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.