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.