‘My few things!’ In the very title there is conveyed, I hope, some
apology for writing of them. If I accept the invitation to do so,
it is partly because I must needs know more of what they are--they
are ‘but poor few,’ in Shakespeare’s phrase--than any one else can
know; partly again because, as I am pleasantly informed, it may be
interesting to certain readers to be told, for a change, not what
can be amassed--amassed and perhaps neglected--by a millionaire who
gives several thousand guineas for a modern painting, but what can be
got together with merely ‘joyful trouble,’--with pains, and waiting,
and love of the things, and only a little money--by a simple man of
Letters, who happens to have been concerned, to some extent, with other
arts than his own; and partly also because, connected with the few
things that one has, there are associations, not few but many.
A little blue-grey drawing--an early drawing of Varley’s, which
has nothing but the lasting virtues of Economy and Style--was the
first artistic thing that ever belonged to me. It came to me--like a
prized Morland mezzotint, many years later--from the portfolio of my
great-grandfather, who was, as I am told, a friend of Turner’s earliest
patron, Dr. Munro. But it is prints, not drawings, that, since I began
to collect a little, I have chiefly brought together.
In a collection of prints there is something less indefinite, something
more systematic, than in a collection of drawings. The things, if
they are good, have the advantage of being known, of being more or
less recognised--not, indeed, by the large public, but at least by
the people with whom, on matters of Art, it is most interesting to
come into contact. Prints are classed and catalogued. Each print by
a particular master has, in the collector’s mind, a direct bearing
on the component parts of that master’s work. Again, fine drawings,
although cheap in relation to the prices paid for modern paintings,
are dear in comparison with many prints to which the adjective
‘fine’ could scarcely be denied; for, while here and there an ‘Adam
and Eve’ of Dürer is sold under the hammer for many hundred pounds,
that is the exception absolutely; and while, at Sotheby’s or
Christie’s, on eventful sale days, two thousand pounds may be the
ransom of a Rembrandt etching, that is not only because it is fine,
but because that particular etching--or that particular ‘state’ of
it--is excessively rare. It has been chronicled; it has been read
of; it has profited by the existence of the accurate catalogue of
the work of the Master--it is a certified thing. But, with knowledge
gradually acquired, with diligence exercised in the right place, a
print extremely fine, extremely desirable, may still be bought for
a few pounds. It will be much fuller of Art than any drawing which
ordinary good fortune is to enable you to get for the same outlay. And
I say this as one who loves drawings--as one who, notwithstanding his
theories, even ventures to live with a few of them; but, if I have
a preference in the matter of collecting--well, I suppose it is for
prints.
About a print, every point is interesting. Apart from subject, apart
too from technical treatment of the copper, there is the delightful
question, How does your own impression compare with other people’s?
And, again, the paper. The true print-lover can talk about different
papers--old French, old Dutch, old English, Japanese--as the
connoisseur of clarets talks of Pontet Canets and Pichon Longuevilles.
... But my Solander-box is all this time unopened!
I suppose the first print that I ever bought was a ‘Liber’ print
of Turner’s. The Burlington Fine Arts Club had held a wonderfully
important exhibition of them--there were Mr. J. E. Taylor’s, Mr. Henry
Vaughan’s, Mr. Gambier Parry’s finest impressions; illustrative,
thoroughly, of that which Turner meant to do; of the means, to some
extent, by which he did it. And having by that time discovered
what I most cared for in the set, and made, no doubt, the politic
compromise--learning to bring my needs within the limits of a lean
purse--I got my friend, Stopford Brooke, to choose from amongst several
impressions of ‘Hind Head Hill,’ that happened then to be at Colnaghi’s
(for it was soon after the great Turner Sale), the one he thought the
best; and from amongst an equal number of impressions of ‘Severn and
Wye,’ that happened to be at Mrs. Noseda’s, similarly, the best. ‘I
chose well that day,’ said Stopford Brooke, many years afterwards,
noticing those prints on my wall. No such opportunities of choice, as
existed then, are likely again to be afforded.
Those were the days when, if I bought at all, it was--at first at
least--‘for the wall’ and not ‘for the folio’--to use a phrase of
Halsted’s. Halsted meant by it to distinguish between the buyer who,
from the very nature of things, must promptly be satisfied (since you
can neither multiply ‘walls’ nor enlarge them), and the buyer to whom
the infinite was open--that infinite in which Solander-box succeeds
Solander-box, folio succeeds folio, and drawer succeeds drawer. His,
perhaps, is the more dangerous case; but the collector who can display
on his walls all his possessions--who can stop buying when the mere
purposes of furnishing are answered--is simply _not_ a collector.
Halsted scorned him.
The mention of this aged dealer’s name brings back to me recollections.
I saw Mr. Halsted in almost the latest of his days, when he was a less
prominent but probably a more interesting figure, in the world of Art
and Connoisseurship, than he had been in his prime. In his prime, his
shop was in Bond Street; but when it was my privilege to go, a humble
learner, sitting at the feet of a dealer who had known ‘Mr. Turner,’
and had been for at least one generation surrounded by his work,
Halsted, elderly, deliberate of speech, slow and almost halting of
movement, large, angular--a craft somewhat difficult to ‘bring round’
or to ‘change the course’ of, within the scanty waters of his back
shop--had his abode--his mart at all events--in Rathbone Place, by
the French _blanchisseuse de fin_ and a little Swiss _café_. He was
half retired; and there in the back shop he would cause you to sit
down, in a perfect light under the window, and would show you what you
had asked for, if he had it--for, in those days, he bought nothing;
he was engaged merely in selling, in the most leisurely of manners,
and at prices which were never open to any suggestion of abatement,
the remains of his old stock. Standing over you--a little away from
you--with something of a soldierly sternness, like a sergeant in a
barrack-yard, he rolled out, slowly, story after story of Mr. Turner,
of Sir John Hippesley, whom he had influenced to admire the ‘Liber,’
by placing before his eyes a ‘Severn and Wye,’ at breakfast-time, and
then of Mr. Turner again. You bought something, of course; but the best
of it is, you never were sorry for it afterwards, for Halsted’s eye
was faultless: his knowledge, though he was old, was in advance of his
day. I cherish as impressions which had received his _imprimatur_--if
one may use the word of things he had thought worthy to buy and to
sell--an ‘Oakhampton Castle,’ a ‘Hindoo Worshippers,’ and I forget for
the moment what else. These two, I remember, bear the stamp of passage
through the collection of the famous Mr. Stokes--the first ‘Liber’
collector--and of his niece, Miss Constance Clarke.
One thing amusing about a visit to Halsted’s was the occasional
presence of his brother. You went to the shop perhaps once by
chance, and Halsted was away. In his place was an inferior sort of
person, courteous and good-natured, but humbly conscious of his
own inferiority. You could do no business with him. If I remember
rightly, he was not even allowed to have the keys. The fine prints
were quite inaccessible. Yet this was, after all, but one of the
inferior brother’s manifestations. He had another phase--another facet.
Chancing, one summer evening, to walk northwards, through Camden Town,
I suddenly beheld the brother standing on what proved to be his own
doorstep, free of heart and with no one to say him nay. He, too, had
a shop, it appeared, and here it was, come upon unexpectedly: a print
shop of the third order--you wondered who they were, in Camden Town or
anywhere else, who bought the cheap things which alone it contained.
Only one other of the old-fashioned dealers, the dealers of another
generation, did I ever see. That was the aged Mr. Tiffin, once busy
in the Strand, but, when I called upon him to inspect the remains of
his possessions, living chiefly retired, slow and deaf, in the small
bourgeois comfort of a villa at Canonbury. There--not to much practical
purpose--I sought him out. He too was a figure of the elder world, and
as such he dwells in the memory.
But I have wandered from the prints of the ‘Liber Studiorum,’ of which
indeed, though one of the warmest admirers of them, I possess but a
handful. Amongst them I greatly cherish one impression--the gift of a
friend whose benefactions to the National collections are remarkable,
and whose knowledge of Turner is profound. It is an early ‘state’ of
the subject known as ‘Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne, Morning’--one of those
plates engraved from end to end by Turner’s own hand. This impression
was given by the Master to Lupton, the mezzotint engraver of the
‘Solway Moss,’ and, a generation ago, my friend had bought it from
him. Another admirable student of Turner’s art sent me once more than
one of those etchings which, in Turner’s case, are the interesting
preparations for the finished ‘Liber’ plate. The rare ‘Isis’ is amongst
them.
Amongst the Turner prints that I have bought, I have always been guided
rather by fineness of impression than by priority of ‘state.’ Thus,
side by side with a First State of the ‘London from Greenwich’ I do
not fear to place a late one of ‘The Frontispiece, with the Rape of
Europa.’ The impression must have been printed the moment the plate had
profited by Turner’s retouch. As for the costly curiosities known as
‘engraver’s proofs’--working proofs, in fine, struck off to see how the
plate was progressing--speaking broadly and roughly, I do not believe
in them. They have their own interest, of course, as illustrating the
means by which the effect was obtained; but, in quality, they yield
to an impression taken when the effect had just been got, or, in the
case of a fine Second or later State, to an impression taken when the
effect, lost in the interval by wear, had just been regained.
No one who appreciates Turner can quite confine himself to the
‘Liber,’ though the ‘Liber’ is the most comprehensive expression of
that infinite genius. Accordingly, in my drawers there may be found,
no doubt, pieces from one or other of his engraved publications:
something, it may be, from the ‘Rivers of England’--amongst them the
‘York’ and the ‘Ripon,’ which are not his indeed, but his friend
Girtin’s--something from the ‘Southern Coast’; and, from the ‘England
and Wales,’ that exquisite ‘Yarmouth,’ which, like the ‘Clovelly’ and
the ‘Portsmouth’ (both of them in the ‘Southern Coast’) exemplifies
old William Miller’s marvellous faculty of rendering the sky effects,
the aerial perspective, of Turner’s maturest art. One has heard of
Turner’s compliments to John Pye, over ‘Pope’s Villa,’ and they were
not undeserved; but how great should his recognition have been of the
Scottish Quaker, simple of nature, subtle of gift, for whom no passage
of Turner’s brush-work was too intricate or too baffling! But let us
turn to earlier Masters.
Only well-to-do people can buy, in any large numbers and in those
fine impressions which alone rightly represent their subjects, the
etchings of Rembrandt; but it is a wonder, and almost a shame, that so
few well-to-do English people take advantage of their opportunities;
for, as a result of their not doing so, or doing so at the best in
so scanty a measure, a most undue proportion of the fine Rembrandts
which have been the ornaments of English collections have within the
last few years crossed the seas, and are now lodged--where they are
justly appreciated--in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Baltimore, New York.
Where, amongst us in England, are the successors of Dr. Wellesley,
of Sir Abraham Hume, of Mr. Holford, of my kind, delightful friend,
Richard Fisher? We want a new race of collectors of the highest class
of ancient prints; the old is dying out; the young is too modest or too
timid: it is afraid to spend its money, though its money could hardly
be spent more economically. Looked at even from the financial point of
view--as the great auctions prove--nothing is better justified than the
investment of important sums in the prints by the Masters. Rembrandt
is for all Time. Every year--taking the wide world over--there is
an increase in the number of people sensible enough to desire and
determine to possess themselves of some representation of his work.
Nothing but small means has prevented my buying in abundance
Rembrandt’s incomparable landscapes, so well aware am I that Landscape
Art reaches its topmost level in the best of Rembrandt’s work--in
his ‘Cottage with Dutch Hay-Barn,’ say, and in his ‘Landscape with a
Tower.’ His Sacred Subjects, with all their virtues of ‘sincerity and
inwardness,’ commend themselves less to us. His Portraiture, upon the
other hand, combines every artistic charm with every human interest.
A few examples I have--a mere handful, but good impressions they must
always be; and the two which, from their subjects, are least unworthy
of mention, are, I suppose, a First State of the ‘Clément de Jonghe,’
the Amsterdam print-seller, which has a picturesqueness less obvious,
but a character more subtle, than in the plate’s later states; and an
early and fortunate impression from that group of studies, executed,
I am convinced, in different years, and containing as its chiefest
and latest ornament an energetically sketched portrait of Rembrandt
himself, in that advanced middle life of his, which gave us, perhaps,
the greatest number of the fine fruits of his genius. To certain of
the commentators on Rembrandt, this rare little plate--a masterly
collection of _croquis_, and nothing besides--is not, I fancy, quite
sufficiently known; though our admirable English amateur, Wilson--who
wrote in 1836--and the latest deceased of the great French collectors
and commentators, Monsieur Dutuit, of Rouen, do it conspicuous justice.
My impression belonged, a generation or two ago, to the Arozarena
collection. I got it, with some other things, at that fascinating
shop in Paris, whose outside is so simple and so unassuming, whose
inside is stuffed with treasures--the shop a door or two from the Quai
Malaquais, up the dark and narrow ‘Rue des Saint-Pères,’ at which, from
the morning to the evening hours, sits placidly at his desk ‘Monsieur
Jules’--Clément’s successor, once Clément’s assistant--the learned
‘Marchand d’Estampes de la Bibliothèque Nationale.’
Even the smallest of collectors may have a ‘speciality’--and I suppose
my speciality to be the comparatively humble one of Méryon and of
Whistler--or, perhaps, of modern etchings generally--but (let me say
it for myself as well as for others) it is at one’s peril that one is
specialist alone. Things are seen then out of all proportion; bias and
prejudice take the place of judgment--a mere fanaticism flourishes,
where there ought to be a growing critical capacity, alert and lively.
On that account, in my small cabinet, a Whistler or a Méryon is liable
to be confronted with an Italian of the Renaissance, a German of the
day of Dürer. Zoan Andrea’s ‘Dance of Damsels,’ after a design of
Mantegna’s, a Coat of Arms of Beham’s, an ornament of Aldegrever’s,
instructively remind me of a delicacy earlier than Whistler’s, and of
a _burin sobre et mâle_ that was wielded three hundred years before
Méryon’s. But while, in collecting, I venture to discountenance the
exclusive devotion to a particular master, I am almost as strongly
against the acquisition of isolated examples of very many men. If a man
is worth representing at all, represent him at the least by a little
handful of his works. Collect one or two masters largely, and obtain
of others small but characteristic groups.
* * * * *
I am fond of my few French prints of the Eighteenth Century. It is easy
to dispose of them (a common way in England)--the works, I mean, of all
that Eighteenth Century School--by calling them light, trifling, even
indiscreet in certain of their revelations of a life that seldom aimed
to be austere; but, in reality, the prints of the ‘_Dix-Huitième_’
represent all phases of the thoughts and ways of French society--its
deeds and its ideals--from the childhood of Louis Quinze to the
Revolution; and, if you read French _contes_ and comedy, memoir and
criticism, these things, from Watteau to Chardin, from Chardin to
Fragonard, are their true illustrations. For myself, I do but mourn
that I have so few of them: not a single Moreau, for instance--not the
‘Sortie de l’Opéra,’ with the love-letter conveyed in the nosegay,
nor ‘C’est un Fils, Monsieur!’ in which a well-favoured young woman
bounces into the library of the fortunate collector, with the news that
he is also, as it seems, a parent. The insular pre-Raphaelite speaks
of the French Eighteenth Century as ‘the bad period.’ It is ‘the bad
period’ to people who are too rigid to grasp its grace. The narrowly
learned, as Walter Savage Landor reminds us--‘the generality of the
learned,’ he is even severe enough to say--‘are apt to conceive that
in easy movement there is a want of solidity and strength.’ Now, ‘easy
movement,’ spontaneous elegance, is the very characteristic of the Art
of France, as it is of its delightful people; and not to recognise, not
to enjoy that, is merely to be under the sway of pedantry, antiquarian
or academic. French Eighteenth Century Art, like Dutch Art of the
Seventeenth Century, like the Art of Titian and of Velasquez, reflected
Life--much of the charm of Life--and unless it be that Life itself
and Beauty have no interest for us, we cannot afford to pass that Art
superciliously by.
Wonderfully small, however, is the amount of sympathy that I am
privileged to expect from English collectors of the older type, in
my enjoyment of a sometimes faulty, but an often bewitching, school.
A score of French prints, some of them recording the high elegance
of Watteau, the pleasant gallantry of Baudouin or Lavreince, the
sober homeliness and the grave truth of Chardin (whose lessons were
Wordsworthian in their way)--these various things, which I shall still
venture to cherish, are wont to be ‘sat upon’ by the antiquary; much
as a certain little table-case of Battersea enamels, dainty and aglow
with colour, like flowers on a wintry day (puce and gold and _rose du
Barry_, that no time and no winter fades), is ‘sat upon’ by some of my
friends who behold indescribable virtues in every product of Japanese
design. We have all of us got our limits--I remember, though, that in
France, two of the men most prominent and influential in their love for
the artistic work of their own country in its famous ‘_Dix-Huitième_,’
had been almost the first to welcome the inventions of the Japanese.
These men were Philippe Burty and Edmond de Goncourt--but then it is
lamentably true that they ignored Rembrandt and Dürer, as far as any
practical interest in them was concerned.
The mention of the Frenchmen brings me once more face to face with
two striking personalities. Burty was a critic in journalism, and an
_Inspecteur des Beaux Arts_ besides--an enthusiast, a connoisseur, a
real _curieux_. When I knew him he had already done much in France
for the popular recognition of Etching. His flat upon an outer
boulevard--the Boulevard des Batignolles--told charmingly of the
refinement and variety of his tastes. Some _kakemonos_ and _tsubas_
hung on the walls; but here there was an etching, and there an ivory.
And he had a little _coin de tapisserie_, as he smilingly said, ‘like
Erasmus at the Louvre’--he was thinking of the background of Holbein’s
picture. In his deep French bookcases, well-bound volumes were ranged,
a second row behind the first, and when the glass doors were opened
and a few vacant places discovered, Burty’s favourite cat--the cat of
the literary man, moving with quietude, treading with grace--curved
about in the bookcase, sleek and smooth, harmless, careful, almost
appreciative.
One Sunday afternoon, when, I remember, as the result of an accident,
we had failed to see Zola, Philippe Burty drove me down to Auteuil--to
the Villa Montmorency, with its wild poetic garden--to spend a couple
of hours with Edmond de Goncourt and his treasures. Jules, the beloved
brother, was already dead, and Edmond, surrounded by his collections,
lived lonely at Auteuil, in the house arranged for both. Stately and
distinguished, melancholy, and yet interested, a descendant of the
old _noblesse_, with many memories in the dark brown eyes that lay
under black eyebrows and silver-grey hair, Edmond de Goncourt moved
about amongst his portfolios, saying a word here, and there directing
a glance. The history of his life surrounded him--the treasures he
and his brother had amassed and studied, before the ‘_Dix-Huitième_’
was fashionable, and very much as a recreation from those ‘_noires
études de la vie contemporaine_’--the words are his own--which had
given us _Germinie Lacerteux_ and _Manette Salomon_. No such collection
of that fascinating French ‘_Dix-Huitième_’ as belongs to Edmond de
Goncourt has ever been made. His _Maison d’un Artiste_ is a book
which is written for the most part about it, and in comparison with
its treasures my humble score of chosen prints--chiefly, after all,
by the Eighteenth Century’s more serious masters--becomes absolutely
insignificant. Still, they remind me, pleasantly enough, of a
delightful period, a delightful people, and of an art that was masterly
when it was Watteau’s, more lightly gracious when it was Pater’s, and,
when it was Chardin’s, was sedate and simple and almost austere.
Sketches in oil or water-colour by Cotman and James Ward, by Thomas
Collier and Charles Green, Edwin Hayes, Alfred East, Shannon, Linton,
Fulleylove, Carl Haag, Wyke Bayliss, Francis James--I need not finish
the list, and it would be foreign to the present purpose to enlarge on
the men--do something, one may hope, to prevent one’s bowing the knee
at only a single shrine. But is that indeed my danger?--I, who confess
to have felt at times the force of quite another temptation--the
temptation to be busy at last in getting together things with which
the pictorial Art that I love has nothing to do. A comely little piece
or so of ‘Blue and White’; a bit of Worcester, with the square mark; a
Nantgarw plate, with its ‘Billingsley rose’; a plate of Frankenthal,
bought in the Corratorie at Geneva, at a shop where, two generations
ago, they had sold things of that fabric to none other than Balzac (who
declared, through his _Cousin Pons_, that Frankenthal would one day be
as much sought after as Sèvres)--these things, I say, the thin end of
the wedge, things that are nothing by themselves, remind me that, in
gathering china, Man may be happy. And so a few books--the earliest
obtained being the _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798, _relieure Janséniste_, a
green coat by Riviere, and the Rogers with the Turner illustrations,
in ‘original boards,’ now, alas! disposed to crack--assure me of the
charm that must lurk for my luckier brethren in the seriously gathering
together of First Editions or of famous ones.
Let us pass to the examples of the Revival of Etching. About forty
Méryons, about seventy Whistlers, are mine. The one artist has been
much more prolific than the other, and thus, while, as regards Méryon,
the possession of even ‘forty’ prints allows the collector to be
fairly well provided for, as regards Whistler, the ‘seventy’ represent
scarcely a third part of that etcher’s catalogued work. Mr. H. S.
Theobald has more Whistlers than I have; so has Sir John Day; Mr. B. B.
Macgeorge, of Glasgow, has, I know, more Méryons; while, of both these
masters, distinctly larger collections than my own rest in the hands of
Mr. Samuel P. Avery and of Mr. Howard Mansfield, of New York.
Nearly all the finer plates of Méryon--those in which, to use his own
phrase, he ‘engraved Paris,’ with a fidelity so affectionate, yet
with an imagination so tragic--were wrought between the year 1850 and
the year 1854. Bracquemond was the only important figure in the group
to whom the Revival of Etching is due, who was working at that time.
Whistler, Seymour Haden, Jules Jacquemart, and Legros, were all of them
a little later; Whistler’s first dated plate--and he was quite among
the earliest of these artists--being of the year 1857.
In looking through my Méryons, it interests me to find that a good
many that are in my Solander-box to-day, belonged, long since, to
distinguished Frenchmen who were Méryon’s contemporaries. Thus, a
First State of the ‘Saint-Etienne-du-Mont’ was given by Méryon to
Bracquemond. My impressions of the ‘Abside’ and the ‘Stryge’ belonged
to Aglaüs Bouvenne, who catalogued Bonington, appreciated Méryon, and,
in comparatively recent years, wrote some reminiscences of him. A ‘Rue
des Toiles, à Bourges’ has on it Méryon’s dedicatory inscription,
addressed to Hillemacher the painter. A curious proof of the ‘Partie
de la Cité de Paris,’ before the introduction of the towers, which
were never really in the actual view, though Méryon chose to see them
there, came from the friend of Méryon’s youth, a friend who spoke over
his grave--M. de Salicis. Some others of the prints have been Philippe
Burty’s. The final trial proof of the ‘Tourelle, dite “de Marat,”’ and
one or two other subjects, of which I spare the reader the details,
were originally bought of Méryon by M. Wasset, a man the public wots
not of, but a collector full of character: the ‘Cousin Pons,’ I dare to
call him, of my own earlier day.
Let me, in a paragraph devoted to himself alone, recall M. Wasset to my
memory. An employé--_secrétaire_, it may be--at the Ministry of War,
he lived, when I mounted to his flat, one winter’s night (how many
years ago!) in a dark, winding, narrow street, of the Rive Gauche,
between the Seine and St. Sulpice--the Rue Jacob. The Cousin Pons, did
I say, this gentleman resembled? But Pons was _gourmet_ as well as
connoisseur--M. Wasset knew no passion but the collector’s. He dined
modestly--by subscription, it was understood--at the Café Procope, in
the Quarter--was _abonné_ for repasts taken there, in a haunt once
classic, now dull and cheap. His rooms in the Rue Jacob, low and small,
were stuffed full with his collections. _Bric-à-brac_ he had, even
more than prints. Strange beings who dredged in the River, brought him
ancient jewellery, and seventeenth-century watches, that had slept
their Rip Van Winkle sleep in the mud of the Seine. I see the venerable
collector now, his sombre and crowded rooms lit with a single lamp,
and he, passing about, spare, eager, and trembling, with bowed figure;
garrulous, excited as with wine, by the mere sight and handling of his
accumulated possessions. A few years afterwards--urged thereto by the
greatest of Parisian printsellers, Clément, who is now no more--he had
a sale, in the Rue Drouot, of his hundreds of prints, of which the
Méryons, of course, formed but a small part. Other treasures--then
ardently desired--he was to purchase with the proceeds. Is his heart,
one wonders, with those treasures now--in the dark Paris street? Or,
the hands that trembled so, fifteen years since--have they relaxed
their hold, for ever, of the things that were meat and drink, that
were wife and child, to him?
Méryon, I remember, took me by storm as a great artistic personality,
and, since he conquered me immediately, I have always been faithful to
him. In that there is no sort of virtue; for has he not now become,
thus early, almost everywhere, where prints are loved, an accepted
classic? To appreciate Whistler--even at all to enjoy him--requires a
longer education. There are even some things that at first one resents.
A touch of charlatanry lurks, one at first supposes, in the Bond
Street ‘arrangement in yellow and white,’ and in the _velarium_ under
which we were invited to gather when the master held sway in Suffolk
Street. But, in time, that impression passes. Then, one accepts the man
whole--takes him as he is--genius like his has a certain licence to be
abnormal. And though it pleases Mr. Whistler, in sundry catalogues and
joyous little books about the ‘art of making enemies,’ to represent
from time to time that I, among a hundred others, do not appreciate
him, that is only because he would have us believe he is a victim to
the interesting monomania of persecution, and I, forsooth, when this is
his mood, am called upon to figure as one of those who would pursue and
vex him. Peace! peace! Now that he has ‘done battering at England’ (I
will not vouch precisely for the phrase), I am, it seems, an ‘enemy’ no
more. So much the better!
I take it, he and Méryon are quite the greatest of the etchers
this century has seen, and if so (since of great true etchers the
Eighteenth Century was barren), they are the greatest since the days
of Claude and Rembrandt. To no one who has studied any group of their
plates for a single quarter of an hour, can it be necessary to insist
upon the essential unlikeness of these two remarkable men. Unity of
impression--almost a test of excellence, the one note dominant, the
rest subordinated--that is found, I know, and found almost equally,
in the work of both. But by what different measures has it been
maintained! Whistler, in so much of his work, has shown himself the
flexible, vivacious, and consummate sketcher, the artist whose choice
of economical and telling ‘line’ is faultless and perhaps well-nigh
immediate. Méryon, upon the other hand, has been remarkable for
building up, with learned patience worthy of Albert Dürer, little by
little, his effects; so that when the thing is done, and that sombre
vision of his has become a realised performance, he has not so much
made a drawing upon a plate, as erected a monument (for so it strikes
one) from base to coping-stone. Such work has at least the permanence
of the very monuments it records. An _œuvre de longue haleine_--a task
severe and protracted--is each one of Méryon’s important coppers. Yet
all the length of Méryon’s labour witnesses to no relaxing hold of his
first thought, and in the great complexity of ordered line there is
revealed no superfluous, no insignificant stroke.
Each man is discovered in his work. In Méryon’s ‘Abside’ say, in the
‘Pont Neuf,’ in the ‘Saint-Etienne-du Mont,’ is his brooding spirit,
his patient craftsmanship, his temperament intense and profound. He was
poor; he was often weary; he spent himself on his work. In Whistler’s
‘Garden,’ in his ‘Piazzetta,’ in his ‘Florence Leyland,’ in the ‘Large
Pool,’ in that wonderful tiny thing, ‘The Fruit Shop,’ there is the
boyish freshness, the spirit of enjoyment, which he has known how
to preserve till the present time. Whistler has never been tired,
or, if he has, he and his work have parted company at that moment.
Wonderful as is his gift of observation and handling, his plates are
a lark’s song. As you see the man before you, elastic, joyous, slim,
and _débonnair_, having never known the heavy and sad wisdom of our
modern youth, nor the cares of our middle age, his appearance almost
persuades you that all his exquisite craftsmanship, practised now
for forty years, is but the blameless recreation of an hour snatched
from life’s severer tasks--the task of sipping duly, _à l’heure de
l’absinthe_, one’s _apéritif_, on the Boulevard; of pulling on the
River, in the long June days; of condensing every rule of life into
perhaps three epigrams, effective at a dinner-party. Who would not envy
this possessor of a craft fantastic, airy, and immortal! Though Mr.
Whistler may entertainingly insinuate that long life has been denied to
his friendships, he will agree with me, I know, when I assert that it
is secured to his etchings.
That my print-drawers contain but four or five etchings by Seymour
Haden is at once my misfortune and my reproach. As one looks at them
one conjures up visions of bygone sales at Sotheby’s, when as yet
Mr. Wilkinson, benign and aged, sat in the chair, to wield the ivory
hammer--what opportunities neglected, of which the more diligent have
availed themselves! For I cannot accept Seymour Haden’s too modest
estimate of the value of his own work. Labour so energetic and decisive
is not destined to be prized by one generation alone, and in esteeming
it comparatively lightly, his connoisseurship, accurate enough when it
is concerned with Claude and Rembrandt, Méryon and Whistler--all of
whom, in his time, he has loved and collected--is for once at fault.
I am somewhat poor again in those etchings which are the creation of
the austere genius of Legros. Popular they will never be, for Legros is
almost alone among men of genius in not belonging to his own day--in
receiving well-nigh no influence from the actual hour. He is a belated
Old Master--but a ‘master’ always: never an affected copyist, who
pranks ‘in faded antique dress.’ Had he but humoured the affectations
of the time, it is quite possible that the time would at all events
have talked about him, and, denied actual popularity, he might yet
have been solaced by an æsthetic coterie’s hysterical admiration. But
that has not been for Legros. As it is, with his gravely whispered
message, his general reticence, his overmastering sense of Style, his
indifference to attractive truths of detail, his scorn of the merely
clever, he is placed at a disadvantage. But his work remains; not
only the etchings, of which Messieurs Thibaudeau and Poulet-Malassis
catalogued a hundred and sixty-eight as long ago as 1877, but the grave
pictures in which the peasant of the Boulognais devoutly worships, or
in which the painted landscape is as the landscape of a dream, and the
vigorous oil portraits--not one of which, perhaps, reaches the nobility
of his etched portrait of Watts--and the pencil drawings of the nude,
several of which Legros has given to the Museum of his birthplace,
Dijon, where the stray Englishman who stays to look at them finds that
they are as finely severe as are the pencil drawings of Ingres. I have
his one big etching, ‘La Mort du Vagabond’--the scale too large to
be effective generally, but, _pace_ Mr. Whistler, I do not, in this
case, find it ‘an offence,’[4]--and amongst others, two that have, it
may be, no particular rarity, but that are worthily, and I think even
exceptionally, characteristic. The one is ‘La Communion dans l’Eglise
Saint-Médard’: in line and in feeling an instance of the most dignified
treatment of ecclesiastical function or religious office. And the
other is ‘Les Chantres Espagnols,’ the singing-men, aged and decayed,
eight of them, in a darkened choir--was ever a vision of narrow and of
saddened lives more serious or more penetrating!
[4] ‘The huge plate,’ writes Mr. Whistler--on the whole
truthfully--‘the huge plate is an offence: its undertaking
an unbecoming display of determination and ignorance, its
accomplishment a triumph of unthinking earnestness and
uncontrolled energy.’
From these grave things it is sometimes a relief to turn to
Jacquemart’s etchings of still-life. The man himself had troubles: not
difficulties about money, nor, like Méryon, the knowledge that he was
little appreciated--for appreciation came to him early--but lack of
health during years that should have been vigorous, and a compulsory
flight towards the sunshine, which yet did not appreciably lessen the
distance that divided him from Death. But his work, from end to end,
in its serene, deliberate accomplishment, suggests no chances and
changes, no personal emotion, and even no actual experience of human
life. One says at first, it might have been done at any period; then
one recognises perhaps what one may call a modern feeling for the
object portrayed; then one thinks of Hollar’s ‘Five Muffs,’ and of
Rembrandt’s ‘Shell,’ and remembers that both have a freedom, a delicate
skill, akin, after all, to the skill and the freedom in the etchings
of Jacquemart. Of Jacquemart’s two great series, the prints for his
father’s _Histoire de la Porcelaine_ and those of the ‘Gemmes et Joyaux
de la Couronne,’ I possess only the first, and these in book form,
as they were sent me by Madame Techener, the widow of Jacquemart’s
publisher and friend. In a simple, russet-coloured half-binding, done
afterwards by Zaehnsdorf, they stand on a shelf I go to. Elsewhere
are such proofs of Jacquemart etchings as the occasional good
fortune of auction rooms--snatched in a spare half-hour--has brought
to a life-long lover of engravings. There is a certain plate of
sword-handles and daggers--things, some of them, that ‘rend and rip’--
‘Gash rough, slash smooth, help Hate so many ways,
Yet ever keep a beauty that betrays
Love still at work with the artificer, through all his quaint
devising--’
as Robert Browning wrote, describing weapons that lay, as I remember,
at peace at last, on his own drawing-room table. How Jacquemart etched
such blades! By this print of his there is one of a seventeenth-century
watch--just such a watch as I said used to be fished up from the bed of
the Seine, for quaint old Monsieur Wasset--and with it the presentment
of Renaissance jewel; and, perhaps, of a carved mirror, or a bit of
Valenciennes porcelain.
Allow me a reflection! The cheapest way of enjoying _objets d’art_
is to enjoy them in etchings; and it is often the easiest way, since
you have but to sit in your chair and look; and it is often not the
least true, since the etcher himself has seen with trained eye before
his trained hand came to draw. Well, to enjoy _objets d’art_ in that
fashion, with tolerable completeness and extreme satisfaction, the
intelligent poor man has really but to get the two chief series of
Jacquemarts (those that are still lacking to me, the ‘Gemmes et
Joyaux de la Couronne,’ are, I know Seymour Haden would tell me, the
bigger, broader, richer, more spontaneous of the two), and those fifty
plates by different etchers, of whom Courtry, Greux, and Le Rat were
among the principal, which Holloway published about a score of years
since--‘Works of Art in the Collections of England.’ In that excellent
folio, the men who have just been mentioned, and several others,
followed hard on Jacquemart’s heels. What a treatment of jade, in
some of those plates! Mr. Addington’s vase in particular--absolutely
unctuous. What a treatment of _cristal de roche_! Desgoffe’s painted
panel at the Luxembourg is only a little finer. What a treatment
of ivory!--that extraordinary Moorish casket, that was Malcolm of
Poltalloch’s.
But this is only copyist’s etching, some people may say.
‘Copyists’--No! You would not enjoy it so much, were it merely servile
imitation. It is interpretation, significant and spirited, alert and
vivid.
Of the original etchers of the younger school in England, Frank Short
and William Strang have long seemed to me the most interesting,
notwithstanding the as yet somewhat marked limitations of theme of
the one, and that possessing ‘devil’ of the love of ugliness which
I have now almost ceased to hope may be exorcised from the other.
Strang, for all the presence of that which is repulsive to many, is
a man of great qualities. A Celt to the depths of him, he is wildly
imaginative. He is dramatic, and his prints are dramatic, however
much he may profess to be busy with line and tone. Besides, there are
moments in which he confesses to being a poet. He has the instinct of
tragedy. Technically, his etchings are almost always good; nor is it,
to my mind, a sin in them that so many of them set you thinking. I
have but a few of Mr. Strang’s prints; of Frank Short’s I have more,
and when he can interpret a Dewint like that ‘Road in Yorkshire,’ and
a Constable like that sketch of Mr. Vaughan’s, I see no reason for not
putting those mezzotints--interpretations so brilliant, translations so
faithful yet so free--by the side of his work in Etching, inspired not
by familiarity with the art of another, but by the presence of charming
line or charming vista in Nature. Frank Short, in his original work, is
a most delicate draughtsman of form in landscape. ‘Evening, Bosham,’
and ‘Sleeping till the Flood,’ sufficiently show it.
Of another good man, Mr. C. J. Watson, I have not enough to judge him
at my ease; but he is a sterling etcher, distinctly gifted, and without
artifice and trick. An actually imaginative vision one must not perhaps
ask of him, but mental flexibility--can he but cultivate it--may enable
him to go far.
‘Profil de Jeune Fille,’ a rare dry-point by Paul Helleu, has, it
seems to me, like much of the work by that most modern of Parisian
pastellists and etchers, a delightful spontaneity and force and
freedom. It is an inevitable _chef-d’œuvre_--the greatest, perhaps, of
a facile and exquisite master.
My gossip stops. Grant me only the grace of one more line, to avow the
satisfaction with which, even after having enjoyed the companionship of
at least some little work that is admittedly classic, I can look upon
the prints of Mr. Charles Holroyd, a young etcher of our latest day. In
them so much of what is generally, and often even rightly, seductive,
is frankly abandoned, that they may keep unimpaired at least the
distinction and reticence which are the very soul of Style.
(_Art Journal_, January and March 1894.)