FOUR MASTERS OF ETCHING
------------------------------------------------------------------------
This Edition is limited to
Two Hundred and Fifty Copies.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_FOUR MASTERS OF ETCHING_.
BY
FREDERICK WEDMORE.
WITH ORIGINAL ETCHINGS
BY
HADEN, JACQUEMART, WHISTLER, AND LEGROS.
LONDON:
_THE FINE ART SOCIETY, LIMITED._
148, NEW BOND STREET.
1883.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
IT is well to say, in a word or two, what this short book aims at.
Unavoidably inferior to Mr. Hamerton’s in merit, it is voluntarily much
more limited in scheme. Taking only the four artists who seem to me most
worthy of note among the many good etchers of our day, it seeks to study
their work with a degree of detail unnecessary and even impossible in a
volume of wider scope. In trying to do this, it can hardly help
affording, at least incidentally, some notion of what I hold to be the
right principles of etching, nor can it wholly ignore the relation of
etching to other art, or the relation of Art to Nature and Life. But
these points are touched but briefly, and only by the way.
A book of larger aim, on Etching in England and France, might
justifiably have given almost as much importance to Macbeth and Tissot
here, and to Bracquemond there, as has been given in the annexed pages
to Haden, Whistler, Jacquemart, and Legros. But Macbeth and Tissot
belong to a younger generation than do any of my four masters. Much of
what the art of etching could do in modern days was already in evidence
before their work began. My four masters are four pioneers. Bracquemond
may be a pioneer also; but in his original work, skilled and individual
as that is, he has chosen to be very limited. The place he occupies is
honourable, but it is small.
About the four chapters that here follow I need say very little. That on
Seymour Haden has been passed through the _Art Journal_, that on Legros
through the _Academy_, that on Jules Jacquemart through the _Nineteenth
Century_. All have now been revised. Something of the chapter on
Whistler has also appeared in the _Nineteenth Century_, but in quite
different form, and I will explain why. In the first place, since that
article appeared, Mr. Whistler has given me cause to modify to some
extent my estimate of his art. Having seen this cause, I have acted on
it. I am not a Mede nor a Persian. And in a system of criticism which
seeks to inquire and understand, rather than to denounce, there is place
for change. Again, much of the article in the _Nineteenth Century_ was
occasioned not by Mr. Whistler’s practice, but by the attack which he
made upon a great teacher and critic, and, by implication, upon all
critics who allow themselves that abstinence from technical labour which
is often essential if their criticism is to be neither immature for want
of time to spend on it nor prejudiced because of their exclusive
association with some special ways or cliques in art. Whatever dealt
with this business I have now withdrawn. It was written for a particular
purpose, and its purpose was served.
A word now on a matter of detail. Two expressions in the body of this
volume—“our _Dusty Millers_” (page 10), and “_M. Rodin_ here” (page
42)—which only the really careful reader will honour me by noticing, are
due to the fact that after the body of the volume was finally printed,
some change was made in the choice of the illustrations. For Mr. Haden’s
copper of _Dusty Millers_, I have been happy to be able to substitute
_Grim Spain_, the only Spanish subject of his which I thoroughly like.
And in place of M. Legros’s learned but hardly attractive portrait of M.
Rodin, it has been still more fortunate that it has been possible to
procure the portrait of Mr. Watts, the painter, one of the most
triumphant instances of Legros’s art.
F. W.
_London, 1883._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I. SEYMOUR HADEN 1
CHAPTER II. JULES JACQUEMART 12
CHAPTER III. J. A. M. WHISTLER 28
CHAPTER IV. ALPHONSE LEGROS 40
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
“GRIM SPAIN” Etched by F. SEYMOUR 10
HADEN
ORIENTAL PORCELAIN by JULES JACQUEMART 16
PUTNEY by J. A. MCN. WHISTLER 36
PORTRAIT OF G. F. by ALPHONSE LEGROS 42
WATTS, R.A.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I.
SEYMOUR HADEN.
PERHAPS the two qualities which, as one gets a little _blasé_ about the
productions of Art, continue the most to stir and stimulate, and to
quicken the sense of enjoyment, are the quality of vigour and the
quality of exquisiteness. If an artist is so fortunate as to possess
both these virtues in any fulness, he is sure not only to please a
chosen public during several generations, but to please the individual
student—if he be a capable student—at all times and in all moods, and,
of the two, perhaps, that is really the severer test. But to have these
qualities in any fulness, and in equal measure, is given to a man only
here and there over the range of centuries. It is given to a Titian, it
is given to a Rembrandt, and of course to a Turner; it is given in the
days of the Grand Monarch to a Watteau, and in the days of the Second
Empire to a Méryon. But so notable and rare a union is denied—is it
not?—even to a Velasquez; while what we praise most in Moreau le Jeune
is by no means a facility of vigour, and what is characteristic of David
Cox is certainly no charm of exquisiteness. To unite the two qualities—I
mean always, of course, in the fulness and equality first spoken
of—demands not a rich temperament alone. The full display of either by
itself demands that. It demands a temperament of quite exceptional
variety: the presence, it sometimes seems, almost of two
personalities—so unlike are the two phases of the gift which we call
genius.
With the artists of energy and vigour I class Mr. Seymour Haden. Theirs
is the race to which, indeed, quite obviously, he belongs. Alive,
undoubtedly, to grace of form, fire and vehemence of expression are yet
his dominant qualities. With him, as the artistic problem is first
conceived, so must it be executed, and it must be executed immediately.
His energy is not to be exhausted, but of patience there is a smaller
stock. For him, as a rule, no second thought is the wisest; there is no
fruitful revision, no going back to-day upon yesterday’s effort; little
of careful piecing and patching, to put slowly right what was wrong to
begin with. He is the artist of the first impression. Probably it was
just and justly conveyed; but if not, there the failure stands, such as
it is, to be either remembered or forgotten, but hardly to be retrieved.
Such as it is, it is done with, no more to be recalled than the player’s
last night’s performance of Hamlet or Macbeth. Other things will be in
the future: the player is looking forward to to-night; but last
night—that is altogether in the past.
There is no understanding Seymour Haden’s work, its virtues and
deficiencies, unless this note of his temperament, this characteristic
of his productions, is continually borne in mind. It is the secret of
his especial delight in the art of etching; the secret of the particular
uses to which he has so resolutely applied that art. With the admission
of the characteristic, comes necessarily the admission of the limitation
it suggests. Accustomed to labour and patience, not only in the
preparation for the practice of an art, but in the actual practice of
it, one may possibly be suspicious of the art which substantially
demands that its work shall be done in a day if it is to be done at all.
Such art, one says, forfeits, at all events, its claim to the rank that
is accorded to the _œuvre de longue haleine_, when that is carried to a
successful issue and not to an impotent conclusion. To flicker bravely
for an hour; to burn continuously at a white heat—they are very
different matters. The mental powers which the two acts typify must be
differently valued. And the art that asks, as one of its conditions,
that it shall be swift, not only because swiftness is sometimes
effective, but because the steadiness of sustained effort has a
difficulty of its own—that art, to use an illustration from poetry and
from music, takes up its place, voluntarily, with the lyrists, and with
Schubert, as we knew him of old—foregoes voluntarily all comparison with
the epic, and with Beethoven.
Well, this remark—a remonstrance we can hardly call it—has undoubtedly
to be accepted. Only it must be laid to Mr. Seymour Haden’s credit that
he has shown a rare sagacity in the choice of his method of expression.
The conditions of the art of etching—a special branch of the engraver’s
art, and not to be considered wholly alone—are fitted precisely to his
temperament, and suit his means to perfection. Etching is qualified
especially to give the fullest effect to the mental impression with the
least possible expenditure of merely tedious work. Etching is for the
vigorous sketch—and it is for the exquisite sketch likewise. It is for
the work in which suggestion may be ample and unstinted, but in which
realisation may, if the artist chooses, hardly be pursued at all. To say
that, has become one of the commonplaces of criticism. We are not all of
us so gifted, however, that commonplaces are to be dispensed with for
the remainder of time.
Of the great bygone masters of the art, some have pursued it in Mr.
Haden’s way, and others have made it approach more nearly to the work of
the deliberate engraver. Vandyke etched as a speedy and decisive
sketcher; the later and elaborate work added to his plates was added by
other hands, and produced only a monotonous completeness destructive of
the first charm, the charm of the vivid impression. Méryon, whose noble
work Mr. Haden has rightly felt and pronounced to be “not impulsive and
spontaneous, but reflective and constructive, slow and laborious,” used
etching evidently in a different method and for different ends. With
something of the patience of a deliberate line-engraver, he built up his
work, piece by piece and stroke by stroke: touching here, and tinkering
there—he says so himself—and the wonder of it is, that for all his
slowness and delay, the work itself remains simple and broad, and the
poetical motive is held fast to. This Mr. Haden has expressly
recognised. Nothing eluded Méryon. The impressions that with some men
come and go, he pertinaciously retained. Through all mechanical
difficulties, his own quality of concentrativeness preserved to his work
the quality of unity. Then, again, it must be said that the greatest
etcher of old time, Rembrandt, and one of the greatest, Claude, employed
the two methods, and found the art equal to the expression both of the
first fancy and of the realised fact. To see which, one may compare the
first state of Rembrandt’s _Clément de Jonghe_—with its rapid seizure of
the features of a character of extraordinary subtlety—and the _Ephraim
Bonus_, with its deliberate record of face and gesture, dress and
environment; and in Claude the exquisite free sketching in the first
state of _Shepherd and Shepherdess_ with the quite final work of the
second state of _Le Bouvier_. Mr. Haden, then, has full justification
for his view of etching; yet Mr. Haden’s view of etching is not the only
one that can be held with fairness.
For all but forty years now Seymour Haden has been an etcher, so that we
may naturally see in his work the characteristics of youth and those of
an advanced maturity, in which, nevertheless, the eye is not dimmed nor
the natural fire abated. That is to say, the mass of his labour—over a
hundred and eighty etchings—already affords the opportunity of
comparison between subjects essayed with the careful and delicate
timidity of a student of twenty, and subjects disposed of with the
command and assurance that come of years, of experience, and—may I
add?—of recognition. But in his early time Mr. Haden did but little on
the copper, and then he would have had no reason to resent the title of
“amateur,” now somewhat unreasonably bestowed on a workman who has given
us the _Agamemnon_, the _Sunset on the Thames_, the _Sawley_, and the
_Calais Pier_. Somewhere, perhaps, knocking about the world are the six
little plates, chiefly of Roman subjects, which Mr. Haden painfully and
delicately engraved in the years 1843 and 1844. All that remains of
them, known to the curious in such matters, is a tiny group of
impressions cherished in the upper chambers of a house in Hertford
Street—a scanty barrier, indeed, between these first tentative efforts
and oblivion.
But in 1858 and 1859 Mr. Haden began to etch seriously; he began to give
up to the practice of this particular way of draughtsmanship a measure
of time that permitted well-addressed efforts and serious
accomplishments. Fine conceptions in all the Arts ask, as their most
essential condition, some leisure of mind, some power of acquisition of
the happy mood in which one sees the world best, and in which one can
labour joyously at passing on the vision. The best Art may be produced
with trouble, but it must be with the “joyful trouble” of Macduff.
Nothing is more marked in the long array of Mr. Haden’s mature work than
the sense of pleasure he has had in doing it. How much, generally, has
it been the result of pleasant impressions! How much the most
satisfactory and sufficient has it been when it has been the most
spontaneous! Compare the absolute unity, the clearly apparent motive, of
such an etching as _Sunset on the Thames_ with the more obscure aim and
more limited achievement of the _Windsor_. The plates of the fruitful
years 1859, 1860, 1863, 1864, and so onward, were done, it seems, under
happy conditions.
Any one who turns over Seymour Haden’s plates in chronological order,
will find that though, as it chanced, a good many years had passed, yet
very little work in etching had been done before the artist had found
his own method and was wholly himself. There were first the six dainty
little efforts of 1843 and 1844; then, when etching was resumed in
1858—or, rather, when it was for the first time taken to seriously—there
were the plates of _Arthur_, _Dasha_, _A Lady Reading_, and _Amalfi_. In
these he was finding his way; and then, with the first plates of the
following year, his way was found; we have the _Mytton Hall_, the
_Egham_, and the _Water Meadow_, perfectly vigorous, perfectly
suggestive sketches, still unsurpassed. In later years we find a later
manner, a different phase of his talent, a different result of his
experience; but in 1859 he was already, I repeat, entirely himself, and
doing work that is neither strikingly better nor strikingly worse than
the work which has followed it a score of years after. In the work of
1859, and in the work of the last period, there will be found about an
equal measure of beautiful production. In each there will be something
to admire warmly, and something that will leave us indifferent. And in
the etchings of 1859, in the very plates that I have mentioned, there is
already enough to attest the range of the artist’s sympathy with nature
and with picturesque effect. _Mytton Hall_, seen or guessed at through
the gloom of its weird trees, is remarkable for a certain garden
stateliness—a disorder that began in order, a certain dignity of nature
in accord with the curious dignity and quietude of Art. The _Egham_
subject has the silence of the open country; the _Water Meadow_ is an
artist’s subject quite as peculiarly, for “the eye that sees” is
required most of all when the question is how to find the beautiful in
the apparently commonplace.
Next year, amongst other good work, we have the sweet little plate of
_Combe Bottom_, which, in a fine impression, more than holds its own
against the _Kensington Gardens_, and gives us at least as much
enjoyment by its excellence of touch as does the more intricate beauty
of the _Shore Mill Pond_, with its foliage so varied and so rich. In the
next year to which any etchings are assigned in Sir William Drake’s
catalogue—a thoroughly systematic book, and done with the aid of much
information from the author of the plates—we find Mr. Haden departing
from his usual habit of recording his impression of nature, for the
object, sometimes not a whit less worthy, of recording his impression of
some chosen piece of master’s art. This is in the year 1865, and the
subject is a rendering of Turner’s drawing of the _Grande Chartreuse_,
and it is an instance of the noble and artistic translation of work to
which a translator may hold himself bound to be faithful. And here is
the proper place, I think, to mention the one such other instance of a
subject inspired, not by nature, but by the art of Turner, which Seymour
Haden’s work affords—the large plate of the _Calais Pier_, done in 1874.
Nothing shows Mr. Haden’s sweep of hand, his masculine command of his
means, better than that. Such an exhibition of spontaneous force is
altogether refreshing. One or two points about it demand to be noted. In
the first place, it makes no pretence, and exhibits no desire, to be a
pure copy. Without throwing any imputation on the admirable craft of the
pure interpreter and simple reproducer who enables us to enjoy so much
of an art that might otherwise never come near to many of us, I may yet
safely say that I feel sure that Mr. Haden had never the faintest
intention of performing for the _Calais Pier_ this copyist’s service. To
him the _Calais Pier_ of Turner—the sombre earlyish work of the master,
now hanging in the National Gallery—was as a real scene. It was not to
be scrupulously imitated; what was to be realised, or what was to be
suggested, was the impression that it made. With a force of expression
peculiar to him, Seymour Haden has succeeded in this aim; but, I think,
he has succeeded best in the rare unpublished state which he knows as
the “first biting,” and next best in the second state—the first state
having some mischief of its own to bear which in the preparatory proofs
had not arisen, and in the second state had ceased. The plate is
arranged now with a ground for mezzotint—it lies awaiting that work—and
if Mr. Haden, having now retraced to the full such steps as may have
been at least partially mistaken, is but master of the new method—can
but apply the mezzotint with anything of that curious facility and
success with which Turner applied it to a few of his plates in _Liber
Studiorum_, in which the professional engraver had no part—then we shall
have a _chef-d’œuvre_ of masculine suggestion which will have been worth
waiting for.
To go back to the somewhat earlier plates. The _Penton Hook_, which is
one of many wrought in 1864, is another instance—and we have had several
already—of the artist’s singular power in the suggestion of tree form.
Of actual leafage, leafage in detail, he is a less successful
interpreter, as is indeed only natural in an etcher devoted on the whole
to broad effects, looking resolutely at the _ensemble_. Detail is
nothing to him—_ensemble_, balance, is all. But the features of trees,
as growth of trunk and bend of bough reveal them, he gives to us as no
other contemporary etcher can. And in old Art they are less varied in
Claude and in Ruysdael. Mere leafage counted for more with both of
these. And if it is too much to compare Mr. Haden as a draughtsman of
the tree with a master of painting so approved as Crome—the painter
especially of oak and willow—as an etcher of the tree he may yet be
invited to occupy no second place, for Crome’s rare etchings are
remarkable for draughtsmanship chiefly. Crome knew little of technical
processes in etching, and so no full justice can ever be done to his
etched work, which passed, imperfect, out of his own hands, and was then
spoilt in the hands of others—dull, friendly people, who fancied they
knew more than he did of the trick of the craft, but who knew nothing of
the instinct of the art. Crome himself in etching was like a soldier
unequipped. Mr. Haden has a whole armoury of weapons.
Seymour Haden has been a fisherman; I do not know whether he has been a
sailor. But, at all events, purely rural life and scene, however varied
in kind, are discovered to be insufficient, and the foliage of the
meadow and the waters of the trout stream are often left for the great
sweep of tidal river, the long banks that enclose it, the wide sky that
enlivens every great flat land, and by its infinite mobility and
immeasurable light gives a soul, I always think, to the scenery of the
plain. Then we have _Sunset on the Thames_ (1865), _Erith Marshes_
(1865), and the _Breaking Up of the Agamemnon_ (1870), the last of them
striking a deep poetic note—that of our associations with an England of
the past that has allowed us the England of to-day—a note struck by
Turner in the _Fighting Téméraire_, and struck so magnificently by
Browning and by Tennyson[1] in verse for which no Englishman can ever be
too thankful.
Footnote 1:
I mean, of course, in “Home Thoughts from Abroad,” and in the
“Revenge: a Ballad of the Fleet.”
In the technique of these later etchings there is, perhaps, no very
noticeable departure from that of the earlier but yet mature work. But
in composition or disposition of form we seem to see an increasing love
of the sense of spaciousness, breadth, potent effect. The work seems, in
these best examples, to become more dramatic and more moving. The hand
demands occasion for the large exercise of its freedom. These
characteristics are very noticeable in the _Sawley Abbey_ of 1873. Nor
are they absent from our _Dusty Millers_.
[Illustration]
_Sawley Abbey_ is etched on zinc, a substance of which Mr. Haden has of
late become fond. It affords “a fat line”—a line without rigidity—and so
far it is good. But the practical difficulty with it is that the
particles of iron it contains make it uncertain and tricky, and we may
notice that an etching on zinc is apt to be full of spots and dots. It
succeeds admirably, however, where it does not fail very much. Of course
its frequent failure places it out of the range of the pure copyist who
copies or translates as matter of business. He cannot afford its risk.
In 1877—a year in which Mr. Haden made a number of somewhat undesirable
etchings in Spain, and a more welcome group of sketches in Dorsetshire,
on the downs and the coast—Mr. Haden worked much upon zinc. And it is in
this year that a change that might before have been foreseen is clearly
apparent. Dry point before this had been united with etching, but not
till now have we much of what is wholly dry point; and from this date
the dry-point work is almost, though not altogether, continuous, the
artist having rejoiced, he tells me, in its freedom and rapidity.
The Dorsetshire etchings, _Windmill Hill_, _Nine Barrow Down_, and the
like, are most of them dry points. In them, though the treatment of
delicate distances is not evaded, there is especial opportunity for
strong and broad effects of light and shade. Perhaps it is to these that
a man travels as his work continues, and as, in continuing, it develops.
At least it may be so in landscape.
Here, for the present, is arrested the etched work of an artist
thoroughly individual, thoroughly vigorous, but against whom I have
charged, by implication, sometimes a lack of exquisiteness, the only too
frequent but not inevitable drawback of the quality of force. So much
for the work of the hand. For the process of the mind—the character
which sets the hand upon the labour, and pricks it on to the execution
of the aim—the worst has been said also, when I said, at the beginning,
that Mr. Haden lacked that power of extremely prolonged concentration
which produced the epic in literature and the epic in painting. These
two admissions made, there is little of just criticism of Seymour
Haden’s work that must not be admiring and cordial—the record of
enjoyment rather than of dissatisfaction—so much faithful and free
suggestion does the work contain of the impressions that gave rise to
it, so much variety is compassed, so much are we led into unbroken
paths, and so much evidence is there of eager desire to enlarge the
limits of our Art, whether by plunge into a new theme, or by application
of a new process.
------------------------------------------------------------------------