Etchers since our great Classics--William Strang--His individuality,
and obligations to Legros--That excellent Master--Legros’s nobility
and dignity--His observation and imagination--Holroyd--The daintiness
of Short--C. J. Watson--Goff, flexible and comprehensive--The
qualities of Cameron--Oliver Hall’s Landscape--The question of
prices--Contemporary Prints generally dear.
Though no very definite commercial values may yet have been
established, in the auction-rooms, for their work, many living English
etchers of a generation later than that of Whistler and of Seymour
Haden have been for some time now appealing to the collector; and
their prints--sold chiefly perhaps at the “Painter-Etcher’s,” at Mr
Dunthorne’s, and at Mr R. Gutekunst’s--are worthy to be carefully
considered. The best of them, at least, will rank some day as only
second to the classics of their art. Indeed, if the term “the Revival
of Etching” has any meaning, it is to the best men of the later
generation that it must most apply; for “revival” signifies surely some
tolerably wide diffusion of interest, and is a word that could scarcely
be used if all we were concerned with were the efforts of two or three
isolated men of genius--in France, Méryon, Bracquemond, Jacquemart; in
England, Haden and Whistler.
No, the collector who addresses himself to the gathering of modern
etchings, must go--or may go, fairly--beyond the limits of the work
of the men I have this instant named. But in going beyond them, very
wary must be his steps. He who is already a serious student of the
older masters--he who by happy instinct, or by that poor but necessary
substitute for it, a steady application to the consideration of
great models--knows something of the secrets of Style, and so will
not fall a ready prey to the attractions of the meretricious and the
cheap. But the beginner is in need of my warning; and among the work
of the younger generation, the etching that is already popular and
celebrated--more particularly the etching that is obviously elaborate
and laboured--is as a rule the work he must eschew. The thing of course
to aim at, is to acquire gradually such “eye” and knowledge as will
enable him to pounce with safety here and there upon unknown work; but
at first it is well perhaps that in his travels beyond the territory of
the admittedly great, he shall not wander too far. I will give him the
names of a few artists, whom the connoisseur begins to appreciate,--men
of whose methods it will be interesting, and need not be extravagant,
to possess a few examples.
Of any such men, here with us in England--save indeed Legros, whose
claims to highest place I hold to be yet more incontestable--William
Strang is the one who has been known the longest, though the number
of his years may still permit him, ere he pass from us, to double the
already formidable volume of his work. Strang has etched in the right
methods, and no one knows much better than he does, the _technique_
of the craft; and, then, moreover, though he paints from time to
time a little, it is Etching--and all of it original Etching--that
is the occupation of his life. And within less than twenty years Mr
Strang has wrought--well, say between two hundred and fifty and three
hundred plates. It is no good giving the precise number, for before
this book has lain for a month upon the reader’s shelf the number will
have ceased to be precise. Almost as many kinds of subjects as were
treated by Rembrandt have been treated--and no one of them on one or
two occasions only--by Mr William Strang. He has dealt with religious
story--caring always, like Rembrandt, and like Von Uhde to-day, for
dramatic intensity in the representation of it, rather than for local
colour--he has dealt too with Landscape, with Portraiture, with grim
and sordid aspects of contemporary life.
The presence of imagination, the absence, almost complete, of formal
beauty, are the very “notes” of Mr Strang’s work--that absence is so
remarkable where it would have been least expected, that we are, it
may be, a little too apt to forget that in certain of his masculine
portraiture it does not make itself felt at all. He has made etchings
of handsome men, and they have remained handsome. He has even made
etchings of men not handsome, and handsome they have become. But he
knows not the pretty woman. And his landscape is endowed but scantily
with the beauty it cannot entirely miss. Another curious thing about
Mr Strang’s landscape is, that more even than that of Legros, his
first great master, it seems derived from but a little personal
observation and an immense study of the elder art. Indeed, I am not
quite sure whether, save in the accessories of his figures--such as the
potato-basket of one of his woebegone, limping, elderly wayfarers--Mr
Strang has ever drawn and observed anything which had not already
fallen within the observation of the great original engravers of the
remoter Past. In his dramatic pieces he shows a sense of simple pathos,
as well as of the uncanny and the weird. In Portraiture Mr Strang can
be effectively austere and suitably restrained. Occasional failures, or
comparative failures, such as the portraits of Mr Thomas Hardy and of
the late Sir William Drake, do perhaps but bring into stronger relief
the successes of the _Mr Sichel_ and of _Ian Strang_, and many others
besides. I must refrain from naming them. When Mr Strang has done so
much, and nearly all of it on a high technical level, it is natural
to feel that though out of them all the general collector of etchings
might reasonably be satisfied with the possession of a dozen--or,
peradventure, six--he would like at least to choose them for himself.
Indeed, there is no “best” to guide him to--no “worst” to guard him
against.
Legros has been named as Strang’s first master. He belongs to an older
generation, and if I name him here, between his best-known pupil and
some of the younger men, it is not to minimise his importance, but in
part as a convenient thing, and in part because, with his long years
of English practice, one hesitates to allow even French birth and a
French first education to cause one to place Legros outside the English
School that he has influenced. Born at Dijon nearly sixty years ago,
Legros has been amongst us since 1863. But it is not English life--or
indeed any life--that has made him what he is. He might have done
his work--most of it at least but the portraiture--while scarcely
wandering beyond the bounds of a Hammersmith garden. He has been fed
on the Renaissance, and fed on Rembrandt; but yet the originality of
his mind pierces through the form it has pleased him to impose on its
expression. He gives to masculine character nobility and dignity; or
rather, he is impressed immensely by the presence of these things in
his subjects. His etching of Mr G. F. Watts is perhaps--taking into
account both theme and treatment--the finest etched portrait that has
been wrought by any one since the very masterpieces of Rembrandt, nor,
honestly speaking, do I know that it fails to stand comparison even
with these.
Like his most prolific and perhaps also his most original pupil,
who has been spoken of already, Legros has little sense of womanly
beauty; but the lines of his landscape--often, as I judge, either an
imagined world or but a faded memory of our own--have refinement and
charm. His art is restful--restful even when it is weird. A large
proportion of his earlier work records the life of the Priesthood. In
its visible dignity--as I have said elsewhere--its true but limited
_camaraderie_, in its monotony and quietude, in its magnificence of
service and symbol, the life of the priest, and of those who serve in
a great church, has impressed Legros profoundly; and he has etched
these men--one now reading a lesson, one waiting now with folded hands,
one meditating, one observant, one offering up the Host, another,
a musician, bending over the ’cello or the double-bass with slow
movement of the hand that holds the bow. Dignity and ignorance, pomp
and power, weariness, senility, decay--none of these things escape
the observation of the first great etcher of the life of the Church.
_Communion dans l’Eglise St Médard_ and _Chantres Espagnols_, when seen
in fine “states,” are amazing and admirable technical triumphs, as
well as penetrating studies, the one of religious fervour, the other
of impending death. In _La Mort et le Bûcheron_--in either version
of the plate, for there are two--the imagination of Legros is at its
tenderest. Is not _L’Incendie_ dramatic, in its large and abstract
way? Is not _La Mort du Vagabond_--with the storm like the storm in
“Lear”--the one _very_ large etching that is not, in its scale, a
mistake? I know I would not have it otherwise, though it wants almost
a portfolio to itself, or, better, a frame upon the wall. One might go
on indefinitely; but again it is preferable to send the reader to the
study of the master’s long and serious work--a hundred and sixty-eight
pieces there were in 1877, when Thibaudeau & Malassis published their
Catalogue; ten years later there were ninety additions to the list;
and to this day Mr Legros has not ceased to etch. Only the very first
of his prints show any evidence of technical incompleteness. The very
latest--though no doubt, by this time, his own real message has been
delivered--the very latest (they include exquisite landscapes) show no
symptom of fatigue or decay.
Not more than once or twice, I think, in all his long career, has
Legros published his works in sets, either naturally connected or
artificially brought together. Charles Holroyd, a distinguished pupil
of Legros’s, has twice already published sets--there is his “Icarus”
set, and a little earlier in date, yet in no respect immature, his
“Monte Oliveto” set. Holroyd--with individuality of his own, without
a doubt--is yet Legros’s true spiritual child. He has much of his
refinement, of his dignity. Did he love the priesthood from Legros’s
etchings, before ever he lived with them in Italy? Rome itself, I
suppose, gave him the love of what is visibly Classic--and that is
a love which Legros does not appear to share. His composition is
generally good; his sense of beautiful “line” most noteworthy. His
trees--stone pine and olive, or the humbler trees of our North--are
thus not only individual studies, true to Nature sometimes in
detail, always in essentials--but likewise restful and impressive
decorations of the space of paper it is his business to fill. _Farm
behind Scarborough_ shows him homely, simple, and direct. Was it
a Roman garden, or Studley, that suggested _The Round Temple_? In
the little plate of the _Borghese Gardens_--my own private plate,
which I bought from him when the first impression of it hung at the
Painter-Etchers’--Holroyd consciously abandons much that is wont to
attract (atmospheric effect, for example), but he retains the thing for
which the plate existed--dignified and expressive rhythm of “line.”
That justifies it, and permits it to omit much, and to only admirably
hint at the thing it would not actually convey.
We will turn for a few minutes to another contemporary who has etched
in the right spirit--Mr Frank Short. Some people think that Mr Short
has not quite fulfilled the promise which only a few years ago he gave,
as an original etcher. For myself, I consider that the fulfilment
is, at most, only delayed: not rendered unlikely. Mr Short has been
for several years extremely busy in the translation, chiefly into
mezzotint, of pictures and drawings by artists as various as Turner,
Nasmyth, Constable, Dewint, and G. F. Watts. If engravings that are
not original inventions are ever worth buying--and that, of course,
cannot be doubted--these translations by Mr Short are worth buying,
eminently. There is not one of them that fails. His flexibility is
extraordinary. His productions are exquisite. In a parenthesis, let me
advise their purchase, when things of the sort are required. But Short
is before us just now only in the capacity of an original etcher, and,
as an original etcher, with well-nigh perfect command of _technique_,
he registers the daintiest of individual impressions of the world.
That his field as an observer at first hand is limited, is certainly
true. Coast subjects please him best. We have no finer draughtsman
of low-lying land, of a scene with a low horizon, of a great expanse
of mud and harbour deserted by the tide--all their simplicity, even
uncomeliness of theme, made almost poetic. _Low Tide and the Evening
Star_; _Evening, Bosham_; _Sleeping till the Flood_, are all, among
subjects of this order, prints that should be secured where it is
possible--and where the accumulation of modern etchings is not an
inconvenience. In _Stourbridge Canal_ and in _Wrought Nails_--both
of them finely felt, finely drawn bits of the ragged, sordid “Black
Country”--we have desirable instances of Mr Short’s dealings with
another class of theme. If you want him in a more playful mood, take
_Quarter Boys_--a quite imaginative yet gamesome vision of urchins
looking out to sea from the Belfry of the church of Rye.
C. J. Watson has for many years now been etching persistently, and
been etching well. But he has not got, and could not perhaps quite
easily get, beyond the learned simplicity of _Mill Bridge, Bosham_,
done in 1888. It is a sketch with singular unity of impression--or
rather with that unity of impression which is not so singular perhaps
when the work remains a sketch. _St Etienne-du-Mont_--a theme from
which one would have thought that Mr Watson would have been warned
off, remembering how, once and for ever, it had been dealt with by
the genius of Méryon--is, doubtless, an accurate enough portrait,
but the individuality--where? And without individuality, such work
is an architectural drawing. This _St Etienne_ bears date 1890; but
since 1890 Mr Watson has done finer things--his strong and capable
hand stirred to expression by a nature not perhaps very sensitive to
every effect of beauty, but feeling the interest of solid workmanship
and something of the charm of the picturesque. _Ponte del Cavallo_
has daintiness, and some yet more recent work in Central Italy and
Sicily--with architecture generally as the basis of its interest--may
fall reasonably enough within the province of collectors who can afford
to accumulate--who can afford to add well to well and vineyard to
vineyard.
Of the remaining English etchers of our time, Colonel Goff, Mr D. Y.
Cameron, and Mr Oliver Hall are those whom it will be best to notice
at a little length. Mr Macbeth, Mr Herkomer, Mr W. H. May, Mr Menpes,
Mr Raven Hill--others besides--have brought out prints of which the
possession is pleasant; but it is, I suppose, the three men whom
I named earlier who by reason of combined quality and quantity of
“out-put” most deserve the collector’s serious consideration.
Of these three, Goff--a retired Guardsman, but no more really an
amateur than Seymour Haden--is, I take it, the best known. Actual
popularity he has been, for an etcher, wonderfully near to attaining.
He may even now attain it. Much of the excellence of his work is
easily intelligible; his point of view, though always artistic, is one
that can be reached, often, by the ordinary spectator of his prints.
Hence, his relatively large acceptance--an agreeable circumstance which
I should be glad to consider was owing exclusively to the skill that
is certainly likewise his. Colonel Goff’s sympathies are broad; his
subjects admirably varied; and the vivacity of his artistic temperament
allows him to attack each new plate with new interest. He is almost
without mannerism in treatment, and of that which presents itself
to his gaze on his journey through the world, there is singularly
little which he is not able artistically to tackle. Not quite the
architectural draughtsman that C. J. Watson is, he yet can indicate
tastefully the architecture of church or cottage or city house. His
sympathies are with the new as much as with the old, and that is in
part because to him a building is not only, or chiefly, a monument
with historical associations; it is, above all, an excuse and a
justification for an arrangement on the copper, of harmonious and
intricate line. Very successfully he has dealt with landscape. Is it
the seaboard or the town that he depicts, he can people the place with
figures vivacious and rightly displayed. I suppose that he has executed
by this time scarcely less than a hundred plates. _Summer Storm in the
Itchen Valley_ remains the most popular, and would therefore prove, in
an auction-room, the least inexpensive. But, among the pure etchings,
_Pine Trees, Christ Church_, and _Norfolk Bridge, Shoreham_, and the
extremely delicate little print of the _Chain Pier, Brighton_, and _Low
Tide, Mouth of the Hampshire Avon_--with its own dreary but impressive
beauty--are to my mind distinctly more desirable, and should be
possessed if possible; whilst among the dry-points (and a dry-point can
never be common) I would place highest, perhaps, the peaceful little
_Itchen Abbas Bridge_.
Intricate in arrangement of line, the work of Colonel Goff is in
actual workmanship less elaborate than that of Mr D. Y. Cameron,
who, though now and again, as in that masterpiece of Landscape
work--_Border Towers_--a pure sketcher in Etching, much oftener devotes
himself to work solid, substantial, deliberate rather in fulness of
realisation than in economy of means. He is a fine engraver on the
copper; addicted to massive arrangements of shadow and light--giving
to these, wherever there is any fair excuse for doing so, a little
of the Celtic weirdness Mr Strang bestows upon the figure. Glamour,
a touch of wizardry, is in the _Palace, Stirling Castle_; and it is
not in that only. A master, already, of the arrangement of light and
shade--a master, already, of _technique_--Mr Cameron (who has studied
Rembrandt so much, and, I should presume, Méryon) is finding his own
path. Indeed, the _Border Towers_ shows that all that he has learnt
from Rembrandt he has made his own by this time. How else could he have
accomplished what is certainly one of the most complete and significant
suggestions of Landscape wrought in our day! A _Rembrandt Farm_ is
earlier. It is extremely clever, but, as its very name might lead one
to conjecture, it is more distinctly imitative. Mr Cameron was not a
master at the moment when he wrought the _Flower Market_; because, if
he did not make in that the irremediable mistake of choosing the wrong
medium--printer’s ink, where one’s cry, first and last, is naturally
for “colour”--he made at all events the mistake that Mr Whistler is
incapable of making (as his etching of _The Garden_ shows), the mistake
of working with a heavy hand, when what was wanted was a treatment
of “touch and go,” as it were--the very lightest coquetry of line.
Occasionally Mr Cameron has failed; occasionally his industry has
resulted in the commonplace; but he is a young man still; the collector
must take account of him; his will hereafter be a very distinguished
name; and meanwhile--now even--the collector of good Modern Etching is
bound to put into his folios not a few of Mr Cameron’s sterling prints.
Mr Oliver Hall--a young man also, and one who paints in water-colour as
well as etches--can hardly have done as many plates as Mr Cameron, yet;
and in none of them, free sketches of landscape--breezy, immediate,
well-disposed--has Mr Hall been so unwise as to emulate the almost
Méryon-like elaboration not inappropriate at all to the architectural
subjects of Cameron. Oliver Hall’s is delightful and sufficiently
masculine work. After a short period of immaturity, during which the
influence of Seymour Haden was that which he most disclosed, his _Trees
on the Hillside_ and _A Windy Day_ testified to great flexibility,
and to some force. The lines of “foliage,” as people call it--it is
the tree, however, rather than the leaf--the lines of the tree-form,
however intricate, did not elude his point. Afterwards, _Angerton Moss:
Windy Day_, and the _Edge of the Forest_, with its gust-blown trees and
threatening sky, and later still, _King’s Lynn from a Distance_, came
to assure us that here was an artist getting at the heart of Nature--an
artist who could bring before us a poetic vision of natural effects.
Mr Alfred East, Mr Jacomb Hood, Mr Roussel, Mr Percy Thomas, Mr J. P.
Heseltine, Mr W. H. May, Sir Charles Robinson, Mr Axel Haig, Elizabeth
Armstrong (Mrs Stanhope Forbes), and Minna Bolingbroke (Mrs C. J.
Watson) ought not to go unmentioned even in a book which has a wider
field than “Etching in England”--in which I have named some of them
less baldly.
The inexpert purchaser may like to know what is the sort of price asked
generally by its producer, or by the dealer, or the Painter-Etchers’
Society--to which the print may be intrusted--for a new etching. I
am here on ticklish ground; but I must make bold to answer, speaking
broadly, “Far too much.” Later on--before I have quite done with the
subject of the Lithograph--I shall return to the charge, on this matter
of solid cash. But each class of work stands, in the matter of price,
on its own peculiar footing; and here we talk, not of lithographs, but
of etchings and dry-points. The wholly exceptional genius, approved by
Time, and happily yet with us to benefit by the result of his fame,
may be pardoned for asking twelve guineas for one of his most recent
etchings. If he gets it, his rewards are delightfully contrasted with
those of Méryon--who was grateful when an old gentleman in the French
War Office gave him a franc and a half for an impression of the _Abside
de Nôtre-Dame_, which, because of its beauty and of its peculiar and
rare “state,” is worth to-day about a hundred and fifty pounds. But
we are not all men of exceptional genius; and, in the case of etched
work, which, without deterioration, may be issued to the number of
fifty or a hundred or a couple of hundred impressions, is it wise to
seek to anticipate what after all may prove not to be the verdict of
the world?--is it wise to limit the issue so very artificially by
the simple, I will not say the greedy process of asking two, three,
and four guineas for an impression of a good but ordinary etching?
A good etching, produced by a contemporary artist, could, quite to
the benefit of the etcher, be sold for a guinea. If the etcher has
not time to print it himself, or is not, at heart, artist enough
to wish to do so, let him send it to a good printer, with definite
instructions how to print it, and, on the average, each impression
may cost him half-a-crown. Then, of course, if he sells it through a
dealer, there will be something for the dealer--perhaps five shillings.
Say about fourteen shillings will be left for the artist. The fee is
insignificant--but, if you once interest the public, it may be almost
indefinitely multiplied. The price that is prohibitive to the ordinary
man of taste--the price that prevents him, not, of course, from
buying an etching here and there, but from forming any considerable
collection of etchings--that, if the artist only knew it, is the
greatest possible disadvantage to himself. He is concerned for his
dignity; his _amour-propre_, he sometimes says. But an etching--like
a book--is a printed thing; and the author of a book conceives, and
rightly, that his _amour-propre_ is wounded rather by absence or
narrow restriction of sale than by the moderation--the lowness, if you
will--of the price at which his book is issued.
Now a dry-point and an ordinary etching stand on different ground in
this respect. Both are printed things, indeed; but whilst the etching
will, according to its degree of force or delicacy, yield, without
“steeling,” from fifty to four hundred impressions--and generally quite
as near the four hundred as the fifty--a dry-point will inevitably
deteriorate after a dozen or twenty impressions, and may even
deteriorate after three or four. Each impression, then, of a dry-point
that is desirable at all, has its own peculiar value--its rarity to
begin with (unless you work it to death), and its unlikeness to its
neighbour. I blame no good artist, when he has made a good dry-point,
for asking two or three or four, or six or seven, guineas for it. I do
not as work of art--as providing me with joy--esteem it any more highly
than the etching. The etching, which I ought to acquire at a guinea,
may give me the gratification of a Wordsworthian poem. It may be--happy
chance for every one concerned if it is!--as directly inspired as the
_Ancient Mariner_: it may be a thing conceived and wrought in one of
those “states of the atmosphere” which (it is Coleridge himself who
says it) are “addressed to the soul.” Do I underrate it? Not a jot. But
I discern that, like the _Ancient Mariner_, it can be multiplied in
large numbers. The dry-point cannot.
Even at the risk of being charged with a certain repetition of my
argument, I shall return--as the reader has been warned already--it
will be somewhere in the chapter on modern Lithography--to this
question of the too extravagant price, and therefore of the necessarily
too restricted sale, of the contemporary print.