The Beggars.
The Flemish engravers formed by Rubens, and their Dutch contemporaries, had no worthy successors. The revolution they accomplished in the art was brief, and did not extend beyond the Low Countries. In Italy, Dutch and Flemish engravings were naturally despised. It is said—and it is easy to believe—that those accustomed to commune with Raphael and Marc Antonio esteemed them fitting decorations "for the walls of pothouses." In France and Germany, where Italian ideas in art had reigned since the sixteenth century, they experienced at first no better reception. When at length the consideration they really deserved was accorded them, the superiority of France was established, and her engravers could no longer be expected to descend to imitation. The movement in the schools of the Low Countries, before the second half of the seventeenth century, is thus, to speak truth, a mere episode in the history of the art, and its masterpieces had no lasting influence on engraving in general. For it to have been otherwise, the engravers of other countries must have renounced, not only the national traditions, but even the models they had at hand. The method of Bolswert or of Pontius could only be usefully employed to reproduce the works of Rubens and Van Dyck. The handling of Visscher and of Suyderhoef was only suitable to such pictures as were painted in Amsterdam and Leyden.
Fig. 68.—REMBRANDT.
The Pancake-maker.
And meanwhile, when the schools of the Low Countries were shining with a lustre so brilliant and so transitory, what was doing in France? and how in France was the great age of engraving inaugurated?
[CHAPTER VI.]
THE BEGINNING OF LINE ENGRAVING AND ETCHING IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND. FIRST ATTEMPTS AT MEZZOTINT. A GLANCE AT ENGRAVING IN EUROPE BEFORE 1660.