MAUD STANDING
ETCHING.
The "painter fellows" were startled by their brilliancy, Whistler told his mother, and he thought rather well of them himself.
The pastels have been praised with the inconsequence characteristic of so much praise of his work. The drawing often is either not good in itself or so slight as to be of little importance. The beauty is in the suggestion of colour or the arrangement of line. Though he passed the spring, summer, winter, and part of two autumns in the city there is no attempt, save in a few sunsets, to give atmospheric effect, or the season, or the time of year. What he saw that pastel would do, what he made it do, was to record certain lines and to suggest certain colours. Critics and artists, having never studied pastel, were unaware of what had been done with it. The revival did not come for some years after Whistler showed his Venetian series, when there was a "boom" all over the world, and pastel societies were started, most of which have since collapsed.
The "boom" in etching commenced years before Whistler went to Venice. There were standards: Whistler had already accomplished great things, after a formula laid down by Dürer, Rembrandt, and Hollar. Therefore, when he made etchings which struck the uncritical, and even those who cared, as something new, the uncritical were shocked because their preconceived notions were upset, and those who cared were astonished. The difference between the Venetian and the London plates was so great that the two series might be attributed to two men. This was due partly to the difference between London and Venice seen by an artist sensitive to the character of places, but more to the difference of technique between the earlier and the later plates. Not so many years ago, talking to him about this subject, we said that the Venetian plates seemed to be done in a new way. It so happened that the Adam and Eve—Old Chelsea and The Traghetto were, as they are now, hanging almost side by side on our walls. In five minutes he proved that one was the outgrowth of the other, and that there was a natural development from the beginning of his work. Until the London Memorial Exhibition it was impossible to trace this, because the prints had never been hung together chronologically, not even at the Grolier Club, in New York, where, for want of space, two separate shows were made. Before Whistler exhibited his Venetian plates most people knew nothing but the French Set and the Thames Set. The intermediate stages had not been followed, and the Venetian plates seemed a new thing. But the difference between them and the Thames series is one of development. Whistler always spoke of the Black Lion Wharf as boyish, though it is impossible to conceive of anything of its kind more complete. His estimate has been accepted by many. Mr. Bernhard Sickert, in writing of it, thinks it misleading to say that every tile, every beam has been drawn. "These details are merely filled in with a certain number of strokes of a certain shape, accepted as indicating the materials of which they are constructed." When an etching is in pure line and owes little to the printer, as in this case, it is the wonderful arrangement of lines, the wonderful lines themselves, which make you feel that everything, every beam and every tile, has been drawn; that every detail actually has been drawn we did not suppose anybody would be so absurd as to imagine. The character of the lines gives you this impression, which is exactly what the artist wanted, and this is what proved Whistler an impressionist. Another critic has said that Whistler exhausted all his blacks on the houses. He did nothing of the sort. He concentrated them there, and did not take away from the interest of the wharf he was drawing by an equal elaboration in the boats, the barges, and the figures. As he learned more he gave up his literal, definite method. Instead of drawing the panes of a window in firm outline, he suggested them by drawing the shadows and the reflected lights with short strokes, and scarcely any outline. In the London plates he got the effect on his buildings by different bitings. In Venice he suggested the shadows. In both, the figures in movement are nearly the same, but there is a great advance in the drawing in the Venice plates, where they give the feeling of life. In the Millbank and the Lagoon, the subjects, or the dominating lines in the subjects, are the same, a series of posts carrying the eye from the foreground to the extreme distance, but their treatment in the Venetian plate, as well as the drawing of the figures, is more expressive. Simplicity of expression has never been carried further. Probably the finest plate, in its simplicity and directness, is The Bridge. Whistler now obtained the quality of richness by suggesting detail, and also by printing. In The Traghetto there is the same scheme as in The Miser and The Kitchen, but the Venice plate is more painter-like. Without taking away from the etched line he has given a fullness of tone which makes the background of The Burgomaster Six weak in comparison. And he knew this.
He was doing his own printing for the first time to any extent. There were a hundred prints of the first Venice Set. All were not pulled by him, and the difference between his printing and Goulding's, done after his death, is unmistakable. In the hand of any professional printer plates like The Traghetto and The Beggars would be a mass of scratches, though scratches of interest to the artist; it required Whistler's printing to bring out what he wanted. And it is the more surprising that he could print in Venice, so primitive was the press. Bacher had a portable press, but most was done on the old press. Whistler protested against the professional printer, his pot of treacle and his couches of ink. But no great artist ever carried the printing of etchings so far or made such use of printer's ink as he did in these plates. Without the wash of ink, they would be ghosts, and he was justified in printing as he wanted to get what he wished. And he used ink in all sorts of ways on the same plate, he tried endless experiments with ever-varying results, even to cover up the weak lines of an indifferent design, as in Nocturne—Palaces, prized highly by collectors, but one of his poorest Venice plates. It, and The Garden, Nocturne—Shipping, and one or two besides are by no means equal to the others in line, though some of his prints of these are superb. But there are no such perfect plates in the world as The Beggars, The Traghetto, the two Rivas, The Bridge, and Rialto.
While printing Whistler continually worked on his plates, and instead of there being—as the authorities say—half a dozen states there are a hundred; only the authorities cannot see. A curious fact about The Traghetto is that there were two plates. He was displeased with the first and etched it again. Bacher writes that The Traghetto "troubled him very much." He pulled one fine proof and then overworked the plate so that he had to make a second. He got copper of the same size and thickness made by the Venetian from whom they had their plates. When this was ready, the first plate was inked with white paint instead of black ink. This was placed on the second varnished plate, and they were then run through the press. The result was "a replica in white upon the black etching ground." Bacher says that on the new plate Whistler worked for days and weeks with the first proof before him, that he might find and etch only the original lines. When the second was printed Whistler placed the two proofs side by side and minutely compared them. And he was pleased, for the examination ended in the one song he allowed himself in Venice:
"We don't want to fight,
But, by jingo! if we do,
We've got the ships,
We've got the men,
And got the money too-oo-oo!"
The early proofs of others plates were unsatisfactory. Each proof was a trial, and, as each was pulled, he worked upon the plate, not generally taking out large slabs or putting in new passages to make a new state of it, but strengthening lines or lightening them, giving richness to a shadow or modelling to a little figure. It would be impossible, if the hundred proofs of each of these Venetian plates were not shown together, to say how much he did or what he did to each, but the first proof is quite different from the last and no two are alike. Some of them, from ghosts, became solid facts.
