The Burlington magazine

by Unknown

BRITISH ENGRAVING AT THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM

THE Exhibition of British engraving which has been arranged at the Victoria and Albert Museum is of considerable interest and importance. Moreover, it is timely; for the trend of fashion in engravings has of late been in a direction so limited, that the need was very apparent of a corrective to a popular point of view by no means entirely warranted by the facts. The cult of the colour-print and mezzotint has been pursued beyond all reasonable bounds. In the hands of able merchants and indiscriminating patrons it has reached a mere absurdity—expressed in market values. The whole matter has got out of scale; and the most serious criticism that could be launched against the present exhibition—that it tried to cover a field too wide—is fully met by the absolute desirability of reminding the British public that there were line engravings of some importance; that aquatint had been used with results of no little value; that etching was not a lost art, and that mezzotints of subjects other than those devoted to portraits of pretty women were by no means ignoble. ¶ The art of line engraving was but tardily settled in this country, for some doubtful reason, not until well-nigh a century after it had reached a pitch of high perfection on the continent. Its tangible beginnings are represented at South Kensington by the superb title-page of the ‘Anatomy’ of Thomas Gemini (1545). But the work of William Rogers is the first of importance by a native-born artist. By him, we have the superb portrait of Queen Elizabeth, lent by his Majesty the King from the collection at Windsor; and three plates from Segar’s ‘Honor Military and Ciuill,’ Sir Thomas Docwra, Godfreydus Adelmar, and Alphonsus Rex Castiliensis. These very fairly represent the strongly individual talent of Rogers, who used a most expressive line with care and economy; and in his employment of the dot for the modelling of faces, foreshadowed the invention of stipple by more than a hundred years. ¶ The method of Thomas Coxon is not represented in the exhibition; but that of Elstracke, a Flemish contemporary has full justice done to it by the fine Prince Charles, as well as other prints from the King’s collection. His Majesty has also contributed most of the best examples of the severe and dry manner of the De Passe family, who had an influence so great on British line engraving; but whose technique, however able, seems to lack something, and to have destroyed the decorative qualities which were already apparent in the earlier group. An interesting comparison may be made between the Queen Elizabeth of Crispin de Passe and that of Rogers mentioned before. Of the engravers of the later part of the seventeenth century, mention need only be made of the fact that Faithorne the elder, David Loggan, Sherwin, and White, all receive ample justice in the exhibition; and this means that under their names will be found some of the finest prints exhibited in any branch of engraving. The line engraving of the eighteenth century developed for the best in subjects other than portraiture. Thus we have the strong work of that turbulent spirit, Sir Robert Strange, devoted mainly to the translation of paintings by the great masters; and that of William Woollett and his school to landscape, especially after Claude. Woollett is well represented by four plates attributed entirely to him, and by two in which Ellis and Vivares avowedly collaborated. But of the first it must be said that a note in Dance’s ‘Portraits’ expressly states that Thomas Hearne, the water-colour artist, who was apprenticed to Woollett, ‘etched’ the Roman Edifices in Ruins. The working proof exhibited at Kensington (No. 146) is, if this is true, in great part the work of Hearne. We have little space on this occasion for more than the merest summary of the contents of the gallery; an adequate notice of which would indeed require at least a whole number of this magazine. It is only possible therefore, in passing from the subject of line engraving, to draw special attention to Mr. Rawlinson’s splendid loan of specimens of the fine school fostered especially by J. M. W. Turner; to the numerous proofs of the delicate work produced by the book illustrators of about the same period; and to the interesting and unique examples of working and finished proofs of the Landseer school—portions of a collection which came to the National Art Library by the generosity of Mr. Sheepshanks—in its way, probably unrivalled.

QUEEN ELIZABETH; LINE ENGRAVING BY WILLIAM ROGERS; IN THE COLLECTION OF HIS MAJESTY THE KING

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ROMAN EDIFICES IN RUINS; LINE ENGRAVING BY THOMAS HEARNE AND WILLIAM WOOLLETT, AFTER CLAUDE; WORKING PROOF; IN THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM

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There is little to say, in this place, on the subject of the mezzotints. His Majesty has lent a magnificent impression of The Great Executioner, by Prince Rupert, after Spagnoletto; a print which strikes one as perhaps in its vigour and splendid painter-like qualities the finest in the gallery. The rest of the mezzotints are generally well known, though to the credit of the exhibition it must be said that the preponderance of the fashionable, if insipid class, is not overwhelming. The Wards are hardly as good as they might be; especially in view of the large amount of space given to Charles Turner. But The Water Mill by the latter, after Sir A. W. Callcott, makes one very charitable towards him. It is certainly one of the finest examples of the value of mezzotint as a method of rendering landscape. Mr. Rawlinson, again, lends some valuable examples of the ‘Liber Studiorum’ which are carefully and instructively catalogued. Among the modern work, that of Mr. Frank Short holds, of course, the first place, for he is one of the very few living mezzotinters who can be said to take rank with the best of the old men in technique. The pretty art of stipple receives due attention; and so do the colour-prints, of which the best are, it is good to find, the property of the museum. The art of etching is well shown from Hollar, the group of imitators of Rembrandt in the eighteenth century, the Norwich school, and Wilkie and Geddes in the nineteenth, down to the etching clubs and our own times. Most of this work is well known, for etching has been better served in the matter of literature than any of its sister arts: and it is the only one which has real life at the present day. A most important complement to the exhibited prints is furnished by a series of technical cases, containing complete sets of all tools and materials used in each of the various methods of engraving and etching; as well as examples of all the intermediate stages of working them. These were arranged by Mr. Frank Short and Miss C. M. Pott, and their descriptive notes in the catalogue make it a really useful little manual of technique for the amateur. It only remains to add that the illustration of Rogers’s Queen Elizabeth is reproduced by the gracious permission of his Majesty the King, who has also allowed a photogravure to be made of The Great Executioner, by Prince Rupert, which will appear as a supplement to the next number of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE. The other illustrations are from the collection of prints in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

EDWARD F. STRANGE.

BRITISH MUSEUM
DEPARTMENT OF BRITISH AND MEDIAEVAL ANTIQUITIES

Among the additions to the department of British and mediaeval antiquities during the past half year are several objects of exceptional interest. In the ceramic section, a large two-handled vase of Florentine maiolica of the fifteenth century, with heraldic lions upon the sides, forms a worthy pendant to the magnificent vase of the same fabric acquired last year; while the series of oriental wares has been enriched by a writing-stand, or stand for flowers, of the twelfth or thirteenth century, ornamented with animals of archaic style in relief, and attributed to a factory in the neighbourhood of Aleppo. The acquisitions to the collection of glass exhibited in the same room include an enamelled German drinking-glass of the late sixteenth century, a very good example of its kind. ¶ In the mediaeval room the most notable additions will be found in the series of ivory carvings. Here the place of honour belongs to the beautiful head of a tau cross in morse ivory, dating from the eleventh century, recently discovered in the vicarage garden of Alcester, Warwickshire, which will be fully described next month in these pages. Secondly, there is a small but important group of ivories formerly in the possession of the Rev. Walter Sneyd, of Keele Hall, and exhibited in the art treasures exhibition at Manchester in 1857, and at South Kensington in 1862. Although few of the pieces composing this group are of high artistic merit, they are valuable as illustrations of the development of ivory carving during the early middle ages, a period which needed fuller representation in the museum collections. The most remarkable is an oval pyx of the form favoured between the fourth and seventh centuries, especially in Egypt and Syria. Its interest lies in the fact that it appears to be a Carlovingian imitation of a Syrian original dating from perhaps two centuries earlier. It differs essentially in style from the other examples which have been preserved, and the heavy, large-headed figures, with their long, retorted fingers, find their nearest parallels in the miniatures of Carlovingian MSS. Then there is a Byzantine panel, apparently by the same hand as a plaque acquired by the museum at the Ashburnham sale in 1901. This plaque was let into the cover of a thirteenth-century MS. of the romance of ‘Parceval le Galois,’ but originally belonged to a casket ornamented with scenes from the history of Joseph, two large panels from which have been for many years in the Berlin museum. It is satisfactory now to record the acquisition from the Sneyd collection of yet another example marked by the same individuality of style, and perhaps once forming a part of the same composition. Another small piece of Byzantine work not without charm is a panel from the lid of a casket of the ninth century, with figures probably from one of the classical scenes so popular during the iconoclastic period. Finally there are two long panels with seated apostles, Rhenish work of the twelfth century, and a smaller panel with the Flagellation, of similar attribution and date. An interesting accession in the sphere of prehistoric industrial art is a remarkably large bronze spear-head, inlaid at the base of the blade with gold studs, a fine example of the skill and taste of the metal-workers of Britain towards the close of the bronze age.

O. M. D.

THE WATER MILL, MEZZOTINT BY C. TURNER AFTER SIR A. W. E. CALCOTT, R.A.; IN THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM

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THE HÔTEL DE VILLE AT LOUVAIN; COLOURED AQUATINT BY J. C. STADLER, AFTER S. PROUT; IN THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM

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