CHAPTER XII
Lithography, the convenient invention of Senefelder—Its recent Revival due to the French and Whistler—Legros—Fantin—Whistler’s Lithographs only inferior to his Etchings—C. H. Shannon’s Lithographs the best expression of his art—Lithography and Etching compared—Will Rothenstein—Oliver Hall—The Lithographs of Roussel—Other Draughtsmen—The contemporary Lithograph foolishly costly.
A final chapter I devote to another of the most justifiable and reasonable of the more recent fads in Print Collecting—to a branch of the collector’s pursuit far less important, indeed, and far less interesting than Etching, far less historic than Mezzotint, but far more creditable than the mania of the inartistic for the pretty ineptitude of the coloured print. I am speaking of Lithography.
Men who are familiar with the later development of artistic work, know that not exactly alongside of the very real and admirable Revival of Etching, but closely following behind it, there has proceeded some renewal of interest in the art of drawing upon stone, which, in 1796, was invented by Senefelder. Often, however, nowadays, it is not literally “on stone.” Without defending the change—and yet without the possibility of violently accusing it, seeing the achievements which at least it has not forbidden—I may note that, as a matter of fact, a transfer-paper, and not the prepared stone, is, very frequently in our day, the substance actually drawn on.
Well, the renewal of interest in the art of Lithography owes much to Frenchmen of the present generation, and much to Mr Whistler. I say “the present generation” in talking of the French, because (not to speak of the qualities obtained two generations ago by our English Prout), Gavarni’s “velvety quality” and the “fever and freedom of Daumier” were noticeable, and might have been influential long before the days of our present young men. The work of Fantin-Latour, has been to them an example, and the noble work of Legros, and the work of Whistler. Fantin-Latour—that delightful painter of flowers and of the poetic nude—has endowed us in Lithography as well as in Painting with reveries of the nude, or of the slightly robed. They are all done in freely scraped crayon. A few of them—such as The Genius of Music, or the quite recent To Stendhal or Les Baigneuses—the collector of lithographs is bound to possess. But I must turn, in detail, to Mr Whistler.
Mr Tom Way, who knows as much about Lithography as any one—and more, perhaps, than any one about the lithographs of Whistler—assured me, a year since, that something like a hundred drawings on the stone, or transfer-paper (for Mr Whistler sometimes uses the one and sometimes the other), had been wrought by one whose reputation is secure as the master-etcher of our time. Since then Mr Way has accurately and eulogistically catalogued them. They amount now, or did when Mr Way finished his catalogue, to exactly a hundred and thirty. But Mr Whistler is always working. Let us recall a few of them—most, though indeed by no means all of them, were first seen in an exhibition held in the rooms of the Fine Art Society. Before then, they were wont to be shown privately, to Amateurs, by one or two dealers. Earlier still, they were not shown at all; though a few of the finest of them had been long ago wrought. There was that most distinguished drawing that was published for a penny in the Whirlwind—the lady seated, with a hat on, and one arm pendant. It is called The Winged Hat. As in Mr Whistler’s rare little etching of the slightly-draped cross-kneed girl stooping over a baby, one enjoys, in The Winged Hat, the suggestion of delicate tone on the whole surface: the working of the face is particularly noteworthy by reason of the subtle way in which the draughtsman had suggested, by means of the handling of his chalk, a different texture. “By means of the handling of his chalk,” did I write?—perhaps a little too confidently. One can’t quite say how he did really get it. But he has got it, somehow.
Then there is that admirable portfolio, of only five or six, the Goupils published—containing the Limehouse, mysterious, weird, and unsurpassable, and a Nocturne, wholly exquisite. Again, there is Battersea Bridge, of 1878, which, good though it is, does not stand comparison with Mr Whistler’s etchings of the same and similar themes. Then there is a rare subject which people learned in Lithography are wont to account a masterpiece in the method—a drawing tenderly washed: a thing of masses and broad spaces, more than narrow lines. It is called Early Morning, and is a vision of the River at Battersea. It is faint—faint—of gradations the most delicate, of contrasts the least striking—a gleam of silver and white.
Later, among many others, there have been that drawing of a draped model seated which appeared in the now rare “L’Estampe Originale”; the fin portrait of M. Mallarmé—a writer so difficult to understand, that by the faithful his profundity is taken for granted—some slender, lissome nudes or semi-nudes, most characteristic of Whistler; the St Giles’s Church, the Smith’s Yard, Lyme Regis, the Belle Dame paresseuse, with the quality of a chalk drawing; the Belle Jardinière, which has something, but by no means all of the infinite freedom of the etching of The Garden; again, The Balcony with people peering down from it, as if at a procession—and procession indeed it was, since the thing was wrought on the day of Carnot’s funeral. Then, in the Forge and The Smith of the Place du Dragon there is the tender soft grey quality which people learned in these things conceive, I think generally, to be impossible to “transfer.”
But of the younger artists who have worked in Lithography it is time to say something. Mr Frank Short, with his placid dream of Putney, with the intricate rhythm of line of his Timber-Ships, Yarmouth, should not be passed by. Nor Mr Francis Bate, who, to draw as he has drawn, and see as he has seen, The Whiting Mill, could not possibly have been wanting in originality of expression or of sight. Nor Mr George Clausen, again, whose Hay Barn bears witness not only to his easy command of technique, but to his flexibility. It is one of those treatments of rustic life in which Mr Clausen has been wont to show the influence of Millet, if not of Bastien Lepage. It is of a realism artistically subdued, yet undeniable. Of the work of C. H. Shannon I must speak a good deal more fully, for of C. H. Shannon, Lithography is the particular art. He is no beginner at Lithography: no maker of first experiments. I do not know that he—like Mr Short—is an engraver in any way. He is not, like Mr Whistler, celebrated on two continents as etcher and painter to boot. He is above all things draughtsman—draughtsman poetic and subtle. The air of Lithography he breathes as his native air.
C. H. Shannon’s art it is by no means easy for the healthy normal person to appreciate at once. It is possible even for a student of the matter to lose sight of Shannon’s poetry and sensitiveness, in a fit of impatience because the anatomy of his figures does not always seem to be true, or because his sentiment has not robustness. I have a lurking suspicion that I was myself rather slow to appreciate him. Few people’s appreciation of the original in Art, comes to them all at once. And touchy folk—unreasonable, almost irresponsible—are apt to blame one on this account. One has “swallowed one’s words,” they say—because one has modified an opinion. The world, even the intelligent world, they querulously grumble, was not ready to receive them. Is that so very amazing? Themselves, doubtless, were born with every faculty matured—they possessed, upon their mother’s breasts, a nice discrimination of the virtues of Lafitte of ’69. Some of us, under such circumstances, can but crave their tolerance—we were born duller.
Of lithographic technique, Mr C. H. Shannon—to go back to him, after an inexcusable digression—is a master; and here let it be said that not only does he draw upon the stone invariably, whilst Mr Whistler (it has been named before) sometimes does and sometimes does not draw on it, but he insists also upon printing his own impressions. He has a press; he is an enthusiast; he sees the thing through. The precise number of his lithographs it is not important to know. What is important, is to insist upon the relative “considerableness” of nearly all of them. With him the thoroughly considered composition takes the place of the dainty sketch. Faulty the works of Charles Shannon may be, in certain points; deficient in certain points; but rarely indeed are they slight, either in conception or execution. Of each one of them may it be said that it is a serious work: the seriousness as apparent in the more or less realistic treatment of The Modeller as in Delia, ideal and opulent and Titianesque. The Ministrants, of 1894, is perhaps his most important. What is more exquisite than the just suggested movements of The Sisters? Sea-Breezes is noteworthy, of course, in composition, and refined, of course, in effect.
Before I go on to discuss a few others of the modern men, it may be more interesting to remind the reader—it may be, even to inform him—what is and what may hope to be Lithography’s place. In such signs of its revival as are now apparent, he will surely rejoice. One does rejoice to find an artist equipped with some new medium of expression—some medium of expression, at all events, by which his work, while remaining autographic, may yet be widely diffused. And the art or craft of Lithography, whatever it does not do, does at least enable the expert in it to produce and scatter broadcast, by the hundred or the thousand if he choose, work which shall have all or nearly all the quality of a pencil or chalk drawing, or, if it is desired, much of the quality even of a drawing that is washed. This is excellent; and then again there is the commercial advantage of relatively rapid and quite inexpensive printing. But what the serious and impartial amateur and collector of Fine Art will have to notice on the other side, is, first of all, that Lithography is not richly endowed with a separate quality of its own. With work that is printed from a metal plate, this is quite otherwise. Mezzotint has a charm that is its own, entirely. And Line-Engraving has the particular charm of Line-Engraving. And Etching—the biting, which gives vigour now, and now extreme delicacy; the printing, which deliberately enhances this or modifies that; the burr, the dry-point work, its intended effect; the papers, and the different results they yield, of tone or luminousness—all these things contribute to, and are a part of, Etching’s especial quality and especial delight.
A comparison between Lithography and Etching in particular—putting other mediums aside—leads to further reflections. Lithography lacks the relief of etched work. “You can’t have grey and black lines”—a skilled etcher says to me, who enjoys Lithography as well as Etching, and sometimes practises it—“you can’t have grey and black lines, in that the printing of a lithograph is surface-printing, and every mark upon the stone prints equally black. Therefore for grey work in Lithography, you must have a grain upon the stone—or on the transfer-paper—that your drawing is made on.” And he adds, “Whatever can be done upon a lithographic stone, can be done with a much higher quality upon a plate.” And the soft grey line, he says, when got upon the stone—“well, if that is what you want, in a soft-ground etching it can be got much better.”
As to Mezzotint again, to compare the quality of a fine mezzotint from copper, with any quality that is obtainable in stone, would, generally, be absurd. We are brought back, however, to that which is Lithography’s especial virtue and convenience—it gives the autographic quality of the pencil drawing, of the chalk drawing, of the drawing that is washed.
When, in these last words, I tried to indicate Lithography’s natural limits, and said, practically, that its main function was to produce “battalions” where ordinary drawing must produce but “single spies,” I said nothing that need encourage readers to suppose that its process lay perfectly at the command of every draughtsman, and that the first-comer, did he know well how to draw, would get from the lithographic stone every quality the stone could yield. And this being so, it can surprise no one if in a chapter on the Revival of Lithography I give conspicuous place to the young men who have really fagged at it, rather than to the possibly more accomplished, the certainly more famous artists who have drawn just lately on the tracing-paper, oftener than not in complimentary recognition of the fact that now a hundred years have passed since Alois Senefelder invented the method which, half a century later, Hulmandel did something to perfect.
Mr C. H. Shannon—pre-eminently noticeable among these younger men—has been discussed already. We will look now at the work of another of them—Mr Will Rothenstein, whose mind, whose hand-work, is conspicuously unlike Mr Shannon’s, in that, though he can be romantic, he can scarcely be poetic. A vivid realism is his characteristic, and, with that vivid realism, romance, phantasy, caprice—either or all—may find themselves in company; but poetry, hardly. Mr Rothenstein—as there is some reason, perhaps, for telling the collector—is not only young, but extremely young. His series of Oxford lithographs were wrought, most of them, when he was between twenty and two-and-twenty years old. It was an audacious adventure, with youth for its excuse. For this set of Oxford portraits was to be the abstract of the Oxford of a day. In it, Professors and Heads of Houses are—men who for perhaps a generation remain in their place—but in it, too, are athletes, engaging undergraduates, lads whose achievements may become a tradition, but whose places know them no more. The first part of the “Oxford Characters”—that is the proper name of it—appeared in June 1893. In it, is the portrait of that great Christ Church boating man, W. L. Fletcher, and a portrait of Sir Henry Acland, for which another more august-looking rendering of the same head and figure was after a while substituted. Again, there is an admirable vision of Max Müller—Mr Rothenstein’s high-water mark, perhaps, in that which he might probably suppose to be the humble art of likeness-taking.
Quite outside the charmed Oxford life are the subjects of some of Mr Rothenstein’s generally piquant portraits. There is the portrait of Emile Zola, for instance. I never saw the man. This may or may not be a terre-à-terre view of him. Most probably it is. But certainly the face, with its set lips and hollow cheeks, is cleverly rendered, though in such rendering we may fancy not so much the author of the Faute de l’Abbé Mouret and of the Page d’Amour, as the author of Nana and of Le Ventre de Paris. Again, there is a portrait, at once refined and forcible, of that great gentleman, path-breaking novelist, and dainty connoisseur, Edmond de Goncourt, elderly, but with fires unquenched in the dark, piercing eyes, and the great decoration, so to say, of snow-white hair. Then again, the pretty, pleasing lady, the fresh young thing with her big bonnet—the lady seen full-face, her lips drawn so tenderly. Such flesh and blood as hers, had the Millament of Congreve. If sometimes in them the anatomy of the figures is expressed insufficiently, these works are at least executed with well-acquired knowledge of the effects to which Lithography best lends itself. It can escape no one that, whatever be their faults, the artist utters in them a note that is his own.
To trace, with fairness, the revival of Lithography, even in England only, it should be mentioned that a generation after the achievements of Samuel Prout—his records of architecture in Flanders and in Germany—and the somewhat overrated performances of Harding, the members of the Hogarth Sketching Club made one night, at the house of Mr Way, the elder—the date was the 15th of December, 1874—a set of drawings on the stone. They must be rare, now. Indeed the only copy I have seen was that shown to me at the printing-house in Wellington Street. One of the best was Charles Green’s drawing of two men—ostlers, both of them, or of ostler rank—one of them lighting his pipe. The hand is excellently modelled: the light and shade of the whole subject has crispness and vigour. Sir James Linton contributed a Coriolanus subject, in something more than outline, though not fully expressed—and yet it is beautifully drawn. Mr Coke sent a Massacre of the Innocents, classic and charming in contour; while to look at the Sir Galahad of Mr E. J. Gregory is to recall to mind completely the great Romantic Gregory of that early day.
In the Paris Exhibition of Lithographs and in that at Mr Dunthorne’s, there have figured a group of subjects done lately by well-known Academicians and others, and printed—some of them with novel effects—by or under the close direction of Mr Goulding, that famous printer of etchings, who now, it seems, has the laudable ambition of rivalling, as a printer of lithographs, the great house of Way. He has his own methods. The original work is of extremely various quality. Much of it was produced somewhat hurriedly. I do not mean that the drawings were done rapidly, or that it would have been wrong if they had been; for, obviously, the rapid drawing of the capable is often as fine as the slowest, and has the interest of a more urgent message. I mean that they were done, for the most part, by those not versed, as yet, in such secrets as Lithography possesses. Yet, coming often from artists of distinction, many of them have merits. Not much is finer than a girl’s head, by Mr Watts. It is mostly “in tone”; and it is scarcely too much to say of it that it is strong as anything of Leonardo’s—as anything of Holbein’s, one might as easily declare, did not Holbein’s name suggest, along with strength, a certain austerity which Mr Watts mostly avoids. There is a graceful figure-drawing by Lord Leighton, who was interested in the new movement, but who was far too sensible to set vast store by what—as I remember that he wrote to tell me—was the only lithographic drawing he had ever executed. There are strong studies by Sargent—rather brutal perhaps in light and shade—of male models, whose partial nudity there is little to render interesting.
We are brought back then to the work of artists not Academicians at all—men some of them comparatively young in years, but older in a faithful following of the lines on which the craft of Lithography most properly moves. There is Mr C. J. Watson, for instance. The personal note—which, I cannot conceal it, I esteem most of all, and most of all must revel in—the personal note may be, with him, a little wanting; but thorough craftsman he undeniably is. And by Mr Oliver Hall, one of the most delightful of our younger etchers, who as an etcher has been treated in his place, there is a vision of some grey sweeping valley—Wensleydale—with trees only in middle distance, or in the remote background. In it, and perhaps even more especially in that quite admirable lithograph, The Edge of the Moor, we recognise that way of looking at the world which we know in the etchings; but the intelligence and sensitiveness of the artist have suffered him, or led him rather, to modify the work: to properly adapt it to the newer medium. The Edge of the Moor is, I have implied, quite masterly; and then again there is a tree-study in which Mr Hall recalls those broad and massive, yet always elegant sketches made by the great Cotman, in the latest years, generally, of a life not too prolonged.
Again, among fine lithographs exhibited or not exhibited, there is, by Mr Raven Hill, The Oyster-Barrow—a marvellously vivid, faithful study of “Over the Water” (or of Dean’s Yard, it may be) by night—and the equally momentary, spontaneous vision of The Baby, with the rotundity of Boucher, and more than the expressiveness of the late Italian: a baby lost, one must avow, to all angelic dreams, and set on carnal things. Perhaps Mr George Thomson’s best lithograph remains the Brentford Eyot, though there is charm of movement in at least one figure-study. By Mr Charles Sainton there is a luxurious head of just the type one might expect from the author of silver-points seductive and popular. Mr Walter Sickert’s work, whether you like it or not, at least has, visibly, its source in personal observation and deliberate principle.
By M. Théodore Roussel there are a whole group of lithographs, dainty and delightful, exquisite and fresh—with so much of his own in them, as well as something, of course, of Mr Whistler’s. By the side of his Scene on the River—a quaint Battersea or Chelsea bit, I take it—place one of his supple nudities, and against his supple nudity, place his Opera Cloak. Charming! all of them. The man is a born artist—he not only draws but sees: sees with refinement and distinction. And there must come a time when Roussel’s work will be appreciated far more widely.
By Mr Jacomb Hood there is a spirited elderly man’s portrait, and an Idyll—a Classical or an Arcadian pas de quatre—of singular, unwonted charm. By Mr Corbett, the semi-classical landscape painter, there is a nude study—a torso, magnificently modelled. By Mr Solomon Solomon there is a Venus, correct in draughtsmanship of course; nor wanting in dramatic quality, for it is not the undressed woman of too many students, but Aphrodite herself—“Vénus, à sa proie attachée.” And lastly—since I cannot merely catalogue—there is Mr Anning Bell, who has bestowed on us enjoyable designs—book-plates hors ligne indeed, so charming are they in their reticence and grace and measured beauty. In Lithography, we may be thankful for the Tanagra-like grace of his Dancing Girl. But “Why Tanagra?” am I asked. Because Classical without austerity: provokingly Modern, and yet endowed with the legitimate and endless fascination of Style.
And now, to end with, it seems advisable to say something on the very practical matter of the acquisition of lithographs by the collector, and on their cost. The money value of the lithograph is most uncertain. When the lithograph appears in a popular magazine—the actual lithograph, remember; no merely photographic reproduction of it—it is, on publication, valued at a couple of shillings, or at a shilling, or, as in the extraordinary case of publication in the extinct Whirlwind, even at a penny. The prices I have named are, most of them at least, absurd; but on the other hand the dealer’s price—sometimes the original artist’s price—for an impression, is wont to be excessive. A lithograph can be printed—as magazine issue suffices to show—in considerable numbers. Nothing restricts it as the ordinary unsteeled etching is restricted: still less, as the dry-point is restricted. There is no reason, except the scantiness of the public demand, why it should not be issued in an edition almost as large as that of the average book. Nor is the printing costly. Nor has the drawing on stone or transfer-paper involved anything more of labour, skill, or genius, than is involved in the preparation of a single chapter of a fine novel—of a single paragraph in a fine short story. Yet while the novel sells probably at six shillings, and the whole short story (and other short stories along with it) sells, very likely, at three-and-sixpence, the impression of a lithograph—unless, as I have said before, it be published in a magazine—is seldom sold for less than a guinea or two. The Fine Art Society asked something like three guineas apiece, I think, for the lithographs of Whistler, even when it first exhibited them. Things, of course, have occurred that have raised their value since. I mentioned the circumstance to a man who was interested in the question, both as artist and connoisseur. “You do not want to vulgarise lithographs,” he said, “by issuing too many impressions.” I wonder how many impressions of Gray’s “Elegy” have been issued? And how many of the “Ode to Duty”? And I wonder whether Wordsworth and Gray have been “vulgarised,” because the fruit of their genius has been widely diffused?