Engraving: Its Origin, Processes, and History

by comte Henri Delaborde

[CHAPTER VII.]

FRENCH ENGRAVERS IN THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV.

We have followed through all its stages the progress of the art of engraving, from the time of its earliest more or less successful attempts, to the time when a really important advance was accomplished. However brilliant these early phases may have been, properly speaking they include but the beginnings of the art. The epoch we are now to traverse is that of its complete development and fullest perfection.

We have seen that the schools of Italy and the Low Countries had, each in its own direction, largely increased the resources of engraving, without exhausting them. The quality of drawing would seem to have been carried to an inimitable perfection in the works of Marc Antonio, had not examples of a keener sense of form and an exactness even more irreproachable been discovered in those of the French masters of the seventeenth century. The engravings produced under the direct influence of Rubens only remained the finest specimens of the science of colour and effect until the appearance of the plates engraved in Paris by Gérard Audran. Finally, though the older engravers had set themselves the task of accentuating a certain kind of beauty, suitable to the peculiar tastes and capacities of the schools to which they belonged, none of them had sought, at least with any success, to present in one whole all the different species of beauty inherent in the art. It was reserved for the French engravers of the age of Louis XIV. to unite in one supreme effort qualities which till then had seemed to exclude each other. While they proved themselves draughtsmen as skilful and colourists as good as the best of their predecessors, they excelled them in their harmonious fusion of whatever qualities are appropriate to engraving, as also in the elasticity of their theory and the all-round capacity of their method.

The works of the Louis XIII. engravers heralded this new departure, and prepared the way for the real masters. As soon as, with a view to securing a certain measure of independence, the French school of painting had begun to free itself from the spirit of systematic imitation, the art of line engraving proceeded resolutely along an open path, and marked its course by still more significant improvements. To say nothing of Thomas de Leu—who for that matter was not, perhaps, born in France[33]—and nothing of Léonard Gaultier, who, like De Leu, principally worked in the reign of Henri IV., Jean Morin, whose method, at once so picturesque and so firm, was the result of a peculiar combination of acid, dry-point and the graver, Michel Lasne, Claud Mellan—in spite of the somewhat pretentious ease and rather affected skill of his handling—and other line engravers, variously capable, each after his kind, are found to owe nothing to foreign example. Their works already do more than hint at the new departure; but we are approaching the period when distinguished engravers become so common in the French school, that in this place we need only mention those whose names are still of special importance.

Robert Nanteuil, one of the most eminently distinguished, and, taking them chronologically, one of the first, was destined for the bar, and in his youthful tastes showed none of that irresistible tendency to the arts which is the common symptom of great talent. Whilst studying literature and science at Rheims, where he was born in 1626, he also took up drawing and engraving, but with no idea of devoting himself steadily to either. It seems, however, that after having merely dallied in odd moments with the art which was one day to make him famous, he very soon concluded that he had served a sufficient apprenticeship; for at nineteen he set about engraving the frontispiece to his own philosophical thesis.

Fig. 82.—JEAN MORIN.

Antoine Vitré. After Philippe de Champagne.

It was in those days the custom to ornament such writings with figures and symbols appropriate to the candidate's position, or to the subject of his argument. The most distinguished painters did not disdain to design originals, and the frontispieces engraved from Philippe de Champagne, Lesueur, and Lebrun, are not unworthy of the talent and reputation of those great men. Nanteuil, in emulation, was anxious not only to produce a masterpiece, but to invest it with an appearance of grandeur as little fitted to his position as to his slender acquaintance with the art. However that may have been, he sustained his thesis to the satisfaction of the judges; and, albeit an exceedingly bad one, his engraving was admired in the society which he frequented.[34] Some verses addressed to ladies[35] still further increased his reputation as a universal genius. Unfortunately, to all these public successes were added others of a more purely personal nature, which were soon noised abroad; and it would appear that, fresh adventures having led to a vexatious scandal, Nanteuil, who shortly before had married the sister of the engraver Regnesson, was compelled to leave, almost in secrecy, a place where once he had none save admirers and friends. By a fatal coincidence the fugitive's family was ruined at the same time: it became imperative for him to live by his own work, and to seek his fortune in the practice of draughtsmanship.