.
GEDDES.
Andrew Geddes etched four or five times as many plates as Wilkie. He
issued ten from Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, in 1826. The dates on
some of them are 1812, 1816, and 1822; and, besides these ten that were
published, about thirty more, which there was no attempt to issue to the
world, have to be taken account of. Some, like the excellent “Portrait
of the Painte Mother”--which is so fine in illumination, in drawing,
and in character--are directly suggested by the artis paintings.
Others--including all the landscapes--are, apparently, studies from
Nature, done with a singular appreciation of the ripest art of
Rembrandt.
Geddes was very sensible of the charm of dry-point--of its peculiar
quality of giving individuality to each one of the few impressions which
you may safely produce from it, and of its unique capacity for rendering
broad effects of light and shade.
[Illustration: ANDREW GEDDES. “AT PECKHAM RYE.”]
[Illustration: ANDREW GEDDES. “AT HALLIFORD ON THAMES.”]
The “Peckham Rye” shows this. Nothing can show it better. And there is
at least one other plate by Geddes, “Halliford on Thames,” which proves
him just as completely a master of elegance and grace of line as
“Peckham Rye” shows him a decisive master of masculine effect, and
curiously adept in the broad and balanced disposition of masses of light
and shade.
Gedde work will not decline in value, and the connoisseur has no
business whatever to forget or to ignore it. Only, if he collects the
dry-points of Geddes, he had better wait for years, if necessary, for
early impressions of them, and he had better repudiate altogether the
unsatisfactory modern edition--the worthy Mr. David Lain volume,
“Etchings by Wilkie and Geddes,” issued, with the best intentions in the
world, in Edinburgh in 1875.
VI.
CROME.
It is the splendid work of Crome among the Norfolk coppices--among the
fields studded here and there with cattle, but chiefly in the tangle of
the wood, or where the wood-path winds under the rustic palings, and
then through undergrowth, and out into the rising meadow, to be lost at
last, a thread against the horizon sky--it is this splendid tree-work,
large, massive, intricate, pictorial, never narrowly faithful alone,
that gives interest and value to Crom series of etchings. He did them
mostly in the last years of his life (which closed in 1821), and it was
always for pleasure and remembrance that he wrought them. Publication he
cannot have intended, for he never did enough to be recognized a master
while he lived, and his etched subjects gave him memoranda for his
pictures, and were little records of places that he loved.
Their merits came slowly to be known by some few; and the etchings,
carelessly printed and ill-bitten, were given, here and there, by Crome
to his friends. In 1834, his widow, I am told, issued an edition, which
must have been very small, and four years later they came again in a
measure before the lovers of Norfolk art, re-bitten by one Mr. Ninham,
re-touched by one Mr. Edwards of Bungay, and issued with a short
biography by Mr. Dawson Turner--a volume which may still be stumbled on
at the booksellers. These later states are of slight artistic value.
They tell us little of Crome which we may not know much better from
other sources he has furnished, and much of their work is not Crom at
all. The early states are, at least, “signed all over” by him.
Amateurish enough in biting and in printing, they are yet pleasant,
characteristic records. “At Bawburgh,” and “Near Hingham” (dated 1813),
and “At Woodrising” are some of those that one would like to cherish:
and cherished they ought to be, for the reasons I have named. Yet to put
them beside even less admirable works which have enjoyed the ordinary
conditions of fair presentation--the biting adequate, the printing
careful, and the paper good--is to see them, of necessity, at a
disadvantage.
VII.
COTMAN.
Cotma etchings--soft ground, for the most part--are scarcely for the
average collector, any more than Crom. No one, I mean, puts them
carefully in the cabinet, or, with reverence, in the shrine and
sanctuary of the solander box; but, in book-form, they stand, and should
stand, on the shelves of some lovers of Art. One not unwieldy
volume--that “Liber Studiorum,” which, in the year 1838, Cotman brought
together, not perhaps without thought of Turne accomplished
triumph--contains two score or so of plates which show much, not only of
Cotma capacity as a draughtsman, but of his genius for ideal
composition, of his faculty for dignity of line, and for so disposing
masses of light and shade that they should be not only significant, but
impressive. It is here seen that this glorious and original colourist
could dispense with colour and yet be fine and individual. Yet, as
achievements in
[Illustration: COTMAN. “NEAR WHITBY.”]
the art of Black-and-White, no careful student could place them in line
with the plates of the admitted masters of etching. They have not often
the subtlety of _technique_ which, allied of course with fineness of
conception, is the very sign of the master. Still, they are too good to
be passed by in silence. And they are a great ma work.
VIII.
SAMUEL PALMER.
Samuel Palmer--an English classic, by this time, as a painter of
water-colours--made (from the year 1850, or thereabouts, onward to his
old age in the seventies) a limited number of elaborate etchings in
which the play of line is almost wholly lost: more lost, much more lost,
than in the etchings of Méryon. But Samuel Palmer, like Méryon, was a
great poetic artist. Slowly he built up his effects, his noble sunrise
or sunset landscapes--the landscape of artistic convention and poetic
vision. The unity and strength of his thought was never sacrificed or
frittered by the elaboration of his labour. To condemn him then, because
he was not a free sketcher, would be as pedantic as to condemn Méryon.
Nay more, were any such pedantic condemnation meted out to him, it would
have to be meted out to the author of the “Ephraim Bonus” in his turn;
since it is a characteristic of Rembrandt that in
[Illustration: SAMUEL PALMER. “THE HERDSMAN.”]
his engraved as in his painted work he allowed himself an amazing
elasticity of method. Rembrandt, like every great man, is _super
grammaticam_. He was a law unto himself. And so, in a measure, was
Samuel Palmer, the creator of the solemn plates of “The Early Ploughman”
and “The Herdsman,” and of certain hardly less admirable coppers which
illustrate his own translation of the Eclogues of Virgil.
IX.
WHISTLER.
I pass from the brief mention of a dignified artist, high of soul--whose
work is charged with reverie, grandeur, admonishment--to the
consideration of an artist little concerned, in emotional or reflective
or didactic way at least, with Humanit fortunes, but the most skilled
wielder of the etching-needle whom the world has seen since Rembrandt.
Mr. Whistle scarcely sympathetic attitude towards his kind may be
occasioned in part by the conviction that it is his kin most urgent
business to be concerned with his prints, and his knowledge that this
conviction of his own--if thus I dare to call it--has not, until the
last few years, been largely shared by other people. Popular he could
not be; or scarcely in his own time. A Sarasate, with his music,
attracts the world; but in pictorial art of every sort the _virtuoso_
appeals only to his brethren. His “brethren”--his real brethren--are
quite as likely indeed to be connoisseurs as fellow-workmen. But
“brethren” shall be the word. And it is such who--some of them for more
than thirty years, and some of them since yesterday--have recognized the
genius of Whistler.
Our admirable comedian, Mr. Toole, is--if I may recall the saying of one
of his fellow artists--commonly supposed to have been born in every town
of the English provinces, in which the receipts, when he visits it, do
their part to justify that town in claiming him as a native. Not quite
for the same reason there are towns which dispute with Baltimore the
honour of having given birth to the artist of the “French Set,” the
“Thames Set,” and the “Twenty-Six Etchings.” Mr. Whistler was born,
anyhow, of American parents--I like Baltimore so much, that I hope it is
only Baltimore that can fairly claim him--and it is stated to have been
in July, 1834, that he came into the world.[2] American then by birth,
or family association, he is to a great extent French by education, and
his first dated etchings, of the year 1857, were wrought when he was a
student in Paris. Along with a popular English draughtsman of Society,
he was in the studio of Gleyre, and to Gleyre, for all that I know, he
may owe something; but no debt is apparent in his work. A few etchings
wrought in Paris, and a few during a journey in Alsace and Lorraine, and
then in 1859 we find Whistler settled in London and busy with the
laborious series of etchings of the Thames.
He was himself almost from the beginning, though it is possible to trace
the influence of even minor Dutch etchers, or Dutch painters at all
events, in such a tentative little work as “The Dutchman Holding the
Glass,” and though in the nobler plates known as the “Rag-Gatherers,”
“La Vieille aux Loques,” “La Marchande de Moutarde,” and “The Kitchen,”
it is clear that Whistler in his conception of a subject was scarcely
without reverent thought of the great masters of pathetic suggestion and
poetic chiaroscuro--Rembrandt, De Hooch, and Nicholas Maes. But by the
time he executed the most justly famous etchings of the Thames set--the
most famous of the “Sixteen Etchings,” such as “Black Lion Wharf,” “The
Pool,” and “Thames Police”--he was himself, wholly. He was in full
possession of what may be called his earlier manner. Nay, in December,
1859--not many months after these things had been wrought with a
minuteness of detail which the art of Van der Heyden or of Hollar could
not have
[Illustration: J. McNEIL WHISTLER. “THAMES POLICE.”]
excelled--we find in one unfinished plate of extreme interest and
extraordinary rarity (“Paris: Isle de la Cité”) some union of his
earlier realization with his later suggestiveness.
The early detail of Whistler, in the Thames etchings, is never for a
moment dull. He puts down for us on the copper endless results of
endless and interesting observation. The life of the River, “below
bridge,” and the life of riverside London is all there--barge and
bargee, crane and warehouse, wharf and chimney, clipper and wherry, and
the sluggish stream, the flat horizon, the distant river-curve, the
tower of Rotherhithe Church, rising perhaps from out of the remote and
low-lying roofs. And, elaborate as the work is, it is never for a moment
either fatigued or mechanical: it preserves inviolate the freshness and
vivacity which it is the province of the etching to retain. Nor does the
work of Whistler, either at this period or later, ever lose sight of
that which, again, it is the etche special business to cultivate--the
value of pure “line.” By “pure,” I do not mean Classic (Classic line has
other functions): I mean the line that is expressive--that is set with a
purpose; that, being laid, is not interfered with--the line that lives
and that tells its story.
By 1863--as is shown by the exquisite “Chelsea Wharf,” with its quiet of
the suburban afternoon, and by the admirable “Amsterdam,” with its
houses, its shipping, its thin line of long flat coast under a wildish
sky[3]--Whistler had thoroughly entered upon the work of his middle
period. A manner more suggestive to the expert, and more economical to
the artist, though received less readily by the first-comer, was by this
time clearly upon him; and, with certain modifications, it has continued
to this day. Perhaps it is most distinctly marked in that Leyland
period--a period of the rare dry-points of the Leyland family--which,
after a little interval, succeeded the period of the “Chelsea Wharf” and
the “Amsterdam.” It is in its perfection in “The Model Resting” (1870),
in “Fanny Leyland” (1873), and in “Dam Wood” (1875)--all of them rare,
desirable, notable plates of the true Leyland period, in most of which,
as in some of his later work, Mr. Whistler would seem--if I may put it
so--to have painted upon the plate as much as drawn: to have sought,
that is, painte as well as draughtsma qualities.
I endeavour to note the distinctions, but after some fourteen years of
close study of Mr. Whistle works--and of fruitful enjoyment of their
possession--I must still guard myself against expressing any marked
preference for one period over another. The work of each period has its
own qualities, and, since all Art is concession and compromise, the work
of each period may have likewise its own deficiencies. Practically there
has been no “bad time;” but at more times than one there have been--even
from this gifted hand--unsatisfactory, unworthy prints.
In 1879, the great etcher went to Venice, at the instance of the Fine
Art Society, and there, in line extraordinarily expressive and
vivacious, he recorded, not so much the recognized beauties of the town,
as the vividness and variety of his personal impressions. That was his
true business. Some of these etchings were exhibited before they were
properly finished--finer effects remained, I mean, to be obtained from
the plates. Hence they were received, perhaps, with more than customary
coldness, though the fairy-like “Little Venice,” nearly perfect to begin
with, was always an exception to the rule. There is nothing of
Rembrand, there is nothing of Méryo, besides which this diminutive
masterpiece may not most fitly be placed. Power of selection, power of
composition, delicacy of handling, all say their last word in the
“Little Venice.” Art does not go any further.
Since 1880, when they were first exhibited, many of the plates done in
Venice have been taken up and perfected. The “Piazzetta,” for
instance--unattractive at first: a ragged thing, or a skeleton--has
somewhat lately been brought to the highest level that is attained by
any etche art. And, several years ago, Mr. Whistler perfected for the
limited issue by the Messrs. Dowdeswell, the “Twenty-six” plates--most
of them Venetian in theme--which had, fortunately, been bought by hardly
anybody (I may suppose) until, in 1886, their excellence was achieved.
In this set, the entrancing freedom and inexhaustible suggestiveness of
“The Balcony” and “The Garden” demand note: the balcony that, with
drapery flung upon it, hangs over and overlooks the Grand Canal: the
garden which passing humanity peers into, and peering, perhaps reflects
with the Greek poet whose youth was gone:
“Spring for the tree and herb; no spring for us.”
It was in 1886 that I published my “Whistle Etchings: a Study and a
Catalogue.” About two hundred and fourteen etchings had then been
executed; and these--the work of what must necessarily be the better
part of Mr. Whistle lifetime--were carefully described as well as
appreciated. I hope the book was not
[Illustration: J. McNEIL WHISTLER. “THE PIAZZETTA.”]
without effect, in England and America, on the demand for Mr. Whistle
prints, many of which, however, were already unobtainable, so narrowly
limited had been their issue, and so various, during all those years,
the fortunes of the plates. But if old etchings were difficult to get,
new ones were not wanting. There cropped up, under my notice, ingenious
but insignificant _croquis_, declared by dealers, interested in them, to
be valuable, because they were “undescribed.” Why were they
“undescribed?” Because, it seems, they had only at that moment been
done. Plates with a few scratches on them--clever, since they were
Whistle, but each plate less important than the last--passed quickly
into the hands of men who had, presumably, much money and only a little
knowledge.
During the last five or six years, with a creditable and natural
reaction from what would seem to have been a fever of immature
fruitfulness--in the midst of which, after all, this exquisite and ever
dainty artist did, of course, nothing ugly, though much that was rather
provokingly thin--Mr. Whistler has, from time to time, produced a few
new plates of serious interest and of finest accomplishment. The
Brussels group belongs, in spirit, if not precisely in fact, to these
latest years; and charming is the seeming intricacy, yet assured
lightness, of the Whistlerian treatment of Flemish house-front. Again,
there are delightful little things wrought in the country of the Loire:
not solid records, but, as it were, fleeting visions of its
architecture, and very fascinating. But the best of all the later work,
and it is among the very latest that has yet been seen, is the quite
admirable “Zandaam,” over whose stretched line the breeze from across
dyke and fen and Zuyder Zee, stirs here, stirs there, stirs everywhere,
the wings of the windmills of Holland.
[Illustration: SEYMOUR HADEN. “TREE STUDY.”]
X.
SEYMOUR HADEN.
Several years before Mr. Whistler etched at all--in 1843 and 1844
indeed--a now veteran artist, President “_de sa propre Académie_,” who
has been famous surgeon as well as famous etcher--founder of the Royal
Society of Painter-Etchers, energetic advocate, by speech and writing,
of the art he loves--drew delicately upon six tiny plates what were
meant to be the beginnings of landscapes in mid-Italy. As rare as
anything in Mr. Whistle long _œuvre_--though, as their author knows,
in themselves far less desirable--are the impressions of those little
plates, which few have seen, but which I beheld, perhaps ten or twelve
years ago, strengthened here and there with pencil-work, yet even then
only feebly holding their own, among the abundant treasures of an upper
chamber in Hertford Street--the almost unknown initial chapter, they, in
the sturdy and now celebrated volume of Seymour Hade etched work.
The days when they were executed were about the days of the Etching
Club, a body which in its turn was followed by the Junior Etching Club.
These clubs left us no legacy we care to inherit; their productions were
for the most part fidgety, prim, at best desperately pretty and
ridiculously elaborated, so that there was practically nothing in them
of visible and expressive line. A little--just a little--of that visible
line there was--there actually was, even in an unenlightened period--in
those few trifling plates of Seymour Hade on which his first work was
accomplished. He wrought nothing for many years afterwards. Then, in
1858, when Whistler, by this time his brother-in-law, was already busy,
Seymour Haden--urged thereto by the knowledge of good work executed in
France at that moment, and by a fitting reverence for the master
etchings of Rembrandt--took up some coppers seriously; and he set down
upon them, in this and the few following years, with an appreciation not
less certain and immediate than Mr. Whistle of those laws to which
etchings should conform, his powerful and personal impressions of
English landscape, of the trout stream, and the stately river, of forest
trees, a sunset over the Thames, of the yews and cedars of an English
country-house (“Mytton Hall”), of the reflections, in some quiet
[Illustration: SEYMOUR HADEN. “THOMAS HADEN, AFTER WRIGHT OF
DERBY.”]
[Illustration: SEYMOUR HADEN. “KIDWELLY TOWN.”]
water, of the homely buildings of a little whitewashed town in Wales
(“Kidwelly Town”).
A few years later, when the achievements of Haden had grown numerous,
the intelligent French critic, Monsieur Philippe Burty (whom the revival
of etching greatly interested), praised and chronicled them in the
“Gazette des Beaux-Arts.” There were fifty or sixty prints by that time.
This was in 1864. And in 1865 and 1866, about thirty of them--including
the minor but still attractive plates used as “head” or
“tail-pieces”--were formally published in Paris, with a French text
which consisted in part of an excellent analytical and didactic letter,
written in the foreign tongue, by the artist to Monsieur Burty.
1864 and 1865 were years of great productiveness, and among educated
lovers of Art, at home and in France, popularity, hitherto denied to the
etcher--for Whistler was little appreciated and Méryon was
starving--courted Haden with its blandishments, or threatened him with
its dangers. Of the “Shere Mill Pond” Mr. Hamerton spoke in “Etching and
Etchers” in terms of what I cannot but think was somewhat exaggerated
praise. In 1870, the large and impressive plate of “The Breaking up of
the ‘Agamemnon’”--“large” I say; not “huge,” for “the huge plate is an
offence”--put the coping-stone upon that edifice of Seymour Hade
celebrity to which the writings of Mr. Hamerton (in the now standard
volume I have already referred to) had contributed an important storey.
Mr. Hamerton, at that period, there can be little question, did not
fully appreciate Mr. Whistler. I am not certain that he ever did. He
already wrote of him--need I say?--with intelligence and interest, but
his enthusiasm was reserved, so far as the moderns are concerned, for
Méryon and for Haden.
Save for an exceptional activity in the year 1877--the year of the
Dorsetshire dry-points and of the Spanish etchings--the productiveness
of Seymour Haden, since 1869, began visibly to slacken. In 1879 it
stopped. The 185 etchings chronicled by Sir William Drake in “A
Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Francis Seymour Haden” had
all been executed; and soon afterwards--either during Seymour Hade
visit to America or during a visit of Mr. Keppe to these shores--the
veteran artist said to the New York print-dealer: “I shall etch no
more.” I imagine Mr. Keppe countenance of surprise and regret, and
Seymour Hade interested observation of it. But the incident was not
over. The artist brought out his etching-needle; looked at it; placed it
gravely in
[Illustration: SEYMOUR HADEN. “THE WATER MEADOW.”]
[Illustration: SEYMOUR HADEN. “WINDMILL HILL.”]
Mr. Keppe hands. It was presented to him as a sign that that which
had been spoken would surely be fulfilled, and the etcher would etch no
more. Like Madame Arnould-Plessis, like Macready, too, but like how few
of his fellows in any department of public effort, this artist withdrew
himself from productiveness before ever the quality of his production
had visibly failed.
Perhaps I shall do well, in one or two last paragraphs about him, to
name, for convenience sake, a few of Sir Seymour Hade most excellent
and most characteristic works--prints in which his vivid impression of
the object or the scene before him has been most vividly or, it may be,
subtly conveyed--prints, perhaps, which have his most distinguishing
qualities of directness and vigour. The etchings of Seymour Haden are
deliberately arrested at the stage of the frank sketch; but it is the
sketch conceived nobly and executed with impulse. It is not the sketch
upon the thumb-nail; it is not the memorandum that may be made upon a
ma shirt-cuff at dinner-time, in the interval between the soup and
the fish.
The tendency of his work, as time went on, was, as is usual, towards
greater breadth; but, unless we are to compare only such a print as “Out
of Study-Window,” say (done in 1859), with only the most admirable
dry-point, “Windmill Hill” (done in 1877), there is no greatly-marked
contrast, no surprise; there is but a steady and slow and apparently
inevitable development. This I in part attribute to the fact that when
Seymour Haden took up etching seriously in 1858, he was already
middle-aged. He had lived for years in frequent intercourse with noble
and accomplished Art; his view of Nature, and of the way of rendering
her, or letting her inspire you, was large, and likely to be large,
almost from the beginning. Yet, as time went on, there came, no doubt,
an increasing love of the sense of spaciousness, of breadth, and of
potent effect. The work was apt to become more dramatic and more moving.
The hand asked the opportunity for the fuller exercise of its freedom.
“Sawley Abbey,” etched in 1873, is an instance of this, and I am glad to
mention it, not alone for its merits, but because, like a certain number
of its fellows among the later work, it is etched on zinc--a risky
substance, which succeeds admirably when it succeeds, and when it fails,
as Sir Seymour tells me, fails very much. “Windmill Hill,” “Nine-Barrow
Down,” “Wareham Bridge,” and “The Little Boathouse,” and, again, that
“Grim Spain” which illustrates my “Four Masters of Etching,” are the
prints which I should most choose to possess
[Illustration: SEYMOUR HADEN. “SCOTCH FIRS.”
(_The artis last etching._)]
amongst those of Seymour Hade later time; whilst, going back to the
period of 1864 and 1865, “Sunset on the Thames” is at the same time
popular and strong, and “Penton Hook” remarkable for its draughtsmanship
of tree-trunk and stump. Yet earlier--for they belong to 1860 and
1859--“Combe Bottom” is unsurpassed for sweetness and spontaneity,
“Mytton Hall” for its full share of that element of Style which is never
wholly absent from Seymour Hade work, and “The Water Meadow” is to be
studied and enjoyed as an extraordinarily happy transcript of a sudden
rain-storm in the Hampshire lowlands, where poplars flourish and grass
grows rank.
XI.
ALPHONSE LEGROS.
More than one of the great etchers who must in fairness be treated with
the British school are of foreign origin. Born at Dijon in 1837, and
trained chiefly in Paris--painter, of course, as well as
etcher--Alphonse Legros came to London when he was quite a young man. He
has been amongst us since 1863. It was in Paris, about 1857, that he did
his first etchings, and his surprising originality was declared from the
beginning. The trivial, the accidental even, had no attractions for him.
Even the quiet humour which one recognizes in his character, has no
place in his work. Simple, serious, austere, highly refined, yet with
curious tolerance of physical ugliness, and curious indifference to the
beauty, at all events, of women, Monsieur Legros has conveyed to us, in
his own leisurely and economical fashion, any time these thirty years,
his vision of a world not ours, or
[Illustration: LEGROS. “COMMUNION DANS GLISE ST. MÉDARD.]
rather, very often, his vision of the deeper realities which underlie
whatever may attract us on the surface.
Legros has been concerned--and best of all concerned in etching--with
many departments of Art. Like Mr. G. F. Watts, he has been fascinated,
here and again, and very specially, by masculine intellect and
character; masculine kindness, goodness, genius, energy. Of Mr. Watts
himself--and fortunately in the medium of etching--he has made the
happiest of all possible portraits, finding in the theme a gravity of
manly beauty, a charm of approaching age, to which he has always been
intensely sympathetic. Gambetta, too, and Sir Frederic Leighton, and
Cardinal Manning--who, if he appealed to him at all, must have appealed
to him on the side of austerity alone--have been the subjects of
Legro etched portraiture. To each portrait he has given, though in
very different measures, according as the subject wanted it, a nobility
and dignity supplied by his own art and temperament, and by a sense of
Style nourished upon the study of the Renaissance and of Rembrandt. And,
on the other hand, upon each selected model whom he has treated in those
other etchings which are not confessedly portraiture, he has bestowed
the grave veracity, the verisimilitude of the portrait.
Hardly any of Legro work is dated, and, as time has passed, the
changes in his method have not been very marked, though it is hardly to
the earliest etching that we must go for his most trained
draughtsmanship and most accomplished technique. On the other hand, the
early work has about it a sometimes savage earnestness, a rapid and
immediate expressiveness, a weirdness also, which are immensely
impressive. Poetic and pathetic is it besides, sometimes to the last
degree. “Les Chantres Espagnols,” for example, is the creation of a
great artist: a most penetrating and pathetic study of physical and
mental decay. It represents eight priestly singing men lifting up what
hoarse and feeble voices they may be possessed of, in the hushed choir,
by the uncertain light of torches, in the nigh most mysterious and
most ominous hour.
Several among the more fascinating of these somewhat early etchings and
dry-points record the life of the priesthood. In its visible dignity,
its true but limited _camaraderie_, in its monotony and quietude, in its
magnificence of service and symbol, the life of the priest, and of those
who serve in a great church, has impressed Legros profoundly, and he has
etched these men--one now reading a lesson, one waiting now with folded
hands, one meditative, one observant, and now one offering up the
[Illustration: LEGROS. “LA MORT ET LA BÛCHERON.”]
Host, and now another bending over the violoncello with slow movement of
the hand that holds the bow. Dignity and ignorance, pomp and power,
weariness, senility, decay, and almost squalor--nothing has escaped him.
In Literature, only a Balzac could have done equal justice to that which
attracts, and to that which must needs repel.
Realist, but always poet, in his treatment of these themes--and in the
treatment of such a dramatic plate as “ncendie,” such a nobly
imaginative plate as “La Mort et le Bûcheron”--Legros, when he betakes
himself to landscape, is realist no longer, or, rather, his realism here
is shown only in his contentment with the homely scene, the most
everyday material. Generally, on impression of his landscape is that
it is built to some extent upon the memories of his youth; that, since
then, a little observation has gone a long way--that he has cared to
dream and fancy rather than to actually notice. Here and there, in his
etchings, one maybe reminded of the uplands around Dijon, or of the
chalk hills of the Boulognais, with its wide fields and haystacks, its
gaunt outhouses--a land which rumours of “high farming” have never
reached. As the railway train swept under the hillside, Legros, one
thinks, may have profited by a glance from the windows. And out of the
glance, and out of the memory, and out of the artis genuine sympathy
with humble and monotonous days, there has grown a homely poem.
With Mr. Whistler, on the rare occasions on which he has treated it in
his mature art (in the rare “Dam Wood” especially), Landscape becomes
Decoration. With Sir Seymour Haden, landscape is a matter that must be
energetically observed. Swift, skilful memoranda are taken of
it--memoranda which are not the less scientific because they may be
dramatic besides. With Legros, the landscape must submit to change, to
simplification, to abstraction, generalization even, in the processes of
his mind; and the picture which his hand fashions--the hand with reverie
behind it--is one which travel will help no one to encounter, and
experience help no one to realize. Yet it has its own value.
Before I leave this deeply interesting and so original artist, I will
add that in the “Catalogue Raisonné de uvre gravé et lithographié
lphonse Legros,” compiled by Messieurs Thibaudeau and Poulet-Malassis
in 1877, there are chronicled 168 pieces, but that, writing to me ten
years later, M. Thibaudeau was able to tell of nearly ninety additions
to the list. Since then the number has been yet further extended, for
Legros, to this day, has not ceased to etch.
XII.
WILLIAM STRANG.
Professor, during something like a score of years, at the Slade School
in London, Legros had then a dominating influence upon many amiable
followers who will hardly hereafter be heard of, and upon two or three
clever people with a future in Art. Among these latter--if, for our
present purpose, we disregard men who are painters exclusively, like
Tuke and Gotch--the most conspicuous are William Strang and Charles
Holroyd. Strang is the senior. He has thus far, naturally, been much the
most prolific. He is also the most technically accomplished, and, more
than any younger etcher of the day--almost as much, indeed, as Monsieur
Legros--he has shown himself possessed of the vital gift of imagination.
Like Legros, he has looked immensely at Old Masters--at the Italian
Primitives and at Rembrandt--and has seen Nature in great measure
through their eyes, and this as much when Humanity as when Landscape
has been the object of his gaze. In Stran case, too, to these
accepted and avowed Old Masters, there has come to be added another Old
Master--I mean, Alphonse Legros.
Strang is a Scotsman. That devotion to the weirdness and the uncanny,
which is a note of the full Celtic temperament, is shown amazingly in
his selection of subject; he is, perhaps, most of all contented with
himself when he sets himself to illustrate a ballad of the supernatural,
written in a dialect into the last recesses of which I--who love best
the English tongue--lack, I confess, the energy to penetrate. His
imagination, however, is far from being exercised alone on these themes
of the supernatural. It is occupied, not seldom, with as great a power,
upon modern incidents treated with quaintness and intensity--the
meditations of a jury, the expositions of a preacher, the rescue of the
drowned from some dark river, the ill-bred hysteria of the Salvation
Army. In portraiture, while it is yet visible, and even valuable, it is
controlled sometimes by sense of Style, and then we have, as in the
almost Vandyke-like portraits of Mr. Sichel, and of Jan Strang--the
nearest approach which Mr. Strang suffers himself to make to the wide
domain of beauty. His customary indifference to charm of form, to charm
of
[Illustration: STRANG. “THE POTATO BASKET.”]
[Illustration: WILLIAM STRANG. “THE BOOKSTALL.”]
[Illustration: WILLIAM STRANG. “JUSTICE LINDLEY.”]
expression, to that which is agreeable and comely, to that which the
natural man would voluntarily look upon, is yet more marked--a hundred
times more marked--than Mr. Legro. Grace, elegance, personal
distinction, the freshness of youth, the winsomeness of girlhood, the
acceptability of the English upper classes--these things are far from
him: he wots not of them, or but rarely. He likes poor folk, enjoys the
well-worn clothes, the story of the poor fol work and poor fol
trouble. For that I do not blame him. But, like Ostade and Brouwer, he
likes the cottager best when he is stunted, and is most interested in
him when he is gnarled.
For all the absence--an absence frequent, not continuous--of local
colour, the scenes Mr. Strang depicts arrest you. You remember them
because he has himself remembered that which was most important in the
making of them. Essentials have not escaped him. The “realism” he has
attained has been at least something much deeper than that which prides
itself on the correct portrayal of the obvious. In great themes and
little themes he has been alike vivid. There may be something that is
squalid and something that is ignoble in “The Last Supper” as he can
conceive it; but, at all events, a genuine human emotion is not banished
from the scene. He is Von Uhde-like in that. And here and there, in
brief suggestive studies of contemporary existence, an imaginative light
is flashed upon the page, a touch of romance suggested, as where, in the
curious little etching of a Bohemian wayfarer--a someone who has lost
caste probably, whose pence and whose friends are few--lighting his pipe
at a flaring gas-jet over some street bookstall on a Saturday night, you
feel that for a moment there has sprung into your vision a
fellow-creature with a history, whose mysteriousness you will not solve.
Out of the darkness he has emerged for an instant, and into it he
returns again.
This very remarkable artist has already executed not less than two
hundred and fifty etchings.
[Illustration: CHARLES HOLROYD. “MIDNIGHT MASS.”]
[Illustration: CHARLES HOLROYD. “FARM BEHIND SCARBOROUGH.”]
[Illustration: CHARLES HOLROYD. “ROUND TEMPLE.”]
XIII.
CHARLES HOLROYD.
A residence of two or three years in Italy--where he enjoyed the Slade
School Travelling Studentship--has vied with the tuition of Mr. Legros
in influencing that more than promising etcher, Mr. Charles Holroyd. A
sense of dignity and Style, and, with this, some direct personal
inspiration, lift Mr. Holroy work entirely above the level of the
commonplace and the ordinary. In sense of line, indeed, he not seldom
makes approach to the classic. He has affinity with Claude and with
George Barret.
Several of the best of Mr. Holroy not yet very numerous prints--each
one of which is well-considered, thorough and serious work--deal
worthily, truly that is, and yet imaginatively, with the lives of
ecclesiastics, among the cypresses and olive woods and pine-trees of
Monte Oliveto, and in the gaunt and spacious chambers of the remote and
hillside monastery, in which Mr. Holroyd, with his love of Italy and of
its graver life, was sometime minded to abide. Thus, in the Monte
Oliveto series, we have the sombre yet pictorial incident of “Midnight
Mass,” and, again, the “Ladies’ Guesthouse,” with its Tiepolo-like
charm.
The homeliness of subject in his “Farm behind Scarborough” does not
forbid the display of certain of Mr. Holroy virtues. Yet perhaps more
characteristic is the “Round Temple,” or that “study of line” suggested
by the noble and free beauty of the Borghese Gardens. “Round Temple” is
the fuller, the more realized. “Borghese Gardens” consciously and
inevitably abandons much that is wont to attract, but it retains the
thing for which it has existed--dignified and expressive rhythm of line.
And this justifies it, and permits it to omit much, and only to
exquisitely hint at the thing it does not actually convey.
[Illustration: FRANK SHORT. “WROUGHT NAILS.”]
[Illustration: FRANK SHORT. “SLEEPING TILL THE FLOOD.”]
[Illustration: FRANK SHORT. “QUARTER BOYS.”]
XIV.
FRANK SHORT.
Amongst the original etchers remaining to be discussed I place Frank
Short almost at the top of the tree. Some people will say that Shor
true place would be with copyists or interpreters rather; but that is
only because they do not know his original work--the very limited issue
of his original plates having withheld from them a publicity won already
indeed by many of his brilliant interpretations of the pictures or the
drawings of long-accepted artists. No one--not even Mr. Wehrschmidt or
Mr. Gerald Robinson--has done as much as Frank Short for the modern
revival of mezzotint. It is more perhaps by mezzotint than by any other
medium that Mr. Short has effected his delightful translations of
Turner, of Constable, of Dewint, and of Watts. But if not one of these
things existed--if he had never wrought those exquisite interpretations,
for example, of a sketch by Constable, belonging to Mr. Henry Vaughan,
and of a Dewint drawing, “A Road in Yorkshire”--if nothing of this work
whatever had been done by Mr. Short, then would he still have cause to
be remembered and valued by reason of the beauty and the technical
virtues of his original prints.
Frank Shor original prints are, indeed, of all the greater merit
because, just as Mr. Whistler himself, he has disregarded in them, from
beginning to end, the taste of the everyday public. This delicate array
of exquisite etching--very little of it merely tentative; most of it of
complete accomplishment, if of limited aim--has been called into being,
as Mozart said of his “Don Giovanni,” “for himself and two friends.” The
“two friends” must be taken--one need hardly protest--_cum grano salis_;
they represent the rare connoisseur, the infrequent person who enjoys
and understands.
Two classes of subjects have hitherto to a great extent engrossed Mr.
Frank Short in his original work, and to these there must now be added a
third; for within the last year or so, following in the wake of his
friend Mr. C. J. Watson, he has visited the land of Rembrandt, and has
done charmingly suggestive and vivacious sketches of quaint town and
long-stretched shore.
But the two classes of subject with which one has been wont to identify
him are subjects of the English coast and of the English manufacturing
districts; and, in a certain sense, even these two subjects are one, and
this one theme may be described--not too imaginatively, I think, if we
look into the heart of the matter--as the complete acceptance of all
that is considered unpicturesque in modern life: in the manufacturing
districts, the factory chimneys, the stunted, smoke-dried trees, the
heavy skies, the dreary level water, along which barges make their
monotonous way (see the interesting dry-point, “Wintry Blast on the
Stourbridge Canal”), and, on the English coast, the massive stone pier,
the harbour muddy at low tide, the tug, the sheds, the warehouses, or it
may be perhaps the wooden fences that protect and preserve the
foreshore--the beauty of the whole, which is unquestionable, being
obtained by a particularly subtle arrangement of line, a perfect sense
of proportion, a perfect delicacy of handling. Coarser people, of more
ordinary vision, addressing themselves, as by a _parti pris_, to these
themes, have treated them with brutality. But, on these themes, it is
the distinction of the treatment of Mr. Short that in rendering them
with fidelity and patience--even with love--he yet somehow, in the brief
phrase of Robert Browning--
“Put colour, poetising.”
Yes, a certain measure of poetry must certainly be claimed not only for
the “Evening, Bosham” and the “Sleeping till the Flood,” but for the
“Stourbridge Canal,” which has been mentioned already, and for the print
of “Ry Long Pier”--this is called indeed, poetically enough in its
suggestiveness, “Low Tide and the Evening Star”--and for the curiously
clever little plate, “Wrought Nails,” a scene of the Black Country,
which shows the sheds of the workers, and little trees untended and
decaying, and a bit of waste land, ragged and dreary, with nothing of
Nature left, but only the evidence of me grimy labours, of their
hard, monotonous life. And, though up to the present, or until very
lately, the field of Mr. Shor own observation of the world may seem
to have been limited, it is plain to any qualified student of his prints
that he has gained the effects he wanted by a fine sketche economy of
means, by a thorough capacity of draughtsmanship, much sense of design,
and a very exceptional control over the technical resources of the
etche art.
[Illustration: C. J. WATSON. “MILL BRIDGE, BOSHAM.”]
[Illustration: C. J. WATSON. “ST. ETIENNE-DU-MONT.”]
XV.
C. J. WATSON.
The work of Mr. C. J. Watson is nearly always absolutely sturdy and
sterling. It has tended, too, to become delicate; and when one compares
it with Mr. Shor, very likely the only thing which puts it at an
obvious disadvantage is that (though one can hardly explain the matter)
it has an air of being less personal. That, I admit, is no small affair.
Judging from the work alone--and no one would desire to make the
comparison except from the work only--one would say, “Here is a strong
and capable hand, stirred to expression by a nature much less sensitive
than that which reveals itself in the etched lyrics of Frank Short.” Mr.
Short records facts--not great and doleful dreams, like Mr. Strang or
Mr. Legros--but he records facts poetically. More absolutely
matter-of-fact is Mr. Watson, who (I am speaking of him, of course,
apart from his agreeable gift of colour) so far portrays things
realistically that the personal, the individual, is comparatively
absent, and his art can hardly be described in the phrase which does
define Art generally--Nature beheld “à travers n tempérament.”
But Mr. Watson, who has long been interesting, has of late years become
within certain limits a first-rate craftsman, albeit still a little
wanting in vivacity. It may be that his individuality--such
individuality as he possesses--has to be sought for in the soundness of
his technique, and in the ripe judgment which he shows in treating
subjects which at least are true etche subjects. Practising his art
during early manhood in Norwich, and being himself, with his sturdy
realism, as it were, a last echo of that “Norwich School” in which only
Cotman was essentially and primarily poet--and Cotman could be
realistic, too--Mr. Watson came, a few years since, to London, and here
he has developed his powers a stage further, there is no doubt;
producing, in the first instance--since his residence in town, with its
wider associations and its greater activities--plates admirable for
directness and certainty, such as “The Mill Bridge, Bosham,” and then
the “Chartres,” its gabled and dilapidated houses, rather; the back of
Chartres--Chartres on the wrong side--and then the “St. Etienne du
Mont,” its west front--that is, the front of one of the most curious
and characteristic of the churches of Paris--and then the “Ponte del
Cavallo,” a refined, if scarcely individual vision of Venice.
Some greater delicacy and flexibility of method than were before
possessed, or than were even desirable, perhaps, for the subjects to
which Mr. Watson in his earlier days addressed himself, are evident in
the “Chartres;” but they are yet more marked in the “St. Etienne”
etching, which no true lover, no properly equipped student, of the
achievements of the great original aquafortists will be able to examine
without some thought of the wonderful plate of Méryon which bears the
same title. Of the relative correctness of the two presentations--not,
in my opinion, an all-important, though still an interesting matter--I
will say nothing, or at least very little; possibly it was Watson who
had looked the hardest at the actual façade of which it was his one
business to convey the impression. Still, the immense solidity of
Méryo etching gives it a realism as much its own as is all the wealth
of its poetry. The very simplification of the facts must have been
deliberate, and it accomplished its end. It would be ridiculous to
suggest that a draughtsman of architecture so patient and thorough as
Méryon, could not have set forth each detail, as well as the general
character, had it been his aim. He had other aims, and this detail
accordingly had to be at times subordinated; for him there was not the
church alone, but the Collège de Montaigu and the corner of the
Panthéon, and the weird shadows and the passing women, and the dark
mystery of the Paris street. In a word, there was his genius and his
message--fancy or fantasy. For Mr. Watson there was “land, the solid and
safe,” as Mr. Browning moralizes; the solid earth, or what the architect
had put there--nothing else. And what the architect had put there Mr.
Watson noticed--portrayed it with strength--portrayed it, too, as
afterwards the “Ponte del Cavallo,” with perhaps unwonted flexibility.
In simpler subjects than the “St. Etienne du Mont,” Mr. Watson shows as
well as, or better, than there, a quality very characteristic of the
truest of modern etchers--of Mr. Whistler and Mr. Short particularly--I
mean, in what is more or less architectural draughtsmanship, after all,
an enjoyment of the evidences of construction. Very likely it may be
said that that is a quality belonging to him as a good draughtsman,
whether, at the moment etching happens to be, or happens not to be, the
medium of his work. I think not. There is something in the etched line
that reveals especially the presence of this enjoyment--that calls for
the certain display of it.
[Illustration: OLIVER HALL. “LANDSCAPE WITH TREES.”]
[Illustration: OLIVER HALL. “ROADSIDE TREES.”]
[Illustration: OLIVER HALL. “TREES ON THE HILL-SIDE.”]
[Illustration: OLIVER HALL. “THE EDGE OF THE FOREST.”]
XVI.
OLIVER HALL.
Mr. Oliver Hall, a young and, until lately, a comparatively little-known
but a distinctly interesting and strongly gifted etcher (who paints, he
tells me, a good deal in water-colour), has next to be spoken of; and if
his work has one characteristic more than another--though grace and
freedom are its characteristics too--the one that is most its own is the
continual evidence his plates afford of his enjoyment of growth and
building up--his pleasure in the traces of the way by which the object
before him became the object that it is. Mr. Hal object is more
likely to be a tree than a church. Architecture he does not attack, and
his rare figures are but the figures of the landscape-painter. He
labours amongst sylvan and amongst pastoral scenes that are not
strikingly picturesque; and in method, as well as often in theme, he
suggests Seymour Haden.
Mr. Hall has not yet wrought very many plates; they number, it may be,
two score. He is not, in his work, always faultless, and perhaps he is
not thus far very varied. But he is in the right track, and has shown no
disposition to leave it. He has done beautiful things--the “Coniston
Hall” one of the finest of them. He is a vigorous, frank, free sketcher,
often sketching “effects,” as well as forms that vanish less quickly;
and, in the realm of effects, the very spirited etching, “A Windy Day,”
is perhaps the best of that which he has done. It is a scene on Angerton
Moss, a stretch of open country rising to the right; the scattered trees
and clustered farm buildings on the horizon line; and they are
wind-swept, and wind is in the sky.
[Illustration: COLONEL GOFF. “CHAIN PIER, BRIGHTON.”]
XVII.
GOFF.
The two contemporary etchers who interest me most, among those I have
not had occasion, yet, to write of, are two men unlike, perhaps, in
nearly everything except in their possession of the essential quality of
impulse--I mean the Frenchman, Monsieur P. Helleu, and our
fellow-countryman, Colonel Goff.
No--when I said they were unlike in nearly everything but the essential
quality of impulse, that was clearly an exaggeration. Another thing they
have in common besides impulsiveness of temperament and spontaneity of
effort--a love of beautiful and of free “line.” Goff will show that in
his studies of the hillside, of the shore, of foliage, of the tall
grasses of the water-meadow, and of the winding stream; Helleu will show
it in his studies of the most modern humanity, of the “Parisienne de
Paris”--all that is most completely of the capital, subtle, refined,
over-refined--but with how extenuating an elegance!--or, now again, of
the young grace of well-bred girlhood, as in a certain “Etude de Jeune
Fille,” with its wonderful union of Nineteenth-Century vividness with
the grace of Reynolds or Gainsborough. And yet one other thing belongs
to them in common--to these two men whose work presents, most certainly,
in method as in subject, many a point of contrast. Both, being artists
essentially, rather than merely skilled practitioners in a particular
medium, swear no unbroken constancy to the art of the etcher--cannot
avoid the keen perception and keen enjoyment of those “effects” and
combinations for which it is not etching that affords the readiest or
most appropriate means of record. And accordingly we have from Monsieur
Helleu, pastels; from Colonel Goff, water-colour, wash heightened with
pen-work, or pencil drawings, marked sometimes with a strong accent, at
others blond and suave as silver-point itself.
Third-rate professional artists, and idle folk, or folk so busy that
they have not had time to notice what good work has been done in
Etching, and who it is that has done it, will at once discount Colonel
Gof labours because I call him “Colonel.” But when I declare that he
is, in the character of his work and in the fidelity and enthusiasm with
which for years he has pursued it, no more of an “amateur” than is Sir
Seymour Haden, he will be, I trust, even by the most commonplace of
judges, forgiven the accident of military rank--his greatest crime
being, after all, only that of having served in the Coldstream Guards.
The offence may be condoned. Or, to speak seriously, I believe that
military discipline, like the training of a surgeon bent on excellence
in his own art, is, in truth, only an advantage. The strenuousness, the
thoroughness, of good professional work, whether it be done in barrack
or in hospital, in a city ma office or in the study of a writer,
gives some guarantee of at all events the spirit in which the new work,
the pictorial work, will be undertaken--a guarantee lacking in the case
of the small professional painter, whose discipline in the arts of Life
I must account to have been generally less complete. Yes, it is only
fair to distinguish, when we talk about the “amateur”--and no one has
less tolerance for the feeble amateur than I have--it is necessary to
distinguish between the mind of the dilettante, of the idler, of the
wishy-washy person who, from the high realms of an unbroken
self-satisfaction, condescends occasionally to an art, and the mind of
the trained and exact, and therefore of presumably the strenuous.
Ten years of frequent “joyful labour”--Macduf inestimable phrase--in
the art of Etching have resulted in making Colonel Goff the author of
some seventy plates, of which, to the outsider at least, the first
characteristic will seem to be, the range and variety of their themes.
The key to this lies in the sensitiveness of the artist, in his width of
appreciation, in his reasonable enjoyment of scenes and subjects that
have little in common, that present the piquancy of change. It is only
figure-subjects proper that have scarcely ever been attempted by him;
but in landscape, in marines, in town subjects, in subjects which
involve now the expression of the passion of Nature, now the frankest
introduction of every kind of modern detail of construction that is
supposed to be ugly, and that the sentimental brushman declares to be
“unpaintable,” Goff is thoroughly at home.
Next to mere prettiness or “strikingness,” what the public likes best in
Landscape Art is not the record of Landscap happy accident or of its
intricate and balanced line, but the intelligible presentation of
natural effects. That probably is why, among Gof etchings, the
“Summer Storm in the Itchen Valley” has thus far been the most popular.
And certainly the public choice in this instance lighted upon work that
was admirable and accomplished, spontaneous and effective--work not a
little akin to that in Seymour Hade admirable “Water-Meadow,”
[Illustration: COLONEL GOFF. “NORFOLK BRIDGE, SHOREHAM.”]
work not proceeding to a conscious elaboration, yet not stopping short
of the point at which even for the many it may be expressive. Its
quality, however, good as it is, does not really give it a unique place
in the list of Gof labours; other plates--some that would be
considered very humble ones--show virtues quite as valuable. Few etchers
are Gof equals, fewer still go beyond him, in composition of line, in
arrangement of light and shade; and as he firmly possesses this science,
it is natural that very many of his plates, and not only one or two of
them, should satisfactorily display it. “Norfolk Bridge, Shoreham”--of
which a reproduction is given here--displays it delightfully. The unity
of impression is complete; the grouping well-nigh faultless--there is
the light arch of the bridge and the dark mass of clustered town behind
it; church and houses and timbered sheds set amidst the winding of tidal
waters; muddy shores, from above whose low sky-line there rises now and
again the mast of a fishing-smack.
In “Winchester”--a little plate of great simplicity and reticence--there
is the note of a mood and of an hour, as well as of a place. Behind the
flat meadows and the nameless stream that small trees bend over, there
is the long line of the cathedral; and one feels over all the quiet of
Autumn. Not a whit less admirable--a complete and satisfying picture,
wrought with strength and delicacy--is “Pine Trees, Christchurch.” Then
there is the peace of “Itchen Abbas Bridge”--the little dry-point with
the mille house, the waving poplar, the granary, and the slow stream.
In another plate, less personal, and perhaps less happy, but still good,
there is the picturesqueness of the Lewes street; in the “Ford,
Shoreham,” complex activity, fullness of theme. In the “South Cone,” the
great broad waves that swing about the base of Brighton Pier, not only
suggest the wind and moving waters that the title implies, but have a
certain decorative quality, possible only when the process of
“selection” has been just, and the visible labour somewhat sternly
simplified. “The Chain Pier, Brighton,” combines in high degree the
charms of elegance and mystery. See the foreshortening of the steep,
high wall, the delicacy of the Chain Pier and little fleet of skiffs,
the reticent, suggestive touch in those grouped houses by the “Albion.”
“Charing Cross Bridge,” by reason of its subtle arrangement, its victory
over difficult material--more even than the “Métropole,” with the dark
cliff of masonry and the lighted lamps along the Brighton “front”--is
perhaps the best of all the several plates which are deliberately
devoted to the treatment of such things as
[Illustration: COLONEL GOFF. “PINE TREES, CHRISTCHURCH.”]
seem prosaic to the person whose poetry is conventional.
Most of Gof plates give proof of thorough draughtsmanship, to the
discerning; though nowhere is such draughtsmanship paraded or made
obvious. In one most recent plate, however, devoted to a subject of
which the inartistic, unimaginative mind, and the insensitive hand,
would have made mere pattern--I mean the etching of the bared boughs of
a weird apple tree--the draughtsmanship is, of necessity, and happily,
conspicuous. But the thing is not pattern at all, and though we follow
with delight the intricate line, there is the charm of an impression as
well as the fidelity of a record. There is accent about the etching;
emphasis, vitality; an atmosphere plays, as it were, amongst the boughs;
the tree is not the tree only, but a part of Nature and the day.
Gœthe said to that disciple to whom he most fully unveiled himself,--to
the privileged Eckermann,--“_All_ my poems are ‘occasional’ poems.” In
that resided their freshness, and Gœthe knew it well. “All my etchings
are ‘occasional’ etchings,” could be said by nearly every fine etcher,
too wise to set forth upon the picturesque tour with the deliberate
resolution to perpetrate particular prints. For the art of etching, if
it is to yield you its peculiar charm, must have been exercised--I
cannot say this thing too often--only upon spontaneous promptings. There
are very few exceptions. Méryon himself--that greatest genius, perhaps,
in original engraving whom our Nineteenth Century has known, and one of
the most elaborate of artists,--was not really an exception; for, slow
as his work must have been, the unity of impression preserved throughout
so long a labour--the original impulse--was there, which the
circumstance created. The spontaneity is essential. And few men better
than Colonel Goff have executed spontaneous work with the resources of a
firmly-held knowledge.
[Illustration: D. Y. CAMERON. “BORDER TOWERS.”]
[Illustration: D. Y. CAMERON. “THE PALACE, STIRLING CASTLE.”]
[Illustration: D. Y. CAMERON. “WINDMILLS, ZANDAAM.”]
XVIII.
CAMERON.
The amateur has had the opportunity of looking lately a good deal at the
prints of a young Scottish artist, Mr. D. Y. Cameron, who has himself,
to do him justice, looked long and much at the prints of the masters.
Though young, he has already been prolific, and has wrought not only
many plates, but in various methods. Of course, I like his work as
against that of men who, however gifted in other mediums of expression,
are not essentially etchers. For Mr. Cameron is essentially an etcher--a
fine engraver on the copper, above all things. Yet I cannot feel that
any great proportion of his work, thus far, has quite enough originality
or freedom; and if he is to live and last as an original engraver--as I
believe he may--he will have to acquire these virtues in yet larger
measure. Meanwhile, here are a few comments on certain of the best of
his most studiously wrought pieces, of which even the least attractive
do not lack a workmanlike accomplishment.
“The Arch,” a composition of curious shape--a tall, narrow plate--is a
performance of solidity and brightness, although it shows that Mr.
Cameron is apt to finish to the corners with a thoroughness too uniform
or obvious--to be, indeed, like Mr. C. J. Watson, a little too positive
and too material. In the “Flower Market,” with its fleeting lights and
shades, he leaves in part this positiveness. He makes an interesting
experiment, but, after all, recalls the theme to which he addresses
himself, only enough to assure you that the experiment has not been made
in the medium that is fittest for it. “Colour, colour, colour!” you say.
“The Palace, Stirling”--a dark forbidding interior--has certainly about
it a grim Celtic imagination, and is individual in that. The oppositions
of light and shade are at once strongly marked and skilful--their
distribution quite successfully studied--in “White Horse Close.” “The
Dolphins” (1892) is full of vigour and vitality. Even better, perhaps,
is “St. John Street, Stirling;” because its draughtsmanship is at once
freer and more hesitating--not fixed and petrified, that is, but
trembling with the semblance of life. And in the background of “A
Rembrandt Farm,” Mr. Cameron has wonderful reminiscences, both of the
maste touch and of his way of looking at the wide-stretched landscape
that he cared for the most. Nor does the plate suffer perhaps from being
for once a deliberate imitation, successfully accomplished. Yet I admire
Mr. Cameron more--my hope for his Future is more certain--when I hold in
my hand a good impression of his “Border Towers”--a composition of his
own North country--a thing in which the inspiration has been very
personal, and the fine work of detail has been obtained at no sacrifice
of noble breadth.
XIX.
PENNELL.
Mr. Pennell is an extremely clever, energetic, dexterous American, who
has found profitable employment in our English land. He has shown
himself to be a ready journalist in draughtsmanship. Drawing
architecture and the scenes of the street, he has produced not a little
art that is at once popular and tolerable; and he has even written about
Art, dealing sometimes with far profounder people than his own order of
mind permits him thoroughly to fathom. “Critic,” therefore, I cannot
call him, but able draughtsman, in a limited field, he unquestionably
is.
A somewhat small proportion of Mr. Pennel work has consisted of
etching, and in this he has shown, first, it appears, the influence of
Seymour Haden, and next, the influence of Whistler. Had he but brought a
personality to be enriched and fructified by great traditions! That,
however, has been denied him; and, possessed
[Illustration: JOSEPH PENNELL. “LE PUY EN VELAY.”]
well of the grammar of his art, and of some of the best of its methods,
he yet, as his own work reveals him, is, at times, uninteresting, since
he is always unimaginative. Vista he has none. Yet, how good can his
work be when the subject comes easily to help him! Nor is that seldom.
The plate of “Le Puy en Velay,” of which I give a reproduction, and
which I like so much, recalls a noble Dürer background--takes our
thoughts to those great elder masters who, from certain remarks that he
has made about them, I judge that Mr. Pennell scarcely likes at all. It
is the irony of circumstance.
XX.
MENPES.
Though Mr. Mortimer Menpes had etched not a few coppers before he gave
us the long series which recorded his impressions of Japan--and though,
no doubt, he has etched from time to time since then--it is by the forty
plates which constitute that Japanese set that he establishes his best
claim to be regarded as an artist, serious and interesting. Traces of
the Whistlerian vision, if not of the Whistlerian method, are
perceptible in these memoranda of the people and the theatre, and of the
long and low-built towns that stretch themselves sometimes along the
edge of sleeping waters. But the art of Mr. Menpes is not all of it
derivative. Something there is that is of himself alone, in the
impression received and in the manner of its registration. He has
economy of means, and yet abundance of resource. He is not merely a
draughtsman
[Illustration: MORTIMER MENPES. “JAPANESE GIRLS.”]
who has chosen to etch: he is an etcher whose feeling for the capacity
of his particular medium has in it much that is instinctive.
XXI.
RAVEN-HILL.
Mr. Raven-Hill--the artist who adds piquancy to comic newspapers--is
little known as an etcher; but his work upon the copper is delicate,
rightly precise and rightly free--it is in the best etche manner--and
if it is as yet so little recognized, that is only because it is so
scanty and has been so seldom exhibited. From several points of view the
small array of Mr. Raven-Hil etched work is interesting and valuable;
it is, almost invariably, observant record and admirable craftsmanship;
and not the least legitimate of its sources of interest lies in the fact
that in it the presence of the refined artist, as distinct from that of
the smart comic illustrator, is markedly asserted. Hereafter it may be
that Mr. Raven-Hill will choose to etch, and to etch ably, scenes from
the life of which, in other mediums, he has been, deservedly, a popular
exponent. Tom, Dick, and Harry--Harriet,
[Illustration: L. RAVEN-HILL. “THE WANDLE RIVER.”]
too, by all means--will then have their day upon the copper, nor will
clown and _cabotin_ be left out of the account. But, hitherto, the best
of Mr. Raven-Hil few etchings record scenes Whistler might have
chosen, and do so with a touch and choice of line which, it may well be,
that master might not desire to disown.
XXII.
MACBETH AND HERKOMER AND AXEL HAIG.
So much said, and yet nothing said of men a dozen times more popular
than the generally single-minded etchers are wont to be, of whom in
chief I have spoken. But to the large public, Macbeth and Herkomer and
Axel Haig appeal without need of introduction--Macbeth and Haig appeal
especially by treatment, and Herkomer especially by subject. Herkome
theme is generally a dramatic one, and into it he introduces such
obvious interest of line and of expression as may be found in a woman
with the picturesqueness of age, a man comely and vigorous, a girl with
Anne Pag “eyes of youth.” Mr. Herkomer has a story to tell
us--sometimes the story of a life as it is told in portraiture, and he
tells it with no absence of ability. But attractive as he well may be,
clever as he most surely is, he rarely reaches exquisiteness; nor is
there reason to think that the plate, the needle, and the aquafortis
constitute in any special way his proper
[Illustration: HUBERT HERKOMER, R.A. “GWENDYDD.”]
medium. Still, one who is, as everybody knows, so spirited and energetic
an artist--the author of so many a valiant experiment, the winner of an
occasional triumph in the art of Painting, from the day of the
“Pensioners” to the day of the “Burgomasters”--can be a graceful
sketcher on the copper, when he likes, or from time to time, at all
events.
Robert Macbet inventive work in etching does not want originality;
but it is not the originality of an etcher, in method or vision of the
world, but rather the originality of his own painted pictures. These, or
the effects of them, elaborate and interesting, he reproduces, as far as
may be, in the print. For nearly twenty years he has, from time to time,
etched his own conceptions, and during much of this long period the
public has surely benefited by his able, dexterous translations of great
or charming masters, from Velasquez to Mason. A certain proportion of
his original work upon the copper was performed--and not indeed
unnaturally--before Mr. Macbeth became familiar with the
technical resources of the craft. Thus, the “Potato Harvest”--an
interesting subject, and treated, as to its composition, very
characteristically--is, as an etching, grey and colourless. “The
Cambridgeshire Ferry” (of 1881), with that free, swinging, rustic girl
he likes to paint, has excellent points about it, and would be called
“important” by a dealer. Later, “A Cast Shoe” is luminous as well as
elaborate. “Flora”--a print of 1882--is very spirited and rich, and has
the sentiment of the morning. But I am not sure whether the purist in
the etche art would not like most of all the rapid and indicative
sketch of “A Flood in the Fens.” It is a slight study, with the rare
note of action and of tragedy--a free dramatic record.
Mr. Axel Haig, the third of these popular and long accepted artists, has
no painted pictures by whose method he may be inspired--he is unlike
Robert Macbeth in this respect--but his able etchings of architectural
subjects are nearly all of them, nevertheless, finished up to the
corners. So much is actually set forth, with such elaborate and skilled
pains--all the work being perfectly evident, no labour of omission
having been undertaken, and little labour of choice--that the
imagination of the spectator has hardly a chance of exercising itself.
His intelligence, alas! is well-nigh unnecessary. And yet, as you look
at the long record of buildings whose aspect has been grasped and
presented by Mr. Haig with diligence and skill, you must respect, in the
artist, much of his craftsmanship, and his great German quality of
untiring and sagacious effort.
[Illustration: E. A. ARMSTRONG (STANHOPE-FORBES). “THE OPEN
WINDOW.”]
XXIII.
SOME OTHER ETCHERS.
I cannot pretend that the artistic individuality of Elizabeth Armstrong
and Minna Bolingbroke (now Mrs. Stanhope Forbes and Mrs. C. J. Watson)
is yet sufficiently marked to allow either to be the subject of a
critical essay; but in the record of an Art in which--as in so many
others--it seems generally to be decreed to women, “Thus far, and no
further,” it is useful and satisfactory to note the closeness of
observation and the skill of hand possessed by these two ladies. In Miss
Armstrong the world some time ago recognized a particularly dainty
draughtswoman; and the little print which is submitted here as an
example of her talent, is a refined Genre picture. To Genre, too,
belongs that which, so far as I have had the opportunity of knowing, is
the happiest effort of Miss Bolingbroke. It is singularly good; the
subject chosen pluckily, where only a Modern would have ventured to find
it; and then the theme pictorially conceived, in the true etche
spirit--this admirable little dry-point is a vision of the factory,
broad, luminous, and rich. One or two other dry-points by the same
artist--dry-points of plump birds, and live stock of the
farmyard--suggest the possibility that in her quest for themes Miss
Bolingbroke may follow in the track of a great Frenchman, and may meet
with a success akin to some extent to that of Bracquemon masterpiece,
“Le Haut n battant de Porte.”
Mr. Percy Thomas--a graceful draughtsman of ancient English buildings,
and of the incidents of the River--must be reckoned almost as of the Old
Guard, amongst the etchers of the present generation. He etched before
Etching became fashionable; and now that he has long been beset with
friendly and accomplished rivalry, he yet proceeds to make additions to
the bulk, and perhaps even to the range, of his labours. An inequality
more marked than any we are wont to perceive in the work of an important
master, tells, perhaps, to some extent, against his position. And though
his manner is often pretty, and is generally refined, it is but seldom
distinguished. He has worked, it may be, too much, and, it may be, not
always in obedience to the spontaneous prompting. Yet his methods
[Illustration: M. BOLINGBROKE. “AT THE LOOM.”]
[Illustration: PERCY THOMAS. “DORKING.”]
have ever been legitimate, and he has attained grace. His
“Dorking”--with its long perspective of the sunny street in some hour of
the summer afternoon--is a piece of agreeable and capable, and even of
elaborate, sketching; and his “Old Lighthouse, Hastings”--one of the
most entirely satisfactory of his coppers--has the charm of an admirable
composition conveyed by simple and certain means.
Among the other aquafortists practising from time to time amongst
us--not to speak of the more recent of the promising recruits to the
Society of Painter-Etchers, who have yet to make their history--mention
should not be altogether omitted of Mr. W. L. Wyllie, whose popular
marine subjects need evoke no opposition, even where, as exhibitions of
the etche art, they scarcely deserve to attract.
Again, there is Dr. Arthur Evershed, a ready and sensitive draughtsman
with the needle, whose “Marsh Farm” is only one out of a score of
evidences of his refined enjoyment of the quiet lines of uneventful
lowland landscape. Sir Charles Robinson and Dr. Propert need by no means
be forgotten. Mr. J. P. Heseltine has not perhaps exhibited much of
late; but he, as long ago as when he wrought that series of Etchings
Mrs. Noseda published--it was some twenty years since--gave ample proof
of his placid, sympathetic observation of the ordinary land, and of his
ability to record the charm he was not tardy in feeling. The etched work
of Mr. Holmes May is, most of it, I think, more recent. It is a
vigorous, independent sketching of landscape. It notes tree-form with
energy and sky effects with refinement.
That potent, brilliant, but eccentric Spaniard, fashionable naturally
among the younger men for his unquestioned audacity of talent--I mean,
of course, Goya--has been, it would appear, the chief inspirer of a few
clever prints done recently by Mr. Rothenstein, in frank, fantastic
illustration of Voltair “Pucelle rléans.” In Mr. Rothenstei few
things--too few as yet to permit us to really judge him as an etcher--we
see, along with some inventiveness which is the artis own, not only
Goy style, but Goy method--an effective, dexterous mingling of the
etched line with aquatint.
Again, the Whistlerian spirit finds appropriate expression in the
vivacious prints of Mr. Walter Sickert and of Monsieur Roussel--many of
them engaging, interesting, and unconcealed impromptus, towards which
any word of adverse criticism would be but ill-addressed. And, lastly,
ere I turn to treat at greater length the work of one who is a born
etcher, and an etcher
[Illustration: W. HOLMES MAY. “SUNRISE IN WALES.”]
[Illustration: ALFRED EAST. “A HURRYING WIND.”]
chiefly--Monsieur Paul Helleu--let there be brief recognition of the
true artis instinct which caused Mr. Alfred East, our admirable
landscape painter, to record, with the solidity and massiveness so
possible to dry-point, his impression of “A Hurrying Wind.”
XXIV.
HELLEU.
The copper on which some master of etching will, sometimes in an hour,
engrave in dry-point the latest of his conceptions, the newest
impression he has received from the world, is, like the pages of a
draughtsma sketch-book, the revelation of just that thing that
strikes him the most. The character--in a sense, the temperament--of the
artist is betrayed or hinted at by his selection; notwithstanding that
the selection, if the man is wise at all, owes something to his
knowledge of what are the bounds of his capacity. The work of the great
etchers--Rembrandt apart, and he was practically unlimited--shows this.
The subtleties of the figure interested Sir Seymour Haden less than the
curve of a great stream, the light and shade in an old garden, or the
broken surface of a Dorset heath. It is, at least, not emotional
incidents that have been the mainspring of the art of Mr. Whistler; for
he has been
[Illustration: HELLEU. “ÉTUDE DE JEUNE FILLE.”]
inspired by the material that he was readiest to receive. And so in the
work of that brilliant artist in dry-point to whom I turn last of all,
there is evident the sign of his own leanings, the engaging suggestion
of those things in his daily life which he most sympathetically notes.
And M. Helleu is, above all things, the recorder of the beautiful or the
refined interior, with its charm of artistic and harmonious detail--its
charm, above all, of feminine life, or of the life of children.
It is as an artist working in pastels that M. Helleu--a man still in
young middle age--happens to have been longest known. And his pastels
have, not unnaturally, been for the most part portraits. In them he has
evinced, and more, it may be, than in his latest portraits in dry-point,
the skill of the likeness-taker. But likeness-taker merely he has never
aimed to be; the artist has invariably asserted himself, and, if in
nothing else, at least by this or that dexterity of craftsmanship--fine
jugglery of execution. Only four or five years ago did it occur to M.
Helleu to turn to the processes of the engraver, and to sketch rapidly
on copper--he turned to dry-point. He has found in England much
appreciation; he has worked here to some extent; and his contributions
to the Society of Painter-Etchers have been frequent as well as
delightful.
In Paris, M. Helleu was much associated with M. James Tissot, an artist
whom Englishmen knew as an etcher in almost the last generation. To the
association with Tissot--a bold and sometimes graceful recorder of
contemporary life with the etching-needle--is due, I have no doubt, M.
Helle first practice in dry-point. To some extent he has seen the
same world as Tissot, but he has seen it always in his own way, and has
pourtrayed it with a singular economy of means that marks him as the
brother of the greatest in etching. Tissot, with all his virtues of
independence and vigour, has shown little of this economy, nor has he
displayed the peculiar refinement which counts for so much in M.
Helle charm. Briefly, this is a case in which the pupil--if pupil you
can call him--has improved upon the master. It has been given to M.
Tissot to have some share in the formation of a craftsman more subtle, a
poet far more sensitive, than himself.
Up to the present time, some seventy or eighty plates have been executed
by the brilliant and delightful sketcher, M. Tissot to some extent
formed. Scarcely one of them, I think, has involved more than a single
sitting on the part of model or artist. An hour or two of strenuous,
enjoyable, untired labour has sufficed for the production of each
dainty, each masterly, work. In
[Illustration: HELLEU. “FEMME À LA TASSE.”]
an hour or two the lady or the child of M. Helle choice has found
herself recorded on the copper--she and whatever accessories were deemed
desirable to indicate her _milieu_, to place her amidst the surroundings
which assist in the telling of her story. There is not, as far as I am
aware, a single piece of M. Helle that is not a figure subject, and
among his work, so far as it has yet proceeded, I do not recollect a
single portrait of a man. Edmond de Goncourt calls his dry-points “_les
instantanés de la grace de la femme_”--“snap-shots,” shall we translate
it, at the charm of modern womanhood--the womanhood of the
drawing-room--“snap-shots,” not less often, at the charm of refined
childhood. In Helle etched work, the connoisseur will welcome what is
practically the complement of the etched work of Vandyck, who, in his
score or so of plates (wonderful painter though he was of women),
undertook only the portraiture of certain distinguished men.
Helle method of dealing with his subjects is not always, or even very
often, the method of direct portraiture. His conception has a certain
affinity with that of the artist in Genre, in that the model or models,
be they women or children, do not only stand for their portraits, but
are discovered in _poses_ which suggest an incident this moment
happening--be it only the incident of a woman having her hair brushed,
of a girl struggling into her jacket, of a woman stooping forward over
the drawing-room fireplace, of a child playing with its toys. Helle
models are not long stationary, their attitude is never stereotyped;
what he pourtrays mainly is movement now making, or movement only just
arrested. Hence, perhaps, the sense of spontaneity in all the work--the
sense, when you have looked through his plates, that you have been
living in the intimacy of charming people who in their daily ways turn
this way and that, stoop, stretch themselves, smile, get suddenly grave,
dress themselves, lift their eyes inquiringly, or toss the great long
hair upon their shoulders. Their movements, whatever they are, are made
with the immediate freedom, the complete absence of self-consciousness,
of well-bred, natural folk--the folk whose presence, even when they are
not actually handsome, or when no personal affection binds them to you,
gives a legitimate charm to the passing hour. The spectacle of the world
is pleasanter when it is they who are on its stage.
Helle etchings prove him to be in sympathy with the most alert, which
is often also the most dignified and distinguished of modern youthful
beauty. I know of no plate of his in which he has realised the
[Illustration: HELLEU. “LE SALON BLANC.]
dignity of age as Rembrandt realised it in the etched portrait of his
mother smiling, and in that other etched portrait of his mother, with a
black veil and folded hands. But several times Helleu has realised what
Whistler realised in the dry-point of “Fanny Leyland”--the dignified
beauty, the reticent tenderness, the mood, courageous or contemplative,
of the better order of young girlhood. Admirable in this way is that
“Etude de Jeune Fille,” which shows the quick and earnest, fearless
glance--the girl with the lifted elbow and the streaming dark hair.
Hardly less admirable, that other study of a child a little younger, the
head on a large scale, and the head alone. It may be added, as a detail
of both these rare plates, that no others, either by M. Helleu or by any
other etcher, show quite so obvious a mastery in the treatment of hair.
Dry-point, as M. Helleu handles it, would seem to have been made for the
magical suggestion of all that you may notice in hair, except its
colour--of its flow and texture, weight and life.
“Femme à la Tasse,” a study of two uplifted hands, holding between them,
lightly, in the fingers, a porcelain cup out of which the reclining
figure drinks, is a most delicate arrangement of “line,” and of amazing
economy of means. And the “Salon Blanc,” or one especially of the
several plates which bear that name, is to be noted not for the figure
only, not, perhaps, for the figure even chiefly, but for the brief and
dainty suggestions of tasteful furniture, the line of a screen, the
mouldings of a mantelpiece, the curve of a girandole.
We have etchers amongst us, and clever ones, too, to whom the presence
of character in their living models, and in those models’ backgrounds,
has been, above all things, precious; to whom the presence of the
eccentric has been valuable, and the presence of beauty, superfluous,
not to say burdensome. But, with M. Helleu, beauty--beauty of no
conventional order, the rapid charm of movement, of expression, of
contour--is the inspiring and satisfactory thing. He lives in its
intimacy. And he reveals it--much as Watteau did, yet in ways how
fearlessly modern!--to the spectator of his work.
CHISWICK PRESS:--CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
* * * * *
MR. WEDMOR SHORT STORIES.
_Each vol. 3s. 6d. net._
_PASTORALS OF FRANCE._
Fourth Edition.
_RENUNCIATIONS._
Third Edition, with portrait by J. J. Shannon.
_ENGLISH EPISODES._
Second Edition.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In nearly every case the illustration is more or less reduced from
the original.
[2] The editor of “The Magazine of Art” has assured me, in its pages,
that Mr. Whistler swore in Court that he was born in St. Petersburg.
[3] The wildish sky is to be found only in the First State, it is
non-existent in the second, which is yet a charming thing, in its own
way.
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