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.