The healthy appreciation of Mezzotint--Its faculty of conveying the
painter’s very touch--Landscape Scenes in Mezzotint--Comparative
Rarity of Landscapes--The Constables--Vast volume of Rare Pieces
and Portraits--The Prints after Sir Joshua Reynolds--Dr Hamilton’s
Catalogue--The smaller number of Gainsboroughs--Increased
appreciation of Romney--Mr Percy Horne’s book on these men--George
Morland--The cost of Mezzotints now, and when first issued.
Of modern fashions in Print Collecting, the appreciation of mezzotints
is assuredly one of the healthiest, and--apart from the question of the
very high prices to which mezzotints have lately been forced--there
is only one drawback to the pleasure of the collector in bringing
them together: the collector of mezzotints has to resign himself to
do without original work. The scraping of the plate in these broad
masses of shadow and light--a method immensely popular as means of
interpretation or translation of the painter’s touch--has from the days
of the invention of the process by Ludwig von Siegen to the days of its
latest practice, never greatly commended itself to the original artist
as a method for fresh design. There are a few exquisite exceptions; and
perhaps there is no sufficient reason why there should not be more;
but the exceptions best known, and most likely to be cited, the prints
of Turner’s “Liber Studiorum,” are exceptions only in so far as regards
that small proportion of the whole--about ten amongst the published
plates--wrought by Turner himself.
And, further, the collector, if he cares much for Landscape subjects,
will note that landscapes in mezzotint are comparatively few. It
was in the Eighteenth Century that the production of mezzotint was
most voluminous; and the Eighteenth Century took little interest in
Landscape. In the earlier half of our own century--ere yet the art had
almost ceased to be practised--the world was given a few famous sets of
landscapes in mezzotint; but they were very few. Turner’s “Liber” (with
its backbone of etching) was followed by the half-dozen pieces of the
“Ports of England,” and by “Rivers of England,” or “River Scenery,” as
it is sometimes called, “after Turner and Girtin.” And then, well in
the middle of the half-century, we were endowed with the delightful,
now highly prized mezzotints, which were executed by David Lucas after
the works of Constable, homely when they were sombre, homely too
when they were most sparkling and alive. They too, the “Constable’s
English Landscape”--like the “Liber” prints of Turner--were influenced,
for better or worse, by the supervision of the creative artist. The
tendency of Lucas may have been to make them too black--even Constable
never blamed him for making them, likewise, massive. Sparkle and
vivacity, as well as obvious breadth and richness, were wanted in
adequate renderings of Constable; and all these, by the adaptability of
Lucas’s talent, by his rare sympathy, were obtained.
[Illustration:
DAVID LUCAS: CONSTABLE’S _Spring_.
]
In our own day, several meritorious artists--Wehrschmidt and Pratt and
Gerald Robinson and others--have done, in several branches, interesting
work in mezzotint; and Frank Short, in one print especially that I
have in my mind, after a Turner drawing--an Alpine subject--and again
in a decisive mezzotint, _A Road in Yorkshire_, after Dewint (a road
skirting the moors)--is altogether admirable. And, to name yet a third
instance of the art of this flexible translator, there is the quite
wonderful little vision of the silvery grey Downs, after a sketch by
Constable in the possession of Henry Vaughan, whose greater Constable,
the _Hay Wain_, was generously made over to the nation. The work of
David Lucas, himself--even in the radiant _Summerland_, or in the
steel-grey keenness of the _Spring_--did not excel in delicacy of
manipulation Frank Short’s delightful rendering of Constable’s vision
of the Downs.
But I am not to dwell longer upon particular instances. We are brought
back to the fact that it is not, generally speaking, in examples of
Landscape Art that the collector of mezzotints must find himself
richest. The collector’s groups of landscapes will be limited--and in
the first place are the rare Proofs--Lucas’s Proofs--after Constable.
In the collection of religious compositions, of _genre_ pieces, of
theatrical subjects, of “fancy” subjects--in which that which is
most “fancied” is the prettiness of the female sex--in sporting
and in racing subjects (amongst the latter there are a few most
admirable prints after George Stubbs), and most of all, of course, in
portraits, from the days of Lely to the days of Lawrence, there will be
opportunities of filling portfolio after portfolio, drawer after drawer.
It is difficult, I think, for the collector--still more for the
student who has not a collector’s practical interest in the matter--to
realise what is actually the extent of that contribution to the
world’s possessions in the way of Art, which has been made, and all
within about two hundred years, by the engravers in mezzotint. Some
eighteen years ago, an Irish amateur, Mr Challoner Smith, began the
publication of a Catalogue which, when it was concluded, several years
later, had extended to five volumes. It was a colossal labour. Styled
by its compiler “British Mezzotint Portraits,” it really includes
the chronicle of many firings which at least are not professedly
portraits--yet it excludes many too. Whatever it excludes, its bulk
is such, that, amongst the mass of its matter, it comprises full
descriptions of between four and five hundred plates by one artist
alone. The man is Faber, junior. Fifty plates are chronicled by an
engraver more modern of character, more popular to-day--Richard Earlom;
amongst them, more than one of the _genre_ or incident pictures after
Wright of Derby (in which a difficult effect of chiaroscuro--an effect
of artificial light--is treated boldly, vigorously, not always very
subtly), and the marvellously painter-like plates of _Marriage à la
Mode_, so much more pictorial than the brilliant line-engravings
executed much earlier after those subjects. But not, be it observed,
mentioned by Challoner Smith amongst the Earloms, are two other prints
in which, in the reproduction of still-life, engraving in mezzotint
reaches high-water mark; I mean the now most justly sought-for plates
after the Fruit and Flower Pieces of Van Huysum. By James Watson, a
contemporary of Earlom’s, more or less, about a hundred and sixty
prints are described. By J. R. Smith--who engraved so many of the
finest of the Sir Joshuas--there are described two hundred, but by
the John Smith who, a century earlier, recorded almost innumerable
Knellers, there are all but three hundred. The difference in the number
of plates produced by the younger men and by the elder--James Watson,
Earlom, and J. B. Smith upon the one hand; John Smith and Faber on the
other--finds its explanation in the tendency of mezzotint to become
more elaborate, more refined, more perfect, presumably slower, during
the hundred years or so that separated the beginning, not from the
end indeed (for the end, strictly speaking, is not yet), but from
the very crown and crest of the achievement. Much of the early work
is very vigorous. John Smith, especially, was within limited lines
a sterling artist; though mainly, like the portrait painters that
he worked after, without obvious attractiveness and indeed without
subtlety. The exceedingly rare examples of Ludwig von Siegen and of
Prince Rupert show that these men--at the very beginning even--were
artists and not bunglers. But when one compares that early work, John
Smith’s even--done, all of it, when the art was but in its robust
childhood--with the infinitely more refined and flexible performance of
the men of the Eighteenth Century, one wonders only at the great body
of achievement, dexterous, delicate, faultlessly graceful, vouchsafed
to the practitioners of mezzotint during the last decades of that
later epoch. And between the distinctly later work and the distinctly
earlier, of the less engaging executants, there came, be it remembered,
the masculine art of M‘Ardell, a link in the chain; for M‘Ardell learnt
something from the early men, and was the master of more than one of
the more recent. He is admirable especially in his rendering of the
portraits of men.
A vast proportion of the work of the first practitioners of Mezzotint
appeals rather to the collector of portraits for likeness’ sake,
than to the collector of prints for beauty’s sake and Art’s. Such a
collector is a specialist the nature of whose specialty obliges him
to amass a certain amount of artistic production without necessarily
having any great regard for the Art that is in it. We are not
concerned, in this volume, with this specialty, honourable and
serviceable as it may be--a book which, by reason of more pressing
claims, leaves out of consideration the manly and yet highly refined
labours of Nanteuil, Edelinck, the Drevets (masters of reproductive
work in pure “line ”), may well be pardoned if it does not pause over
mere portraiture--I mean, the less artistic portraiture--in mezzotint.
The collector who is as yet but a beginner should be encouraged to
direct his eye to the more statedly and purposely artistic--to the
hill-tops where he will find already, as his comrades in research,
those who have brought to the task of collecting a long experience and
a chastened taste. In other words, the generation of Reynolds and of
Gainsborough, or else the generation of Romney and of Morland, has to
be reached before the mezzotint collector can lay hands on the great
prizes of his pursuit. The perfectly translated art of these painters
is amongst the few things which may be accounted popular and yet may be
accounted noble.
In saying this, I do not preclude myself from saying also that I think
the sums given at present for the most favourite instances of mezzotint
engraving are distinctly excessive. We will look at a few of them in
detail, on a later page. Fashion knows little reasonableness--but
little moderation--and hence it is that a translation of Reynolds,
gracious and engaging, commands, if it happens to be at all rare, the
price, and often more than the price, of an original and important
creation of Dürer’s, or even of Rembrandt’s. But what shall we say when
we have to recollect that, at the present moment, even the mezzotints
after Hoppner are ridiculously dear!
Of all the masters of the Eighteenth or early Nineteenth Century, it is
Sir Joshua Reynolds who has been engraved most amply. It is safe to
say that there are something like four hundred prints after his painted
work--prints of the great time, I mean, ending not later than 1820, and
taking, amongst others, no account of the smaller plates of which S.
W. Reynolds executed so many. The latest and best Catalogue of these
great Reynolds prints is that of Dr Hamilton--a labour of diligence
and loving care undertaken in our own generations. Of the painters
of the British School, Morland probably comes next to Reynolds, in
respect of the number of engravings executed after his work. Apart
from prints in stipple, there exist after Morland something like two
hundred mezzotints. A systematic Catalogue, with states and all, is
still to be desired, as a sure practical guide to the collector of
Morland; but meanwhile useful service has certainly been rendered by
the Exhibitions at the Messrs Vokins’s, for these were wonderfully
comprehensive, and with them careful lists--only just short of being
catalogues _raisonnés_--have been issued. William Ward--Morland’s
brother-in-law--and J. R. Smith, with whom he was associated, were his
two principal engravers; but many another accomplished craftsman had
a hand in popularising his labours by reproducing his themes--amongst
them John Young, the author of the rare and little known, and poetic
plate, _Travellers_. Mr Percy Horne--himself, like Dr Hamilton, a
well-known collector--has done for Gainsborough and Romney what
Dr Hamilton has done for Sir Joshua. In one volume, charmingly
illustrated with a few specimen subjects, Mr Percy Horne has issued
a Catalogue of the engraved portraits and fancy subjects painted by
Gainsborough and by Romney--the Gainsborough pieces of which he has
taken note having been published between 1760 and 1820; the Romneys,
between 1770 and 1830. By Gainsborough, there are eighty-eight, of
which seventy-seven are portraits. The numbers include some in stipple
and a few even in line, but the bulk are, of course, mezzotints. By
Romney--somehow more popular with the engravers, and, it would seem,
with the public--there are no less than a hundred and forty-five, of
which a hundred and thirty-six are portraits. But it is difficult, in
this matter, to draw the line very sharply, owing to the habit of the
beauties of that day to be painted not only as themselves, but “as
Miranda,” “as Sensibility,” and the like. Mr Horne himself reminds us,
by cross references in his index, that even of the few Romneys which
he has chosen to catalogue as “fancy subjects,” some are in truth
portraits. Among the engraved Romney portraits, no less than twenty are
avowed representations of the fascinating woman who inspired Romney
as did no other soul, and without whose presence he not seldom pined.
She came to him first as Emma Hart, or Emma Lyon, mistress of Charles
Greville. He knew her afterwards as the wife of Sir William Hamilton.
The modified and unforbidding Classicism of her beauty accorded well
with his ideal--helped perhaps to form it--and, admirable as is much of
the work of his in which she had no place, Romney is most completely
Romney when it is Lady Hamilton he is recording.
The value of an average Romney print is to-day at least as high as
that of an average Reynolds, and much higher than that of an average
Gainsborough. An exceptional print like his _Mrs Carwardine_, than
which nothing is finer--a well-built gentlewoman, seen in profile, in
close white cap, her head bent prettily over a nestling child, and her
arms clasped at his back--sells for about a hundred guineas, and, in a
fine impression, is scarcely likely to fetch less. It was engraved by
J. R. Smith in 1781. Very beautiful and delicate, though not perhaps so
extremely rare, is the _Elizabeth, Countess of Derby_, engraved by John
Dean. Two hundred pounds has been fetched by Raphael Smith’s engraving
of Romney’s Lady Warwick. Of Gainsboroughs, perhaps the very finest is
one engraved by Dean; this is the _Mrs Elliot_, a print of 1779; a very
great rarity; a thing of delightful and dignified beauty, and in its
exquisite delicacy, quite as characteristic of the engraver as of the
original artist. It is a long time since any impression has been sold.
About £70 was the last chronicled price for it. It would fetch more, so
experts think, did it reappear to-day.
[Illustration:
REYNOLDS: _Miss Oliver_.
]
The highest price ever yet paid for a print after Sir Joshua is, as I
am told, £350; and this was given for an impression of Thomas Watson’s
print after the picture sometimes called “An Offering to Hymen”--the
_Hon. Mrs Beresford, with the Marchioness Townshend and the Hon. Mrs
Gardiner_. For a while, the _Ladies Waldegrave_, engraved by Valentine
Green, was considered at the top of the tree. £270 has been cheerfully
paid for it. Mr Urban Noseda--than whom no dealer in England is a
greater specialist in mezzotint, for he has inherited, it seems, his
mother’s eye--the eye which made that lady so desirable a friend to
the collector, a quarter of a century ago--Mr Urban Noseda (if I can
get somehow to the end of a sentence so involved and awkward that I am
beginning to feel it must necessarily be very clever too) tells me,
from Notes to which he has had access, that the original price of even
the most important of these Sir Joshua prints was never more than a
guinea and a half, and that not a few were issued at five shillings.
The Morland prices still seem moderate when compared with those of
average Sir Joshuas: actually cheap when compared with those that
are finest and rarest. Lately, the charming pair, _A Visit to the
Child at Nurse_ and _A Visit to the Child at School_, fetched, at
Sotheby’s, twenty-seven guineas; the _Farmer’s Stable_ fetched, at
the Huth Sale, £11, 10s.; the _Carrier’s Stable_, not long since at
Christie’s, fetched twenty-one guineas; _Fishermen going out_, by S. W.
Reynolds, has realised £17; _The Story of Letitia_, a small set, has
realised £30, but would to-day fetch more--in fine condition. Mr Noseda
says--and I suppose those other great authorities on Mezzotint, Messrs
Colnaghi, would confirm him--that the original prices of the Morlands
ranged from seven and sixpence to a guinea. Great as the difference is
between the sum first asked and the sum now obtained, I cannot in the
case of this so genial, graceful, acceptable, observant master, think
it is excessive. A generation that has gone a little mad over J. F.
Millet, and other interesting French rustic painters, may allow itself
some healthy enthusiasm when George Morland is to the front.