6 × 8¼. SUNSET, BLACK ROCK.
Splatter-work.
Here follows [an experiment with diluted inks]: the drawing made upon HP Whatman with all manner of nibs. It is all pen-work, worked with black stain, and with writing ink watered down to different values. This is an attempt to render as truthfully as possible (and as unconventionally) the sunset shine and shadow of a lonely shore, blown upon with the wild winds of the Channel. A little stream, overgrown with bents and waving rushes, flows between a break in the low cliffs and loses itself in the sands. The sun sets behind the ruined house, and between it and the foreground is a clump of storm-bent trees, constrained to their uneasy inward pose not by present breezes, but to this shrinking habit of growth by long-continued stress of weather. The block is by Gillot, of Paris, who was asked to get the appearance of the original drawing in a line-block. This he has not altogether succeeded in doing: perhaps it was impossible; but the feeling is here. It is a line-block, rouletted all over in the attempt to get the effect produced by watered inks. The roulettes, by which these greynesses are produced, are peculiar instruments, consisting of infinitesimal wheels of hard steel whose edges are fashioned into microscopically small points or facets. Mounted at the end of a stick more nearly resembling a penholder than anything else, the wheel is driven along (and into) the surface of the metal by pressure, making small indentations in it. There are varieties of roulettes, the differences between them lying in the patterns of the projections from the wheel. The varieties in the texture of rouletting seen in this print are thus explained.
10 × 6½. DRAWING IN DILUTED INKS, REPRODUCED BY GILLOT.
Block touched up by hand and freely rouletted.
Now come some experiments in mixtures. The mixed drawing has many possibilities of artistic expression, and here are some essays in mixtures, harnessed to tentative employments of process.
First is this experiment in pen and pencil reproduced in half-tone. It is a view of [Chepstow Castle]—that really picturesque old border fortress—from across the river Wye, a river that comes rushing down from the uplands with an impetuous current full of swirls and eddies. The town of Chepstow lies at the back, represented in this drawing only by its lights. The huts and sheds that straggle down to the waterside, and the rotting pier, where small vessels load and unload insignificant cargoes, are commonplace enough, but they go to make a fine composition; and the last sunburst in the evening sky, the stars already brilliant, and the white gleams from the hurrying river, are immensely valuable, and things of joy to the practitioner in black and white. Rain had fallen during the day, and, when the present writer sat down to sketch, still lent a fine impending juicy air to the scene that seemed incapable of adequate translation into pure line; therefore, upon the pencil sketch was added pen-work, and to that more pencil, and, when finished, the drawing was sent to be processed, with special instructions that the white spaces in the sky should be preserved, together with those on the buildings, but that all else might acquire the light grey tint which the half-tone always gives, as of a drawing made upon paper of a silvery grey. In the result you can see this purely arbitrary, but delightful, ground tint everywhere; it gives absolutely the appearance of a drawing made upon tinted cardboard, but, truly, the only paper employed was a common, rough make, that would be despised of the lordly amateur. Here you see the half-tone process on its best behaviour, and I think it has secured a very notable result.