The Revival in England--Whistler and Haden, Classics--Haden’s
first works--The “Agamemnon”--Dry-points--Etchings on
Zinc--Prices--Whistler’s French Set--His Thames series--The Leyland
period--The Venetian work--His rarest Dry-points--Whistler’s Prices
at the Heywood Sale, the Hutchinson Sale, and now.
In England, the Revival of Etching, so far as one can fix its origin at
all, seems due, in chief, to the great practical work of two etchers of
individual vision and exceptional power--Whistler and Seymour Haden.
Much writing on the subject--and some of it, I hope, not bad--has also
scarcely been without its effect. It has at least roused and sustained
some interest in Etching, amongst the public that reads. It cannot,
fairly, ever have been expected to produce great artists.
Whistler and Haden are, it is now allowed, amongst the Classics
already. Each has a place that will not be disturbed. Each is an
honoured veteran. The work of Seymour Haden has been closed long ago.
It is years since he gave his etching-needle to Mr Keppel of New York;
saying, with significant gesture, “I shall etch no more.” From the
other delightful veteran no such formal declaration has--so far as I
understand--as yet proceeded. Mr Whistler may even now surprise us by a
return from Lithography. His lithographs, which will be considered more
or less in the final chapter of this book, are indeed admirable and
engaging. But it is by his etchings that Mr Whistler’s fame will live.
And though he began to etch two score of years ago, one would be sorry
even now to feel it was quite certain that the last of his etchings had
been done.
We will speak of Seymour Haden first. He is the older of the two, and
his practical work is admittedly over. His etching, though conceived
always on fine lines, has somehow always been much more intelligible to
the large public than Whistler’s. For years, in England and America,
he has enjoyed something as near to popular success as sterling work
can ever get; and in days when I was able to pick up for six shillings,
in Sotheby’s auction-rooms, the dry-point of Whistler’s _Fanny
Leyland_--which would now be considered ridiculously cheap at just as
many guineas--Seymour Haden’s _River in Ireland_ was selling (when it
appeared and could be bought at all) at quite substantial prices. His
published series of Etchings, with the text by Monsieur Burty, and
then the eulogies of Mr Hamerton, had done something, and justifiably,
towards what is called “success”--the success of recognition, I mean,
as distinguished from the success of achievement, which was certainly
his besides. And then--in the nick of time--there had come the
_Agamemnon_, almost the largest fine etching one can call to mind; for,
in Etching, “important size” often means vulgarity. The _Agamemnon_
had an immense sale. It was seen about so much, in the rooms of
people who aspired to Taste, that it became what foolish men call
“vulgarised.” As if the multiplication of excellent work--its presence
in many places, instead of only a few--was positively a nuisance and a
disadvantage! Anyhow, Seymour Haden had already entered into fame.
In 1880, the late Sir William Drake--an intimate friend who had
collected Haden and admired him--issued, through the Macmillans, a
descriptive Catalogue of Haden’s etched work. The Catalogue takes
note of a hundred and eighty-five pieces. Scarcely anything, I think,
is omitted. Of the substantial work none bears an earlier date than
1858; but fifteen years before that--when he was a very young man,
journeying--Haden had scratched on half-a-dozen little coppers sparse
notes of places of interest he had seen in Italy; and very long ago
now (when Sir Seymour was living in Hertford Street) he showed me, I
remember, the almost unique impressions from these practically unknown
little plates. They were impressions upon which a touch or so with the
brush had--if I remember rightly--a little fortified the dreamy and
delicate sketch which the copper had received. There is neither need
nor disposition to insist too much on the existence of these plates, or
rather upon the fact that once they were wrought. They scarcely claim
to have merit. But the fact that they were wrought shows one thing a
collector may like to know--it shows that Seymour Haden’s interest
in Etching began before the days of that French Revival in which was
executed undoubtedly the bulk of his work.
These little prints, then, as far as they went, were in quite the
right spirit. They were jottings, impressions--had nothing of labour
in them. But in the interval that divides them from the important and
substantive work of 1858, 1859, 1860, and later years, the artist
must have studied closely, though he was in full practice, most of
that time, as a surgeon. In the interval, he had lived, so to put it,
with Rembrandt; he had become familiar with Claude. And though they
influenced, they did not overpower him. By 1864, there were fifty or
sixty prints for M. Burty to chronicle and eulogise, in the _Gazette
des Beaux Arts_. The greatly praised _Shere Mill Pond_ had been done
in 1860. _Mytton Hall_--which, unlike Mr Hamerton, I prefer to the
_Shere_--had been wrought one year earlier. It shows a shady avenue
of yew-trees leading to an old manor-house which receives the full
light of the sun; and in that print, early as it may seem, there was
already the breadth of treatment which as years proceeded became more
and more a characteristic of Seymour Haden’s work. In 1863 came,
amongst many other good things, _Battersea Reach_, which in the First
State bore on it this inscription of interest: “Old Chelsea, Seymour
Haden, 1863, out of Whistler’s window.” To the same year belongs the
charming plate, _Whistler’s House, Old Chelsea_. The tide is out, the
mud is exposed; on the left is Lindsay Row; and beyond, and to the
right, Chelsea Old Church and Battersea Bridge: the picturesque wooden
pile-bridge of that privileged day. It was not till 1870 that there
came the _Agamemnon_--the _Breaking-up of the Agamemnon_, to give it
its full title--a view, in reality, of the Thames at Greenwich, seen
under sunset light, the hull of the old ship partially swung round
by the tide. This very favourite print exists in a couple of States.
The Second, though less rare, is scarcely perceptibly less fine than
the First. In it a smoking chimney, a brig under sail, and two small
sailing-boats--all of them objects in extreme distance--have been
replaced by indications of the sheds of a dockyard. In the Heywood
Sale, a rich impression of the _Agamemnon_--the State not specified,
but in all probability a First--sold for £7, 10s. In the Sir William
Drake Sale, twelve years afterwards--in 1892--a First State fetched £7,
7s.; a Second, £6, 15s.
For convenience’ sake, I will name a few more excellent and
characteristic works--prints which have Seymour Haden’s most
distinguishing qualities of frankness, directness, and an obvious
vigour. His etchings are deliberately arrested at the stage of the
sketch; and it is a sketch conceived nobly and executed with impulse.
The tendency of the work, as Time went on, was, as has been said,
towards greater breadth; but unless we are to compare only such a
print as _Out of Study-Window_, say (done in 1859), with only the most
admirable Rembrandt-like, Geddes-like dry-print, _Windmill Hill_ (done
in 1877), there is no greatly marked contrast; there is no surprise;
there is but a steady and not unnatural development. I put this down,
in part at least, to the fact that when Seymour Haden first took up
Etching seriously (in 1858, remember) he was already middle-aged. He
had lived for years in the most frequent intercourse with dignified
Art; his view of Nature, and of the way of rendering her--or of letting
her inspire you--was large, and likely to be large. Yet as Time went on
there came no doubt an increasing love of the sense of spaciousness and
of potent effect. The work was apt to be more dramatic and more moving.
The hand asked the opportunity for the fuller exercise of its freedom.
_Sawley Abbey_, etched in 1873, is an instance of this, and not alone
for its merits is it interesting to mention it, but because, like a
certain number of its fellows amongst that later work, it is etched
upon zinc--a risky substance, which succeeds admirably, when it
succeeds, and when it fails, fails very much. _Windmill Hill_--two
subjects of that name--_Nine Barrow Down_, _Wareham Bridge_, and the
_Little Boathouse_, and again that _Grim Spain_ which illustrates my
“Four Masters of Etching” are the prints which I should most choose
to possess amongst those of Haden’s later period; whilst--going back
to the period of 1864 and 1865--_Sunset on the Thames_ is at the same
time a favourite and strong, and _Fenton Hook_ remarkable for its
draughtsmanship of tree-trunk and stump. Yet earlier--for they belong
to 1860 and 1859--there are the _Mytton Hall_, which I have spoken of
already, and the _Combe Bottom_. _Combe Bottom_ is unsurpassed for
sweetness and spontaneity. And _Mytton Hall_ has its full share of
that priceless element of Style which is never altogether absent from
Seymour Haden’s work. Again--and most acceptable of all to some of
us--_The Water Meadow_ (which has been circulated very largely) is,
in a perfect impression, to be studied and enjoyed as a vivacious,
happy, sympathetic transcript of a sudden rain-storm in the Hampshire
lowlands, where poplars nourish and grass grows rank. The collector who
can put these things into his folios--and a little diligence in finding
them out, and three or four guineas for each print, will often enable
him to do so--will have given himself the opportunity of confirmation
in the belief that among modern etchers of Landscape, amongst modern
exponents in the art of Black and White of an artistic sympathy with
pure and ordinary Nature, Seymour Haden stands easily first. And to
say that, is not to say that he succeeds equally, or has equally tried
to succeed, with portraiture or figure-studies. It is not to compare
him--to his advantage or disadvantage--with any other artist in the
matter of the etcher’s peculiar skill and technical mastery.
The best collection of Seymour Haden’s work that has ever been sold in
detail was the collection of Sir William Drake. In it the First State
of _A River in Ireland_--of which only twelve impressions had been
taken--fetched £49 (Dunthorne); and the First State of _Shere Mill
Bond_, £35; a unique impression of _Battersea Railway Bridge_ fetched
£18, 10s. (Deprez); _Erith Marshes_, First State, £4, 4s.; _Combe
Bottom_, First State, £3; _Sunset on the Thames_, First State, £2,
12s.; and _Sawley Abbey_, First State, £2, 4s.
With the master-etchers of the world--Méryon’s equal in some respects,
and, in some respects, Rembrandt’s--there stands James Whistler.
Connoisseurs in France and England, in America, Holland, Bavaria,
concede this, now. It was fiercely contested of old time, and there
is not much cause for wonder in that, for the work of Mr Whistler
is, and has been from the first almost, so desperately original that
the world could hardly be expected to be ready to receive it. And Mr
Whistler never by anything approaching to cheap issue facilitated
familiarity with his work. In 1868 Mr Hamerton wrote of him: “I have
been told that, if application is made to Mr Whistler for a set of his
etchings”--the set, it may be said in parenthesis, was a very small
one then--“he may perhaps, if he chooses to answer the letter, do
the applicant the favour to let him have a copy for about the price
of a good horse; but beyond such exceptional instances as this, Mr
Whistler’s etchings are not in the market.” They have been in the
market since, however--everybody knows--and if in 1868 a “set” (the
Thames Set or the French Set was meant, presumably) was valued by Mr
Whistler at the price of a horse, of late years a single print, such
as the _Zaandam_ for instance, has been valued by Mr Whistler at the
price of a Humber cycle. Even in the days--some sixteen years ago, or
so--when the work of the delightful master was least appreciated, there
was an enormous difference in the price of a print obtained through
what are known as the “regular channels” and its price if obtained in
open competition, under the hammer at Sotheby’s. Those great days!--or
days of great opportunities--when, as I have said before, I became
possessed for six shillings of _Fanny Leyland_, and, for hardly more
than six shillings, of the yet rarer dry-point, _Battersea Dawn_.
About a dozen years ago, I, with the enthusiasm of a convert, began a
Catalogue of Whistler’s prints, intending it for my own use. I finished
it for my brother-collectors, and for poor Mr Thibaudeau, who refreshed
me with money--and a little for Mr Whistler, too, if he was minded to
receive my offering. The only previously existing Catalogue--that of Mr
Ralph Thomas--had been published twelve years earlier, and had meantime
become of little service. There were several reasons for that, but,
to justify my own attempt--which, as in the case of Méryon, has been
justified indeed by my brother-collectors’ reception of it--it will
suffice if I mention one. Mr Thomas, working in 1874, catalogued about
eighty etchings. I, finishing my work in 1886, catalogued two hundred
and fourteen. Of the additional number only a few are prints which had
been already wrought when Mr Thomas wrote, and which had escaped his
notice. By far the greater portion have been etched in more recent
years. And many of them are unknown to the amateur--by sense of sight
at least--even to this day.
Whistler’s etchings are so scattered, and so many of them are, and must
ever be, so very rare, that I could not have done what I did if several
diligent collectors, well placed for the purpose, had not helped me.
Mr Thibaudeau himself--the erudite dealer--amassed much information,
and placed it at my service. Mr Samuel Avery, when Mr Keppel took me to
see him in East 38th Street, in the autumn of 1885, put at my disposal
everything he knew; and his collection was even then the worthy rival
of what Mr Howard Mansfield’s is now--the rival, almost, of Seymour
Haden’s own collection of Whistler’s, which went to America a few years
ago: drawn thither by the instrumentality of a great cheque from Mr
Kennedy. Mr Mortimer Menpes--much associated with Whistler at that
time, and who, I suppose, retains the fine collection of Whistler’s
he then possessed--took much trouble with me in the identification of
the rare things he owned, and I had to express my thanks to Mr Barrett
of Brighton, to the Reverend Stopford Brooke, Mr Henry S. Theobald,
and some of the best-known London dealers--to Mr Brown of the Fine
Art Society, and Mr Walter Dowdeswell, an enthusiast for Whistler,
who furnished me with delightful notes I never published, on the
precise condition of the impressions in my own set of the “Twenty-Six
Etchings.” Again, I saw--what any one may see--such of the Whistler
prints as are possessed by the British Museum Print-Room. And, lastly,
I had access, more than once, to Mr. Whistler’s own collection; but
that unfortunately was very incomplete. It consisted chiefly of the
later etchings.
It is now about forty years since Whistler began to etch; but his work
in Etching has never been continuous or regular, and though he has
done a certain number of things, some fine, some insignificant, since
the appearance of my Catalogue, of late his work in Etching appears to
have almost ceased. Looking back along his life, one may say, periods
there have been when he was busy with needle and copper--periods, too,
during which he laid them altogether aside. The first chronicled,
the first completed plate, was done, it was believed, in 1857--when
he was a young man in Paris. But he told me there existed, somewhere
or other, in the too safe keeping of public authorities in America,
a plate on which, before he left the public service of the States,
he neglected to fully engrave that map or view for the Coast Survey
which the authorities expected of him, but did not neglect to engrave
upon the plate, in truant mood, certain sketches for his own pleasure.
The plate was confiscated. Young Mr Whistler was informed that an
unwarrantable thing had been done. He perfectly agreed--he told the
high official--with that observation. In removing a plate from the
hands of its author before he had completed his pleasure upon it,
its author had been treated unwarrantably. Just as my Catalogue--a
“Study and a Catalogue,” I call it--was going to press, there arrived
from New York--sent thence to London by the courtesy of Mr Kennedy,
its owner--an impression from the copper I have spoken of. It is a
curiosity, and not a work of Art--a geographer’s view of the coast.
It will be noticed from my little anecdote, that, at a very early
period of his life, Mr Whistler was in the right, absolutely, and other
people in the wrong--and in the right he has remained ever since, and
has believed it, in spite of some intelligent and much unintelligent
criticism. He has been (let the collector be very sure of this) a law
unto himself--has worked in his own way, at his own hours, on none
but his own themes: the result of it, I dare to think deliberately,
the preservation of a freshness which, with artists less true to
their art and their own mission, is apt to suffer and to pass away.
And with it the charm passes. Now Whistler’s newest work--his work
of this morning, be it etching or lithograph--possesses the interest
of freshness, of vivacity, of a new and beautiful impression of the
world, conveyed in individual ways, just as much as did his early work
of nearly forty years ago. When the comparatively few people whose
artistic sensibilities allow them to really understand the delicacy
of Mr Whistler’s method, shall but have known it long enough, they
will not be found, as some among the not quite unappreciative are
found to-day, protesting that there is a want of continuity between
the earlier efforts and the later, and that the vision of pretty and
curious detail, and the firmness and daintiness of hand in recording
it, which confessedly distinguished the etchings of France and of the
Thames below Bridge, are missing to the later plates or the plates of
the middle period--to the dry-points of what I may term the Leyland
period (when he drew all three Miss Leylands, their father and their
mother too, and _Speke Hall_, where they lived), and to the more recent
Venetian etchings. _Peccavi!_ I have myself, in my time, thought that
this continuity was wanting. I have told Mr Whistler with exceeding
levity of speech, that when, in the Realms of the Blest, he desired,
on meeting Velasquez and Rembrandt, not to disappoint them, he must
be provided, for his justification, with his Thames etchings in
their finest states. It would be a potent introduction. But I am not
sure that the Venetian portfolios--the “Venice” and the “Twenty-Six
Etchings,” which are most of them Venetian in theme--would not serve
Mr Whistler in good stead. For--spite of some insignificant things
put out not long after the appearance of my Catalogue, along indeed,
or almost along with some fine ones of Brussels and Touraine--there
is a continuity which the thorough student of Mr Whistler’s work
will recognise. There is often in the Venetian things--as in the
_Doorway_ of the “Venice,” and in _The Garden_ and _The Balcony_ of the
“Twenty-Six Etchings”--an advance in the impression produced, a greater
variety and flexibility of method, a more delightful and dexterous
effacing of the means used to bring about the effect.
The Venetian etchings--some people thought at first they were not
satisfactory because they did not record that Venice which the
University-Extension-educated tourist, with his guide-book and his
volumes of Ruskin, goes out from England to see. But I doubt if Mr
Whistler troubled himself about the guides or read the sacred books
of Mr Ruskin with becoming attention. Mr Ruskin had seen Venice
nobly, with great imagination; Mr Fergusson and a score of admirable
architects had seen it learnedly; but Mr Whistler would see it for
himself--that is to say, he would see in his own way the Present,
and would see it quite as certainly as the Past. The architecture of
Venice had impressed folk so deeply that it was not easy in a moment
to realise that here was a great draughtsman--a man too of poetic
vision--whose work it had not been allowed to dominate. The past and
its record were not Whistler’s affair in Venice. For him, the lines
of the steam-boat, the lines of the fishing-tackle, the shadow under
the squalid archway, the wayward vine of the garden, had been as
fascinating, as engaging, as worthy of chronicle, as the domes of St
Mark’s.
Yet we had not properly understood Mr Whistler’s work in England, if
we supposed it could be otherwise. From associations of Literature
and History this artist from the first had cut himself adrift. His
subject was what he saw, or what he decided to see, and not anything
that he had heard about it. He had dispensed from the beginning with
those aids to the provocation of interest which appeal most strongly
to the world--to the person of sentiment, to the literary lady, to the
man in the street. We were to be interested--if we were interested at
all--in the happy accidents of line and light he had perceived, in his
dexterous record, in his knowing adaptation.
I must be allowed to say, however--and it is useful to the collector
that I should say it plainly--that there was some justification (much
more than Mr Whistler, I suppose, would allow) for those of us who did
not bow the knee too readily before the Venetian prints. In the States
in which they were first exhibited, there was, with all their merits,
something ragged and disjointed about several of them. Mr Whistler
worked more upon them later, adding never of course merely finicky
detail, but refinement, suavity. Of these particular plates, the
collector should remember, it is not the earlier impressions that are
the ones to be desired. It is, rather, the later impressions, when the
plate was, first, perfected--then even, if need arose through any wear
in _tirage_, suitably refreshed.
To return for a moment to Whistlerian characteristics. Though the
value of many of his etchings, as Mr Whistler might himself tell
us, consists in the exquisiteness of their execution and of their
arrangement of line, it would be unfair not to acknowledge that amongst
the many things it has been given to Mr Whistler to perceive, it has
been given him to perceive beautiful character and exquisite line in
Humanity--that, certainly, just as much as quaintness and charm in
the wharves and warehouses of the Port, in the shabby elegance of the
side canals of Venice, in the engaging homeliness of little Chelsea
shop-fronts. The almost unknown etching of his mother--one of the most
refined performances of his career, as exquisite, in its own way, as
the famous painting which is displayed at the Luxembourg--proves his
possession of the quality which permitted Rembrandt to draw with the
reticence of a convincing pathos his most impressive portraits of the
aged--the _Lutma_, the _Clément de Jonghe_, the _Mère de Rembrandt, au
voile noir_.
Again the _Fanny Leyland_, and _The Muff_, and many another print that
I could name, attest Mr Whistler’s solution of a problem which presents
itself engagingly, attractively, to the ingenious, and uselessly to
the incompetent--the problem of seeing beauty in modern dress, and
grace in the modern figure. Whistler, no more than Degas, Sargent, or
J. J. Shannon, sighs for the artificial dignity of the fashions of
other times. Even at moments when modern Fashion is not in truth at its
prettiest, he is able to descry a piquancy in the contemporary hat, and
to find a grace in the flutter of flounce and frill. What else after
all should we expect from an artist the sweep of whose brush would
give distinction to the Chelsea Workhouse, or to the St George’s Union
Infirmary in the Fulham Road, and for whom, under the veil of night or
dusk, the chimney of the Swan Brewery would wear an aspect not less
beautiful than King’s College Chapel? It has been given to the master
of Etching to see everyday things with a poetic eye.
“Take care of the extremities,” said old Couture, to a painter who
addressed himself to the figure: “take care of the extremities, for
all the life is there.” But that, it may truly be answered, is what
Mr Whistler has often neglected to do. It may be rejoined, however,
that where he has neglected to do it, somehow “all the life” has not
gone out of his work. And the hand of the man sitting in the boat, in
one of the most desirable of the early Thames etchings, _Black Lion
Wharf_, and (to name no other instance) the hands in the painting of
Sarasate of a dozen years ago, are reminders of how completely it is
within Mr Whistler’s power to indicate the life, the temperament, by
“the extremities,” when it suits his work that he shall do so. And the
avoidance, so often commented upon, of this detail here, and of that
detail there, itself reminds us of something important--nay, perhaps
of the central fact which determines the direction of so much of this
great etcher’s labour. It reminds us that whether Mr Whistler’s work is
record of Nature or not, it has at all costs to be conclusive evidence
of Art. And for the one as well as for the other, he has had need to
know, not only what to do--a difficult thing enough, sometimes--but
a more difficult thing yet: what to avoid doing. In other words,
selection plays in his work a part unusually important, and he has
occupied himself increasingly, not with the question of how to imitate
and transcribe, but with the question how best to imply and to suggest.
In nearly all his periods he is the master of an advanced art, which
gives a curious and a various and a continual pleasure.
And now a word or two on what is matter of business to the
collector--the business of the acquisition of Whistler’s etchings.
Unlike the thousand prints which, in these later days of “the Revival,”
are the inadequate result of the laborious industry of popular
people--and which have served their purpose when, framed and mounted,
they have covered for a while the wall-paper in every builder’s terrace
in Bayswater--works of the individuality, the flexibility, the genius
in fine of Whistler, appeal to the collector of the highest class
and of the finest taste, and, it may be even, to him alone. They lie
already in the portfolio by the side of Rembrandts and Méryons. It
is not easy to get them; or, rather, there are some which it is only
difficult, and some which it is impossible, to possess. Certain of the
coppers are known to have been destroyed; others, which one cannot
always particularise, are in all probability destroyed. Then again
there are dry-points, never very robust; some of them so delicate, so
evanescent, that the plate, should it exist, would prove to be worth
nothing. It has yielded, perhaps, half-a-dozen impressions, and they
have gone far towards exhausting it. Many plates, again, exist, no
doubt, in the late State, or in the undesirable condition, and some are
yet intact, and others, like the two Venetian series--the “Venice” and
the “Twenty-Six”--economically managed from the beginning, have yielded
a substantial yet never an extensive array of such proofs as satisfy
the eye that is educated.
Publication--if one can quite call it so--of Mr Whistler’s etchings
first began in 1859, when the artist had worked seriously for only two
or three years. Thirteen etchings, generally called “the French Set,”
were printed then by Delâtre in Paris, in very limited numbers, on the
thin Japan or China or on the good old slightly-ribbed paper that the
collector loves. The “Thames Set”--sixteen in number, and consisting
of the majority of the River pieces executed up to that time--were the
next to be offered. But they appeared, publicly, only in 1871, when,
as Mr Ellis was good enough to tell me, “Ellis & Green” bought the
plates and had a hundred sets printed. Their printing was rather dry,
so that it is really by the rare impressions which either Mr Whistler
himself, or Delâtre it may be, had printed, years before, that these
plates are to be judged. It is these impressions which represent them
most perfectly--it is these the true collector demands--though I would
not speak disrespectfully of the impressions printed by Mr Goulding
when the Fine Art Society bought the plates of Mr Ellis, or of the
subsequent ones printed when Mr Keppel, in his turn, bought the coppers
of the Fine Art Society.
Of the two other recognised sets--the “Venice” of the Fine Art Society
and the “Twenty-Six Etchings” of the Dowdeswells--it must be said first
that neither has been subjected to the vicissitudes that attended the
earlier plates. The dozen prints in the “Venice” were first issued by
the Fine Art Society in the year 1880; but, as I have said earlier,
very few of the fine and really finished impressions--of the hundred
permitted from each plate--date from as early as that year. The
“Twenty-Six Etchings,” issued by the Messrs Dowdeswell, were brought
out in 1886; Mr Whistler himself printing, with consummate skill, every
mortal copy, and making the most interesting little changes, repairs,
improvements, at the press-side. Of most of the subjects there were but
fifty impressions.
These things are wholly admirable, and mostly--it is evident--are
rare; but the extremest rarity is reserved for a few of those
many plates which do not belong to any set at all, and were never
formally issued. Thus _Paris, Isle de la Cité_--etched from the
Galérie d’Apollon in the Louvre--is of unsurpassable rarity; and it
is singularly interesting as having, though with a date as early as
1859, very distinct characteristics of a style of which the wider
manifestation came much later. The First State of the _Rag Gatherers_
is of great, though not of quite such extraordinary rarity. The
_Kitchen_, in the First State, is not exceptionally rare. It should
be had, if possible, in the Second, for, many years after its first
execution, Mr Whistler took it up again, and then, and then only, was
it that he perfected it. In subtlety of illumination, in that Second
State, it is as fine as any painting of De Hooch’s. _Westminster
Bridge_ is very rare and very desirable in the First State; in the
Second--by which time it has gone into the regular “Thames Set” or
“Sixteen Etchings”--it has lost all its delicacy and harmony: it is
hard and dry. The figure-pieces of the Leyland period--dry-points,
nearly always--are very rare. They include not only a little succession
of portraits--the lovely print of _Fanny Leyland_ I have referred to
already--but likewise a succession of studies of paid or of familiar
models, of which the _Model Resting_ is one of the most beautiful.
There is _Tillie_: a model, too: likewise of great rarity and charm. Of
the larger etchings, three of the finest are the _Putney Bridge_, the
_Battersea Bridge_, and the _Large “Pool.”_ Beyond this scale, Etching
can hardly safely go. Even this scale would be a danger to some, though
Mr Whistler has managed it. But then, that art of his--like Rembrandt’s
own--can “blow on brass” as well as “breathe through silver.” He
“breathes through silver” in the dainty rarities of a later time, the
little Chelsea shop subjects--_Old Clothes Shop_, _Fruit Shop_. Are
there half-a-dozen impressions of them anywhere in the world? And then,
the poetic charm of _Price’s Candle Works_--the easy majesty of _London
Bridge_!
As to the prices of Whistlers in the open market? Well, they
increase, unquestionably. Some of the very greatest rarities, it may
be remembered, have never appeared in the auction-room. There are
half-a-dozen, I suppose, for any one of which, did it appear, forty
or fifty guineas would cheerfully be paid. The average price, now,
of a satisfactory Whistler--to speak to the collector very roughly,
and always with the difficulty of striking an average at all--the
average dealer’s price might now be eight guineas. But we will look at
the Catalogues; premising, as has been premised already, that there
are some rarer things than any that are there chronicled. The time
when Mr Heywood sold his Whistlers was the fortunate time to buy. A
First State of the _Rag Gatherers_ was sold then for less than two
pounds; a First of the _Westminster Bridge_ (then called “The House of
Parliament”), for about five pounds; and many quite desirable things
went for a pound a piece, and some for a few shillings. In 1892,
when there came the sale of Mr Hutchinson’s collection, and of Sir
William Drake’s, opinion was more formed; yet nothing like the prices
that would be reached to-day were attained then. In Mr Hutchinson’s
collection, the First State of the _Marchande de Moutarde_--rare,
but not especially rare--went for £4, 10s.; the First State of the
_Kitchen_ for £8, 15s.; the _Lime-Burners_ for £6, 10s.; a trial proof
of the _Arthur_ for £10, 15s.; a trial proof of the _Whistler_ for
£15, 10s. Again, the _Weary_ fetched £12; the First State of _Speke
Hall_, £9, 12s.; the _Fanny Leyland_, £15, 10s.; _From Pickled Herring
Stairs_, £6, 6s.; the _Palaces_, £8, 15s.; the _San Biagio_, £7, 10s.;
the _Garden_, £5, 10s.; the _Wool Carders_, £8; the _Little Drawbridge,
Amsterdam_, £9, 15s.; the _Zaandam_, £10. At the Drake Sale--a smaller
one, as far as Whistlers were concerned--ten guineas was given for the
_Kitchen_; £19 for the _Forge_. It must be added that this _Forge_,
which is in the second published set (the “Thames series” or “Sixteen
Etchings,” call them which you will) is in the quality of its different
impressions more unequal than almost any print I know. It varies
from an ineffective ghost to a thing of beauty. At £19, let us hope
it was a thing of beauty; but very much oftener it is an ineffective
ghost--desperately overrated.