Engraving: Its Origin, Processes, and History

by comte Henri Delaborde

It was in this way that he came to spend nearly two months at St. Cyr, in the very heart of which community he engraved his "Mme. de Maintenon," after Mignard. This portrait, paid for long previously to the last farthing, made no progress whatever; and the Mother Superior, having exhausted prayers and reproaches, and despairing of seeing it finished, addressed herself to the metropolitan. From him she obtained permission to introduce the artist into the convent, and to keep him there till the accomplishment of his task. But things went on no better. Ficquet, bored to death in his seclusion, simply slept out the time, and never touched his graver. One day he sent for the Superior, and told her that if he stayed at St. Cyr to all eternity, he could not work in the solitude they had made for him; amusement he must and would have, and in default of better, it must be the conversation of the nuns; he added, in a word, that he refused to finish the portrait unless some of them came every day to keep him company. His conditions were accepted; and to encourage him still further, some of the pupils accompanied the nuns, and played and sang to him in his room. At length the long-expected plate was ready; but Ficquet, disgusted with the work, destroyed it, and would only consent to begin again on the promise of instant liberty and a still larger sum. By these means the nuns of St. Cyr at last became possessed of the likeness of their foundress, and the little "Mme. de Maintenon"—which is perhaps Ficquet's masterpiece—made up to them for the strange exactions with which they had had to comply.

As the habit of employing etching in the execution of their works had gained ground among artists, the temptation to have recourse to this speedy process had vanquished one person after another, even those who seemed least likely to yield, whether from their position in society, or their former methods. There were soon as many amateur as professional engravers; and learning the use of the needle well enough to sketch a pastoral was soon as fashionable as turning a madrigal. Among the first to set the example was the Regent; he engraved a set of illustrations for an edition of "Daphnis et Chloe," and his initiative was followed by crowds of all ranks: great lords like the Duc de Chevreuse and the Marquis de Coigny; gentlemen of the gown, like the Président de Gravelle; financiers, scholars, and men of letters, like Watelet, Count Caylus, and D'Argenville.[44] Court ladies and the wives of plain citizens joined the throng; from the Duchesse de Luynes and the Queen herself, to Mme. de Pompadour and Mme. Reboul (who afterwards married the painter Vien), there were scores of women who amused themselves by engraving, to say nothing of the many who made it a profession.

The drawback of such pastimes, innocent enough in themselves, was that they degraded art into a frivolous amusement, and promulgated a false view of its capabilities and real object. This is what very generally happens when, on the strength of a certain degree of taste, mistaken for talent, people aspire to compass, without reflection or study, results only to be attained by knowledge and experience. The authors of such hasty work think art easy, because they are ignorant of its essentials; and the public, in its turn mistaken as to these, accepts appearances for reality, becomes accustomed to the pretence of merit, and loses all taste for true superiority. Every art may be thus perverted; and in our own days, amateur water colours, statuettes, and waltzes are as injurious to painting, sculpture, and music, as in former days, the amusement of print-making was to engraving.

Moreover, it was not art only that these prints began to injure. Prompted by gallantry, as understood by the younger Crébillon and Voisenon when they wrote their experiences, they often presented to the eyes of women scenes to the description of which they would not have listened: as a certain lady is reported to have asked Baron de Besenval, during the relation of an embarrassing adventure, to "draw a picture-puzzle of what he couldn't tell her." Often, however, engraving, as practised in the salons, appealed to quite another order of passions and ideas. In support of the great cause of the day—philosophy—all weapons seemed fair, and the needle was used to disseminate the new evangel. When Mme. de Pompadour, in her little engraving, the proofs of which were fought for by her courtiers, attempted to show "The Genius of the Arts Protecting France," she set no very dangerous example, and only proved one thing—that the said Genius did not so carefully protect the kingdom as to exclude the possibility of platitude. But when the habitués of Mme. d'Épinay and D'Holbach set themselves in their little prints to attack certain so-called mental superstitions, they unconsciously opened the door to people of a more radical turn of mind. Before the end of the century prints a good deal more crudely energetic appeared on the same subject; and the pothouse engravers, in their turn, illustrated the Père Duchêne, as the drawing-room engravers had illustrated the "Essai sur les Mœurs" and the "Encyclopédie."

Although the engraving of illustrations, or at least "light" subjects, was, in the eighteenth century, almost the only sort practised in France, even by the most eminent artists, some of these imparted to their productions a severer significance, and an appearance more in harmony with that of former work. Several—pupils of Nicolas Henri Tardieu, or of Dupuis—resisted with much constancy the encroachment of the fashionable style, and passed on to their scholars of all nations those teachings they had received in their youth. The Germans, Joseph Wagner, Martin Preisler, Schmidt, John George Wille; the Italian, Porporati; the Spaniards, Carmona and Pascal Molés; the Englishmen, Strange, Ingram, Ryland, and others, came, at close intervals, for instruction or improvement in this school. In Paris they published plates of various degrees of excellence; but, in the greater part of these, the nationality and personal sentiment of their authors are obliterated in acquired habits of taste and handling.

Wille's prints, for instance—those even which have most contributed to his fame, "Paternal Instruction," after Terburg, or the "Dutchwoman Knitting," after Mieris—might just as well, for anything one sees to the contrary, have been the work of a French engraver of the same period. They only differ from plates bearing the name of Beauvarlet or of Daullé in a certain Teutonic excess of coldness in the handling; in a somewhat staid, and, as it were, metallic stiffness of arrangement. Carmona's "François Boucher," and his "Colin de Vermont," after Roslin, and Porporati's "Tancrède et Clorinde," after Carle Vanloo, have still less of the stamp of originality.

Fig. 92.—PORPORATI.

Susannah. After Santerre.

Finally, with the exception of Ryland, by reason of the particular process he employed, and of which we shall presently have to speak—and especially of Strange, who has his own peculiar mode of feeling, and a sort of merit peculiar to himself—none of the English engravers trained in the French school fail to show the signs of close relationship. Engravers of more original talent must be looked for neither amongst historical nor portrait engravers, nor even amongst engravers of genre. For information as to the state of the art outside of France, and apart from the French school, we must rather turn to the illustrations of books and almanacs engraved by Chodowiecki at Dantzic or Berlin, or to the vast plates from ancient Roman monuments etched—not without a certain rhetorical emphasis—by Piranesi.