CHAPTER XI
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.
David Lucas: Constable’s Spring.
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.
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.
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.