Geddes, a link between Rembrandt and the French Revival--The Etchings
of Millet--Charles Méryon’s work--The best, accomplished in but few
years--His “Paris”--The Méryons the Collector wants--The prices of
some masterpieces--Papers--Méryon Collectors--Bracquemond’s few noble
things--Maxime Lalanne--Jules Jacquemart’s Etchings--His still-life
pieces practically original--Jacquemart interpreter, not copyist, of
his subject--The “Porcelaine”--The “Gemmes et Joyaux”--The dry-points
of Paul Helleu.
Between the period of the work of Rembrandt and the middle of the
Eighteenth Century very little fine work was done in Etching. The
practitioners of the art, such as they were, seemed to lose sight
of its greater principles. What they lacked in learning and in
mastery, they made up for--so they probably thought--by elaboration
and prettiness. Only here and there did such a man as our English
Geddes--our Scottish Geddes, if the word is liked better--and he not
later than the second and third decades of our own century--produce
either portrait or landscape in the true method, with seeming
spontaneity, with means economised. It was in landscape chiefly--most
particularly in _On Peckham Rye_ and _Halliford-on-Thames_--that
Geddes most successfully asserted himself, as, in his smaller way,
Rembrandt’s true follower, though in his few portraits (his mother’s,
perhaps, most notably) the right decisiveness, simplicity, and energy
of manner may not be overlooked. In some measure, it may be supposed,
Geddes influenced David Wilkie, who was his friend, and Wilkie, amongst
several etchings which were inferior at least to the dry-points of his
fellow-workman (for his small portfolio is not, on the whole, worth
much), produced one or two memorable things: a perfect little _genre_
piece, called _The Receipt_--an old-world gentleman searching in a
bureau, while a messenger waits respectfully at his side--being by far
the best, and obviously a desirable possession.
But the middle of our century had to be reached before the true revival
of the art of Etching, anywhere. Before it, Ingres, in a single
plate, practised the art in the spirit of the line-engraver. Just as
it approached, Delacroix and Paul Huet and Théodore Rousseau showed,
in a few plates, some appreciation of the fact that etching is often
serviceable chiefly as the medium for a sketch. But the middle of the
century had actually to arrive before the world was in possession
of the best performances of Millet, Méryon, Bracquemond, and Jules
Jacquemart.
Jean François Millet executed but one-and-twenty etchings, according to
the Catalogue of Monsieur Lebrun, the friend and relative of Sensier,
Millet’s biographer. Of M. Lebrun’s Catalogue--originally issued as an
Appendix to the Paris edition of Sensier’s _Life_ of the artist--Mr
Frederick Keppel, of New York, has published a translation, with some
additional facts which are of interest to the precise student. The
etchings of Millet are, at the very least, masterly notes of motives
for his painted pictures. But they are often much more than that. Often
they are entirely satisfactory and final and elucidatory dealings
with the themes they choose to tackle. They are then, quite as much
as the pictures themselves, records of peasant life, as the artist
observed it intimately, and at the same time vivid and expressive
suggestions of atmosphere and light and shade. In effect they are large
and simple. In Etching, Millet was scarcely concerned to display a
skill that was very obvious, a sleight-of-hand, an acrobatic triumph
over technical difficulties. Etching was to him a vehicle for the
expression of exactly the same things as those to which he addressed
himself in mediums more habitual. And so we have his _Glaneuses_ and
his _Bêcheurs_, his _Départ pour le Travail_--worth perhaps, each one
of them, in good state, a very few pounds each. In America Millet has
of late years been particularly appreciated. I should dare to say even
that he has been overrated, owing to a skilfully-worked craze about his
painted pictures, ending with the immense, ridiculous sensation of the
sale of the _Angelus_. But in France--which, in the appreciation of
all work of art, is certainly not less enlightened, but is cooler and
more questioning--Millet is also appreciated; nor, in England, in 1891,
was there substantial difficulty in borrowing for the Burlington Club
Exhibition of the French Revival of Etching, the eleven prints, lent
by Mr Justice Day, Sir Hickman Bacon, Mr H. S. Theobald, and Mr Alfred
Higgins, which were deemed a sufficient representation of Millet’s work
with the needle.
In that Exhibition the representation of the great work of Méryon
was confined to twenty-five prints. It practically included all his
masterpieces; but it would have been made more extensive had not the
Burlington Club, soon after I published the first edition of my little
book upon this master--and when Burty’s Memoir was yet fresh--organised
a splendid gathering of the prints we owe to Méryon’s high imagination,
keen sensitiveness, and unstinted labour.
I am not concerned to deal here at any length with the story of
Méryon’s life, or with the analysis of his poetic temperament.
The question asked about him by the reader of this present book
is a comparatively simple one, but I shall have to answer it with
fulness--which to possess of the “sombre epics,” and lovely lyrics,
wrought during the time in which his spirit was most brilliant and his
hand firmest?
Méryon’s fame rests on the achievements of a very few years. The
period comprised between 1850 and 1854 saw the production, not indeed
of everything he did which may deserve to live, but of all that
is sufficient to ensure life for the rest. Many of his pretty and
carefully planned drawings were made earlier than 1850, and several
of the more engaging of his etchings were made after 1854; but the
four years between these dates were the years in which he conceived
and executed his “Paris,” which was something more than a collection
of etched views--it was a poem and a satirical commentary on the
life he recorded. Moreover, Méryon is quite pre-eminently the etcher
of one great theme. Among richly endowed artists who have looked at
Life broadly, it is rare and difficult to discover one whose work has
evidenced such faithful concentration. It is rare enough to find that
concentration even in the labour of such artists as are comparatively
unimaginative, of such as are content to confine themselves to the
patient record of the thing that actually is--of such an engraver,
say, as Hollar. It is doubly rare to find an imaginative artist of
wide outlook and of deep experience so much the recorder of one set
of facts, one series of visions. He will generally have been anxious
to give form to very different impressions that came to him at
various times and under changing circumstances. Now it may have been
Landscape that interested him, and now Portraiture, and now again ideal
composition or traditional romance. And in each he may have fairly
succeeded. But Méryon, though stress of circumstance obliged him to
do work beyond the limits of his choice, did such work, generally
speaking, with only too little of promptings from within, to lighten
the dulness of the task. There are, of course, exceptions--one or
two in his Landscape, if there are none in his Portraiture. But the
beginning and the end of his art, as far as the world can be asked to
be seriously concerned with it, lay in the imaginative record, now
faithfully simple, now transfigured and nobly visionary, of the city
which requited him but ill for his devotion to its most poetic and its
most prosaic features. It is the etchings of Paris, then, that the
collector will naturally first seek.
Nearly all the etchings of Paris are included in what is sometimes
known as “the published set.” Not that the twelve major and the
eleven minor pieces comprised in that were ever really published
by fashionable print-sellers to an inquiring and eager public. But
they were at least so arranged and put together that this might
have happened had Méryon’s star been a lucky one. In Méryon’s mind
they constituted a “work,” to which the few other Parisian subjects
afterwards came as a not unsuitable addition. Like the plates of “Liber
Studiorum,” they were to be looked at “together.” Together, the plates
of “Liber” represented, as we shall see better in another chapter, the
range of Turner’s art. Together, the etchings “sur Paris”--“on” and not
“of” Paris, let it be noted--represented Méryon’s vision of the town,
and of its deeper life.
In beginning a collection of Méryon’s, I imagine it to be important
not only to begin with one of the “Paris,” but with a very significant
example of it--a typical, important etching. The twelve views--the
twelve “pictures,” I should prefer to call them--Méryon himself
numbered, when, rather late in life, he issued the last impressions
of them. These numbered impressions, being, as I say, the very last
States, are not the impressions to cherish; but these are the
subjects of them (and the subjects, in finer impressions, will all
be wanted)--the _Stryge_, the _Petit Pont_, the _Arche du Pont
Nôtre-Dame_, the _Galérie de Nôtre-Dame_, the _Tour de l’Horloge_,
the _Tourelle, Rue de la Tixéranderie_, the _St Etienne-du-Mont_,
the _Pompe Nôtre-Dame_, the _Pont Neuf_, the _Pont-au-Change_, the
_Morgue_, and, lastly, the _Abside de Nôtre-Dame_. Before these,
between them, and again at the end of them, are certain minor designs,
not to be confused with that “Minor Work,” chiefly copies and dull
Portraiture, described but briefly in my little book on Méryon, which
is devoted more particularly to the work of genius with which it is
worth while to be concerned. Those minor designs which are associated
with the “Paris” are an essential part of it, doing humble, but, as
I am certain Méryon thought, most necessary service. In a sense they
may be called head-pieces and tail-pieces to the greater subjects of
which the list lies above. Sometimes they are ornament, but always
significant, symbolic ornament; sometimes they are direct, written
commentary. Either way, they bear upon the whole, but yet are less
important than those twelve pieces already named. So it was, at all
events, in Méryon’s mind; but of one or two of them it is true also
that they have a beauty and perfection within their limited scheme,
lacking to one or two of the more important, to which they serve
humbly as page or outrider. The one lyric note of the _Rue des Mauvais
Garçons_, for instance, is in its own way as complete a thing as is
the magnificent epic of _Abside_ or _Morgue_--it is greater far than
the _Pompe Nôtre-Dame_, or, it may be, than the _Petit Pont_. The late
Mr P. G. Hamerton--an admirable specialist in Etching, but a writer
making no claim to the narrower speciality of minute acquaintance with
Méryon--has praised the _Pompe Nôtre-Dame_. He has praised it for
merits which exist, and it is only relatively that the praise is, as
it seems to me, undeserved. The plate is really a wonderful victory
over technical difficulties; but, in the ugly lines of it, its realism
is realism of too bold an order. The _Petit Pont_ is a fine piece of
architectural draughtsmanship, and an impressive conception to boot;
but, like Rembrandt’s wonderfully wrought _Mill_, it is one-sided--it
wants symmetry of composition.
The _Abside_ is accounted the masterpiece of Méryon, in right of its
solemn and austere beauty. A rich and delicate impression of this print
is, then, the crown of any Méryon collection. It must be obtained in
a State before the dainty detail of the apse of the cathedral, and
the yet daintier and more magically delicate workmanship of its roof,
in soft and radiant light, have suffered deterioration through wear.
It must be richly printed. The First State is practically not to be
found. I suppose that there are scarcely in existence seven or eight
impressions of it. It is at the British Museum, and in the collections
of Mr B. B. Macgeorge, Mr Avery, Mr Mansfield, Mr R. C. Fisher, and Mr
Pyke Thompson. For the last that changed hands, fully 125 guineas was
paid. Méryon had received for it--and gratefully, in his depression
and poverty--one shilling and threepence. I have seen his receipt.
But money now will not acquire it. A Second State is therefore the
one to aim at; and, just because there were so very few impressions
taken of the First, that I ought, in my Catalogue, to have described
them as proofs--more especially as there was no change whatever in the
work, but only in the lettering--it stands to reason that the earliest
and best impressions of the Second (I mean these only) are, in their
exquisite quality, all that good judges can desire. These are on thin
and wiry paper--old Dutch or French--often a little cockled. The green,
or greenish, paper Méryon was fond of, he never used for the _Abside_.
The poorer impressions of the Second State are on thick modern paper.
After the Second State, which, when carefully chosen, is apt to be
so beautiful--and is worth, then, forty or fifty guineas--there
comes a Third, a Fourth, a Fifth: none, fortunately, common; and
deteriorations, all of them; downward steps in the passage from noble
Art to the miserable issue of a thing which can rejoice the soul no
longer, nor evidence the triumph of the hand.
Not much more need be said in detail here as to the larger prints of
the great “Paris,” but there is still a little. In the shape and size
of the plate, and by its breadth of distant view, the _Pont-au-Change_
is the companion to the _Abside_. There are some impressions on the
greenish paper, and some on the thin Dutch that yields the best of
the _Absides_. The impression of the First State in the De Salicis
Sale sold for £33. The _Pont-au-Change_ is one of those prints which
have submitted to the most serious alterations. A wild flight of giant
birds against the rolling sky is the first innovation--it occurs in the
Second State--and though it removes from the picture all its early calm
and half its sanity, it has, as many think, a charm of its own, a weird
suggestiveness. A good impression, in this State, is worth, it may be,
£6 or £7. The next change--when the flight of birds gives place to a
flight of small balloons (unlike the large balloon which, in the First
State, sails nobly through the sky, before ever the dark birds get
there)--the next change, I say, is a more pronounced mistake. The _Tour
de l’Horloge_--of which a First State fetched in the Wasset Sale £10,
and in the De Salicis £22--has also submitted to change, but scarcely
in a State in which it need occupy the careful collector. In certain
late impressions, Méryon, convinced, in the restlessness of mental
ill-health, that one side of the tall Palais de Justice was left in his
picture monotonous and dull, shot great shafts of light across it, and
these became the things that caught the eye. He had forgotten, then,
the earlier wisdom and more consummate art by which, when first he
wrought the plate, he had placed the quiet space of shadowed building
as a foil to the many-paned window by the side of it. The change is an
instructive and pathetic commentary on the ease with which artistic
conceptions slip away, they themselves forgotten, and the excellence
that they had beautifully achieved ignored even by the mind that gave
them birth.
The _St Etienne-du-Mont_ is one of those etchings which possess the
abiding charm of perfect things. In it a subject entirely beautiful
and dignified is treated with force and with refinement of spirit,
and with faultless exactitude of hand. It shows--nothing can better
show--the characteristic of Méryon, the union of the courage of realism
and the sentiment of poetry; in other words, its realism, like the
realism of the finest Fiction, has to be poetic. You have the builder’s
scaffolding, the workmen’s figures, for modern life and labour; the
Gothic stones of the Collège de Montaigu, the shadow of the narrow
street, the closely-draped women hurrying on their way, for old-world
sentiment and the mystery of the town. But I suppose a chapter might be
written upon its excellent beauty. I mention it here, partly because
it too submits to change, though change less important than that in
the _Pont-au-Change_, and less destructive than that in the _Tour de
l’Horloge_. Not to speak of sundry inscriptions, sundry “posters,”
which Méryon, in mere restlessness, was minded to alter, he could never
quite satisfy himself about the attitude of one of the workmen on the
scaffolding. Three States represent as many changes in this figure,
and all these--as a matter, at all events, of minor interest--it is
pleasant to collect. Here, in the _St Etienne_, as so often in the
etchings of Méryon, the First State (£16 in the De Salicis Sale) is the
one of which the impressions are the most numerous, though even in
this piece of writing, which does not take the place of a catalogue, I
have had occasion to note one instance out of some in which it is not
so. But generally it is so. And so the Méryon collector has to be even
more careful than the collector of “Liber” about the impression which
he buys. He must have an early State, but it is not enough to have an
early State. He must most diligently teach himself to perceive what is
really a fine example of it. He must not fall into the commonest vice
of the unintelligent purchaser--be captivated by the mere word, forego
his own judgment, and buy First States with dull determination.
Presently the collector of the “Paris” will legitimately want the
smaller pieces, some of which I have called “tail-pieces”: all are
commentaries and connecting-links. Some are beautiful, complete, and
significant, as has already been said, but generally the significance
is more remarkable than the beauty. They bind together, almost as an
appropriate text itself might bind together, what might otherwise be
detached pictures. They complete the thought of Méryon in regard to his
“Paris,” and make its expression clear. Thus, the etched cover for the
Paris Set bears the title, “Eaux Fortes sur Paris,” on a representation
of a slab of fossiliferous limestone, suggesting the material which
made it possible to build the city on the spot where it stands. Then,
there is a set of etched verses wholly without other ornament than
may be found in their prettily-fantastic form, verses that bewail the
life of Paris. Again, lines to accompany the _Pont-au-Change_ and its
great balloon. These things recall William Blake--the method by which
the “Songs of Innocence” first found their limited public. Again, the
_Tombeau de Molière_--Méryon thinks there must be place in his Paris
for the one representative French writer of imaginative Literature,
the cynic, analyst, comedian. And to name one other little print, but
not to exhaust the list, there is a graceful embodiment of wayward
fancy to accompany the _Pompe Nôtre-Dame_. It is called the _Petite
Pompe_--represents the Pompe in small; gives us verses regretting half
playfully, half affectionately, the removal of so familiar a landmark,
and surrounds all with a flowing border of rare elegance and simple
invention.
But a few other brilliant and poetical records of Paris lie, it has
been said already, outside the published Set, claim a place almost
with the greater illustrations I have spoken of earlier, and must
surely be sought. The _Tourelle, dite “de Marat”_ is one of these,
and it is Méryon’s record of the place where Charlotte Corday did the
deed by which we remember her. Except for the interest of observing
a change, due, I may suppose, to the dulled imagination of a fairly
shrewd tradesman--a change by which all symbolism and significance
passed out of this wonderful little print--it is useless to have this
little etching in any State after the First published one. For, after
the First published one, the picture and the poem became merely a
view: there is nothing to connect the place with Marat’s tragedy, and
Méryon has been permitted to represent, not the Tourelle, _dite_ “de
Marat,” but “No. 22, Street of the School of Medicine.” And the First
State is already rare. There were very few impressions of it. It was
too imaginative for the public. But here is an instance in which Trial
Proofs, generally to be avoided, may fairly be sought for, along with
the First State. Distributed among different collectors is a little
succession of Trial Proofs with different dates of May and June written
by Méryon in pencil on the margin. The first and second belong to Mr
Macgeorge; the third was Seymour Haden’s; the fourth belongs to Sir
James Knowles; the eighth--which is the last--belongs to me (I got it,
if I recollect, for £8, 10s. and a commission, at the Wasset Sale).
Even at the beginning of this little sequence of proofs the work is not
ineffective; and at the end it is complete.
Also outside the published Set of “Paris” are two little etchings which
are particularly noteworthy, and which, by reason of the extreme, even
astounding, delicacy of some of their work, it is, I think, well to
secure in the early state of Trial Proof--when one can get the chance.
These are the _Pont-au-Change vers_ 1784--which no one can possibly
confuse with the larger _Pont-au-Change_--and _Le Pont Neuf et la
Samaritaine_. Unlike most of Méryon’s Parisian work, both are, not
indeed transcripts from, but idealisations of, drawings by another.
The first dry draughtsman, in the present case, was one Nicolle. As
far as the practical presentation of all the subject is concerned, the
Trial Proofs of these prints, which have been sold under the hammer
for about £10 each, are all that can be wanted, and they possess,
moreover, an exquisite refinement of light, of which the published, and
especially the later published, examples give no hint. All impressions
of these two little plates are worthy of respect, for these plates were
never worked down to the wrecks and skeletons of some of the others;
but, nevertheless, it is only in the earliest impressions that we can
fully see the lovely lines and light and shade of the background in
the _Pont-au-Change vers_ 1784--it must be had “before the great dark
rope”--and the sunlit house-fronts (Van der Heyden-like, almost) of the
_Pont Neuf et la Samaritaine_.
Of the Bourges etchings, which are good, though none are of the first
importance--and they are but few in all--the best is the _Rue des
Toiles_. It is a varied picture, admirably finished. The rest are
engaging sketches.
Amongst the remaining etchings by which Méryon commends himself to
those who study and reflect upon his work, it is enough, perhaps,
here, to speak of three. _Océanie: Pêche aux Palmes_ is almost the
only quite satisfactory record of that acquaintance that he made
with the antipodes. The Second State--with the title--is not scarce
at all, and can never be costly. You may pay, perhaps, one or two
pounds for it, and for the first, say, four or five. The _Entrée du
Couvent des Capucins Français à Athènes_--a print devoted in reality
to the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates--is the single and the very
noble plate which a visit to Athens, when he was a sailor, inspired
Méryon to produce. This rare plate was done for a book that is itself
now rare--Count Léon de Laborde’s “Athènes au XV^{me}, XVI^{me}, et
XVII^{me} Siècles.” Even in the Second State the _Entrée du Couvent_
has fetched about £12, in more sales than one. _Rochoux’s Address
Card_, albeit not particularly rare, is curious and worth study. It
was executed for the only dealer who substantially encouraged Méryon;
and Méryon contrived to press into his little plate much of what he
had already found and shown to be suggestive in the features of Paris.
Symbolical figures of the Seine and Marne recline at the top of the
design. Then there are introduced bits from the _Arms of Paris_, from
the _Bain Froid Chevrier_ (the statue of Henri Quatre), from _Le
Pont Neuf_, and from _La Petite Pompe_. No one, of course, can ask
us to consider _Rochoux’s Address Card_ very beautiful or grandly
imaginative; but it is ingenious, and, like _La Petite Pompe_, though
in more limited measure, it is good as a piece of decorative design.
The impressions of Méryon’s etchings are printed on papers of very
different sorts. A greenish paper Méryon himself liked, and it is
one of the favourites of collectors. Its unearthly hue adds to the
weirdness of several of the pictures, often most suitably; but it is
not always good. Méryon knew this, and many of his plates--amongst
them, as I have said already, that unsurpassable masterpiece, the
_Abside_--were never printed on it. I have a _Rue des Mauvais
Garçons_--the thing was Baudelaire’s favourite--upon very bluish gray.
A thin old Dutch paper, wiry and strong, white originally and softened
by age, gives some of the finest impressions. Other good examples are
on Japanese, and there are fine ones on thinnest India paper that is
of excellent quality. Modern Whatman and modern French paper have been
used for many plates; and a few impressions, which, I think, were
rarely, if ever, printed by any one but Méryon himself, are found on
a paper of dull walnut colour. If I seem to dwell on this too much,
let it be remembered that very different effects are produced by the
different papers and the different inks. The luxurious collector,
possessing more than one impression, likes to look first at his “Black
_Morgue_,” and then at his “Brown.” The two make different pictures.
[Illustration:
MÉRYON: _La Morgue_.
]
About the Méryon collections, it may be said that M. Niel, an early
friend, possessed the first important group that was sold under the
hammer. Then followed M. Burty’s, M. Hirsch’s, and afterwards M.
Sensier’s. These fetched but modest prices--prices insignificant
sometimes--for Méryon’s vogue was not yet. Later, the possessions of
M. Wasset--an aged bachelor, eager and trembling, whom I shall always
remember as the “Cousin Pons” of certain _bric-à-brac_-crowded upper
chambers in the Rue Jacob--were sold for more substantial sums. Since
then, the collection of that most sympathetic amateur, the Rev. J. J.
Heywood--one of the first men in London to buy the master’s prints--has
passed into the hands of Mr B. B. Macgeorge of Glasgow, whose
cabinet, enriched from other sources, is now certainly the greatest.
The Méryons that belonged to Sir Seymour Haden went, some years since,
to America, where whoever possesses them must recognise collectors that
are his equals, in Mr Samuel Avery and Mr Howard Mansfield. If too many
carefully gathered groups of Méryon’s etchings have left our shores,
others remain--though very few. The British Museum Print-Room is rich
in the works of the master: many of the best impressions of his prints,
there, having belonged long ago to Philippe Burty, who early recognised
something at least of their merit, and made, in the _Gazette des Beaux
Arts_ of that day, the first rough catalogue of them.
It is time we turned for a few minutes to Felix Bracquemond--a dozen
years Méryon’s junior, for he was born in 1833. Among the sub-headings
to this present chapter there occurs the phrase, “Bracquemond’s few
noble things.” Why “few”?--it may be asked--when, in the Catalogue
of the Burlington Club Exhibition of the French Revival of Etching,
it is mentioned that the number of his plates extends to about seven
hundred, and that the list would have been longer had not Bracquemond,
in his later years, accepted an official post which left him little
time for this department of work? Well, there are two or three reasons
why, with all respect to an indefatigable artist, I still say “few.”
To begin with, no inconsiderable proportion of Felix Bracquemond’s
etched plates are works of reproduction--translations (like Rajon’s,
Waltner’s, Unger’s, some indeed of Jacquemart’s) of the conceptions of
another. These may be admirable in their own way--the _Erasmus_, after
the Holbein, in the Louvre, is more than admirable: it is masterly--a
monument of austere, firmly-directed labour, recording worthily
Holbein’s own searching draughtsmanship and profound and final vision
of human character. But we have agreed, throughout the greater part
of this book, and more especially in those sections of it which are
devoted to the art whose greatest charm is often in its spontaneity,
to consider original work and work inspired or dictated by others as
on a different level. Then again, in such of Bracquemond’s prints as
are original, there is perhaps even less than is usual, in a fine
artist’s work, of uniformity of excellence. No very great number of all
the plates M. Beraldi industriously chronicles need the collector busy
himself with trying to acquire. The largish etchings of great birds,
alive or dead, are amongst the most characteristic. With singular
freedom and richness--an enjoyment of their plumage and their life, and
a great pictorial sense to boot--has Bracquemond rendered them. If I
could possess but a single Bracquemond, I would have a fine impression
of _Le Haut d’un Battant de Porte_, the dark birds hanging there. That
plate was wrought in 1865. But _Margot la Critique_ and _Vanneaux
et Sarcelles_--prints of about the same period--likewise represent
the artist; and there is a plate done later, at the instance of the
Messrs. Dowdeswell, which is certainly a triumph of _technique_ and of
character. This is _Le Vieux Coq_.
Daubigny, Maxime Lalanne, Meissonier, Corot, are all amongst deceased
French artists who have etched ably. The two last-mentioned--doubtless
the most important or most popular artists in their own customary
mediums--wrought the fewest plates. Corot’s are characteristic
sketches. Daubigny worked more systematically at etching, and you feel
in all his works a sympathetic, picturesque vision of Nature; but his
prints never reach exquisiteness.
Lalanne, who was prolific with the needle, had elegance and charm,
and sometimes power, as well as facility. And, as a little practical
treatise that he wrote upon the subject shows, he was devoted to his
craft. Indeed, he taught it. He was best, generally, in his smaller
plates: never, I think, having beaten his dainty plate of the Swiss
_Fribourg_, which was given in “Etching and Etchers,” though a larger
_Fribourg_--a vision of the great ravine--is very noble, and nothing
is at once more learned and spontaneous than the brilliant print of
the _Conflagration in the Harbour of Bordeaux_. Also, Lalanne did
not share, and had no need to share, most etchers’ timidity in the
treatment of skies. His own are delicate and charming. In the rare
proofs of his etchings we can alone prize properly this well-bred
observer and graceful draughtsman, who was only occasionally mediocre.
A genius, wholly individual--and yet in a sense the founder of a school
or centre of a group--now occupies us. We pass to Jules Jacquemart,
who, born in 1837, died prematurely in 1880; a child of his century,
worn out by eager restlessness of spirit, by the temperament, by the
nervous system, that made possible to him the exquisiteness of his
work. The son of a collector, a great authority on porcelain, Albert
Jacquemart, Jules Jacquemart’s natural sensitiveness to beauty, which
he had inherited, was, from the first, highly cultivated. From the
first, he breathed the air of Art. Short as his life was, he was happy
in the fact that adequate fortune gave him the liberty, in health, of
choosing his work, and, in sickness, of taking his rest. With extremely
rare exceptions, he did the things that he was fitted to do, and did
them perfectly; and, being ill when he had done them, he betook himself
to the exquisite South, where colour is, and light--the things we long
for most, when we are most tired in cities--and so there came to him,
towards the end, a new surprise of pleasure in so beautiful a world.
He was happy in being surrounded, all his life long, by passionate
affection in the circle of his home. Nor was he perhaps unhappy
altogether, dying in middle age. For what might the Future have held
for him?--a genius who was ripe so soon. The years of deterioration
and of decay, in which first an artist does but dully reproduce the
spontaneous work of his youth, and then is sterile altogether--the
years in which he is no longer the fashion at all, but only the
landmark or the finger-post of a fashion that is past--the years when
a name once familiar and honoured is uttered at rare intervals and in
tones of apology, as the name of one whose performance has never quite
equalled the promise he had aforetime given--these years never came to
Jules Jacquemart. He was spared these years.
But few people care, or are likely to care very much, for the things
which chiefly interested him, and which he reproduced in his art; and
even the care for these things, where it does exist, unfortunately
by no means implies the power to appreciate the art by which they
are retained and diffused. “Still-life”--the portrayal of objects
natural or artificial, for the objects’ sake, and not as background
or accessory--has never been rated very highly or very widely loved.
The public generally has been indifferent to these things, and often
the public has been right in its indifference, for often these things
are done in a poor spirit, a spirit of servile imitation or servile
flattery, with which Art has little to do. But there are exceptions,
and there is a better way of looking at these things. Chardin was
one of these exceptions--in Painting, he was the greatest of these.
Jacquemart, in his art of Etching, was an exception not less brilliant
and peculiar. He and Chardin have done something to endow the beholders
of their work with a new sense--with the capacity for new experiences
of enjoyment--they have portrayed, not so much matter, as the very
soul of matter; they have put it in its finest light, and it has
got new dignity. Chardin did this with his peaches and his pears,
his big coarse bottles, his copper sauce-pans, and his silk-lined
caskets. Jacquemart did it with the finer work of artistic men in
household matter and ornament: with his blue and white porcelain,
with his polished steel of chased armour and sword-blade, with his
Renaissance mirrors, and his precious vessels of crystal, jasper, and
jade. But when he was most fully himself, his work most characteristic
and individual, he shut himself off from popularity. Even untrained
observers could accept this agile engraver as the interpreter of
other men’s pictures--of Meissonier’s inventions, or Van der Meer’s,
Greuze’s, or Fragonard’s--but they could not accept him as the
interpreter, at first hand, of treasures peculiarly his own. They were
not alive to the wonders that have been done in the world by the hands
of artistic men. How could they be alive to the wonders of this their
reproduction--their translation, rather, and a very free and personal
one--into the subtle lines, the graduated darks, the soft or sparkling
lights of the artist in Etching?
A short period of practice in draughtsmanship, and only a small
experience of the particular business of etching, made Jacquemart a
master. As time proceeded, he of course developed; found new methods,
ways not previously known to him. But little of what is obviously
tentative and immature is to be noticed even in his earliest work. He
springs into his art an artist fully armed--like Rembrandt with the
wonderful portrait of his mother “lightly etched.” In 1860, when he is
but twenty-three, he is at work upon the illustrations to his father’s
“Histoire de la Porcelaine,” and though, in that publication, the
absolute realisation of wonderful matter--or, more particularly, the
breadth in treating it--is not so noteworthy as in the later “Gemmes
et Joyaux de la Couronne,” there is most evident already the hand of
the delicate artist and the eye that can appreciate and render almost
unconsidered beauties.
The “Histoire de la Porcelaine” contains twenty-six plates, of which
a large proportion are devoted to the Oriental china possessed in
mass by the elder Jacquemart, when as yet there was no rage for it.
Many of Albert Jacquemart’s pieces figure in the book: they were
pieces the son had lived with and knew familiarly. Their charm, their
delicacy, he perfectly represented--nay, exalted--passing without
sense of difficulty from the bizarre ornamentation of the East to
the ordered forms and satisfying symmetry which the high taste of
the Renaissance gave to its products. Thus, in the “Histoire de la
Porcelaine”--amongst the quaintly naturalistic decorations from China
and amongst the ornaments of Sèvres, with their boudoir graces and
airs of pretty luxury fit for the Marquise of Louis Quinze and the
sleek young Abbé, her pet and her counsellor, we find, rendered with
an appreciation as just, a _Brocca Italienne_, the Brocca of the
Medicis of the Sixteenth Century, slight and tall, where the lightest
of Renaissance forms the thin and reed-like _arabesque_--no mass or
splash of colour--is patterned over the smoothish surface with measured
exactitude and rhythmic completeness. How much is here suggested,
and how little done! The actual touches are almost as few as those
which Jacquemart employed afterwards in rendering some fairy effects
of rock-crystal--the material which he has interpreted, it may be,
best of all. On such work may be bestowed, amongst much other praise,
that particular praise which seems the highest to fashionable French
Criticism--delighted especially with feats of adroitness: occupied with
the evidence of the artist’s dexterity--“_Il n’y a rien, et il y a
tout_.”
The “Histoire de la Porcelaine”--of which the separate plates were
begun, as I have said before, in 1860, and which was published by
Techener in 1862--was followed in 1864 by the “Gemmes et Joyaux de
Couronne.” The Chalcographie of the Louvre--which concerns itself with
the issue of State-commissioned prints--undertook the first publication
of the “Gemmes et Joyaux.” In this series there are sixty subjects, or,
at least, sixty plates, for sometimes Jacquemart, seated by his Louvre
window (which is reflected over and over again at every angle, in the
lustre of the objects he was drawing), would etch in one plate the
portraits of two treasures, glad to give “value” to the virtues of the
one by juxtaposition with the virtues of the other; opposing, say, the
transparent brilliance of the globe of rock-crystal to the texture and
hues, sombre and velvety, of the vase of ancient sardonyx, as one puts
a cluster of diamonds round a fine cat’s-eye, or a black pearl, glowing
soberly.
Of all these plates M. Louise Gonse has given an accurate account, in
enough detail for the purposes of most people, in the “Gazette des
Beaux Arts” for 1876. The Catalogue of Jacquemart’s etchings--which
are about four hundred in all--there contained, was a work of
industry and of very genuine interest on M. Gonse’s part, but its
necessary extent, due to the artist’s own prodigious diligence in
work, cannot for ever sufficiently excuse an occasional incompleteness
of description making absolute identification sometimes a difficult
matter. The critical appreciation was warm and intelligent, and the
student of Jules Jacquemart must always be indebted to Gonse. But for
the quite adequate description of work like Jacquemart’s--the very
subject of it, quite as much as the treatment--there was needed not
only the French tongue (the tongue, _par excellence_, of Criticism),
but a Gautier to use it.
Everything that Jacquemart could do in the rendering of beautiful
matter, and of its artistic and appropriate ornament, is represented
in one or other of the varied subjects of the “Gemmes et Joyaux,”
save only his work with delicate china. And the large plates of this
series evince his strength, and hardly ever betray his weakness. He
was not, perhaps, a thoroughly trained Academical draughtsman; a large
and detailed treatment of the nude figure--any further treatment of
it than that required for the beautiful suggestion of it as it occurs
on Renaissance mirror-frames or in Renaissance porcelains--might have
found him deficient. He had an admirable feeling for the unbroken flow
of its line, for its suppleness, for the figure’s harmonious movement.
He was not the master of its most intricate anatomy; but, on the scale
on which he had to treat it, his suggestion was faultless. By the brief
shorthand of his art in this matter, we are brought back to the old
formula of praise. Here, indeed, if anywhere, “_Il n’y a rien, et il y
a tout_.”
As nothing in Jacquemart’s etchings is more adroit than his treatment
of the figure, so nothing is more delightful and, as it were,
unexpected. He feels the intricate unity of its curve and flow--how
it gives value by its happy undulations of line to the fixed,
invariable ornament of Renaissance decoration--an ornament as orderly
as well-observed verse, with its settled form, its repetition, its
refrain. I will name one or two notable instances. One occurs in the
etching of a Renaissance mirror (the print a most desirable little
possession)--_Miroir Français du Seizième Siècle_, elaborately carved,
but its chief grace after all is in its fine proportions--not so much
the perfection of the ornament as the perfect disposition of it. The
absolutely satisfactory filling of a given space with the enrichments
of design, the occupation of the space without the crowding of it--for
that is what is meant by the perfect disposition of ornament--has
always been the problem for the decorative artist. Recent fashion has
insisted, sufficiently, that it has been best solved by the Japanese;
and indeed the Japanese have solved it, often with great economy of
means, suggesting, rather than achieving, the occupation of the space
they have worked upon. But the best Renaissance Design has solved
the problem as well, in fashions less arbitrary, with rhythm more
pronounced and yet more subtle, with a precision more exquisite, with a
complete comprehension of the value of quietude, of the importance of
rest. If it requires--as Francis Turner Palgrave said, admirably--“an
Athenian tribunal” to understand Ingres and Flaxman, it needs at all
events high education in the beauty of line to understand the art of
Renaissance Ornament. Such art Jacquemart understood absolutely, and,
against its purposed rigidity, its free play of the nude figure is
indicated with touches dainty, faultless, and few. Thus it is, I say,
in the _Miroir Français du Seizième Siècle_. And to the attraction of
the figure has been added almost the attraction of landscape and of
landscape atmosphere in the plate No. 27 of the “Gemmes et Joyaux”
which represents scenes from Ovid as a craftsman of the Renaissance has
portrayed them on the delicate liquid surface of _cristal de roche_.
And not confining our examination wholly to “Gemmes et Joyaux,” of
which, obviously, the mirror just spoken of cannot form a part--we
observe there, or elsewhere in Jacquemart’s prints, how his treatment
of the figure takes constant note of the material in which the first
artist, his original, worked. Is it raised porcelain, for instance,
or soft ivory, or smooth, cool bronze with its less close and subtle
following of the figure’s curves, its certain measure of angularity in
limb and trunk, its many facets, with a somewhat marked transition from
one to the other (instead of the unbroken harmony of the real figure),
its occasional flatnesses? If it is this, this is what Jacquemart gives
us in his etchings--not the figure only, but the figure as it comes to
us through the medium of bronze. See, for example, the _Vénus Marine_,
outstretched, with slender legs--a bronze, long the possession of M.
Thiers, I believe. One really cannot insist too much on Jacquemart’s
mastery over his material--_cloisonné_, with its rich, low tones, its
patterning outlined by its metal ribs; the coarseness of rough wood, as
in the _Salière de Troyes_; the sharp, steel weapons and the infinite
delicacy of their lines, as in _Epées_, _Langues de Bœuf_, _Poignards_;
the signet’s flatness and delicate smoothness--“c’est le sinet du Roy
Sant Louis”--and the red porphyry, flaked, as it were, and speckled, of
an ancient vase; and the clear, soft, unctuous green of jade.
And as the material is marvellously varied, so are its combinations
curious and wayward. I saw, one autumn, at Lyons, their sombre little
church of Ainay, a Christian edifice built of no Gothic stones, but
placed, already ages ago, on the site of a Roman Temple--the Temple
used, its dark columns cut across, its black stones re-arranged, and
so the Church completed--Antiquity pressed into the service of the
Middle Age. Jacquemart, dealing with the precious objects that he had
to portray, came often on such strange meetings: an antique vase of
sardonyx, say, infinitely precious, mounted and altered in the Twelfth
Century, for the service of the Mass, and so, beset with gold and
jewels, offered by its possessor to the Abbey of Saint Denis.
It was not a literal translation, it must be said again, that
Jacquemart made of these things. These things sat to him for their
portraits; he posed them; he composed them aright. Placed by him in
their best lights, they revealed their finest qualities. Some people
bore hardly on him for the colour, warmth, and life he introduced into
his etchings. They wanted a colder, a more impersonal, a more precise
record. Jacquemart never sacrificed precision when precision was of
the essence of the business, but he did not--scarcely even in his
earlier plates of the “Procelaine”--care for it for its own sake. And
the thing that his first critics blamed him for doing--the composition
of a subject, the rejection of this, the choice of that, the bestowal
of fire and life upon matter dead to the common eye--is a thing which
artists in all arts have always done, and for this most simple reason,
that the doing of it is Art.
As an interpreter of other men’s pictures, it fell to the lot of
Jacquemart to engrave the most various masters. But with so very
personal an artist as he, the interpretation of so many men, and in so
many years, from 1860 or thereabouts, onwards, could not possibly be
of equal value. As far as Dutch Painting is concerned, he is strongest
when he interprets, as in one now celebrated etching, Van der Meer
of Delft. _Der Soldat und das lachende Mädchen_ was, when Jacquemart
etched it, one of the most noteworthy pieces in the cabinet of M.
Léopold Double. It was brought afterwards to London by the charming
friend of many artists and collectors--the late Samuel Joseph--in the
hands of whose family it of course rests. The big and blustering
trooper common in Dutch art, sits here, engaging the attention of that
thin-faced and _eveillée_ maiden peculiar to Van der Meer. Behind the
two, who are contentedly occupied in gazing and talk, is the bare,
sunlit wall, spread only with its map or chart, and, by the side of the
couple, throwing its brilliant but modulated light upon the woman’s
face and on the background, is the intricately patterned window, the
airy lattice. Rarely was a master’s subject, or his method, better
interpreted than in this print. The print possesses, along with all its
subtlety, a quality of boldness demanded specially by Van der Meer, and
lacking to prints which in their imperturbable deliberation and cold
skill render well enough some others of the Dutch masters--I mean the
Eighteenth Century line engravings of J. G. Wille after Metsu and the
rest.
Frans Hals, once or twice, is as characteristically rendered. But with
these exceptions it is Jacquemart’s own fellow-countrymen whom he
translates the best. The suppleness of his talent--the happy speed of
it, not its patient elaboration--is shown by his renderings of Greuze:
the _Rêve d’Amour_, a single head, and _L’Orage_, a memorandum of a
young and frightened mother, kneeling by her child, exposed to the
storm. Greuze, with his cajoling art--which, if one likes, one must
like without respecting it--is entirely there. So, too, Fragonard--the
ardent and voluptuous soul of him--in _Le Premier Baiser_.
Jacquemart, it may be interesting to add, etched some compositions of
flowers. Gonse has praised them. To me, elegant as they are, fragile
of substance, dainty of arrangement, they seem enormously inferior to
that last century flower-piece of Jan Van Huysum’s--or rather to that
reproduction of it which we are fortunate enough to know through the
mezzotint of Earlom. And Jacquemart painted in water-colour--made very
clever sketches: his strange dexterity of handling, at the service of
fact; not at the service of imagination. In leaving him, it is well
to recollect that he recorded Nature, and did not exalt or interpret
it. He interpreted Art. He was alive, more than any one has been alive
before, to all the wonders that have been wrought in the world by the
hands of artistic men.
I have not said a word about the prices of the Jacquemart etchings.
It is still customary to buy a complete series--one particular work.
The “Porcelaine” set costs a very few pounds: the “Gemmes et Joyaux,”
something more--and Techener’s re-issue, it is worth observing, is
better printed than the first edition. Separate impressions of the
plates, in proof or rare states, sell at sums varying from five
shillings or half-a-sovereign--when scarcely anybody happens to be at
Sotheby’s who understands them--up, I suppose, to two or three pounds.
I do not think the acquisition of these admirable pieces is ever likely
to be held responsible for a collector’s ruin.
In the Introductory chapter, a word of reference to two other
Frenchmen--Legros and Paul Helleu--points to the importance which, in
contemporary original Etching, I assign to these artists. As Legros
has lived nearly all his working life in England, he is treated,
in subsequent pages, with English fellow-workers. Even Paul Helleu
I treated with Englishmen, in my book called “Etching in England,”
because he also has done some part--though a small part--of his
work here, and has been one of the mainstays of our Society of
Painter-Etchers. But in the present volume--for the purposes of the
Collector--Helleu must be placed with his compatriots. The character of
his genius too--his alertness and sensitiveness to the charm of grace
rather than of formal beauty, the charm of quick and pretty movement
rather than of abiding line--is French, essentially. He is of the
succession of Watteau. His dry-points, of many of the best of which
there are but a handful of impressions (purchasable, when occasion
offers, at three or four guineas apiece), are artist’s snap-shots,
which arrest the figure suddenly in some delightful turn, the face in
some delightful expression. Am I to mention but two examples of Paul
Helleu’s work--that I may guide the novice a little to what to see and
seek for in these elegant, veracious records--I will name then _Femme à
la Tasse_, with its happy and audacious ingenuity in point of view, and
that incomparable _Étude de Jeune Fille_, the girl with the hair massed
high above her forehead, thick above her ears, a very cascade at her
shoulders, her lips a little parted, and her lifted arms close against
her chin.
A Belgian draughtsman--established in Paris, and now approaching old
age--has seen of late his reputation extending, not only amongst
collectors of the cleverly odious; and he has shown imagination,
draughtsmanship, a nimble hand, a certain mastery of process. But in
a volume from which I must exclude so much of even wholly creditable
Art--a volume in which the subject of Woodcuts, which of old was wont
to interest, is, deliberately, almost ignored--I adopt no attitude of
apology for refusing serious analysis to the too often morbid talent
of Félicien Rops. A portfolio containing the delightful inventions of
Helleu, and the great things of Méryon, could have no place for the
record of Rops’ disordered dream. Were I to be occupied with any living
Belgian, it would be with one whose work M. Hymans, the Keeper of the
Prints at Brussels, showed me at the Bibliothèque Royale--M. de Witte.