Engraving: Its Origin, Processes, and History

by comte Henri Delaborde

The few painters who, like Regnault, were more or less independent of David's influence, or, like Prud'hon, had ventured to create an entirely original method, were admired by so small a public that their pictures were not generally reproduced in engraving and thus could do little for the progress of the art. Some, however, of Prud'hon's drawings and pictures met, under the Directory and the Empire, with excellent interpreters in Copia and in Barthélemy Roger; while in the last years of the eighteenth century Bervic's engraving of Regnault's "Éducation d'Achille" had obtained at least as much success as the original had won in the Salon of 1783. To give a companion to this justly celebrated piece, Bervic soon after published his "Enlèvement de Déjanire," after Guido. This work, to which the judges of the Decennial Competition awarded the prize in preference to any engraving published in France from 1800 to 1810, by confirming the engraver's reputation, caused his fellow-craftsmen to return once more to the old path of progress.

It must not, however, be supposed that Bervic did not himself diverge somewhat from the way of the masters: it may even be said that he was always more inclined to skirt it than to follow it resolutely. At the outset he was not sufficiently alive to the perils of facility; and later on he was apt to attach too much importance to certain quite material qualities. Yet it must be added that he never went so far as to entirely sacrifice essentials to accessories, and that more than once—in his fine full-length of Louis XVI. for instance—he displayed an ability all the more laudable as the original was by no means inspiring.

Fig. 95.—BERVIC.

"L'Éducation d'Achille." After Regnault.

From the engraving it is hard to suspect the mediocrity of Callet's picture. This, now at Versailles, is insipidly coloured and loosely and clumsily drawn; the print, on the contrary, is to be admired for its solid appearance, and its easy yet unostentatious handling. Lace, satin, velvet, all accessories, indeed, are treated with a largeness of touch by no means at variance with delicacy, and the general tone is harmoniously luminous. Here and there, however, is already visible a certain artifice of manner which threatens to degenerate into an unwise cultivation of fine line, and end in an abuse of skill. This, indeed, is what happened. Bervic, henceforth, thought of little else but dexterity, and ended in his "Laocoon," perhaps the best known of all his works, by a display of common technical fireworks, to a certain extent surprising, but by no means to be unreservedly admired. The care with which he set himself to imitate the grain of marble by minute workmanship is only trifling with his subject; and though a group of statues cannot be treated in the same way as figures painted on canvas, it was more important, and more desirable in every respect, to reproduce the character and style of the original than to imitate the substance in which it was wrought.

Moreover, in the attempt so to interpret his model, Bervic has defeated his own purpose. By a multitude of details, and an abuse of half-lights intended to bring out the slightest accidents of form and modelling, he has only succeeded in depriving the general aspect of brilliancy and unity.

Far removed, indeed, was such a method from that of the Old Masters, and Bervic lived long enough to change his mind. "I have missed the truth," he declared in his old age, "and if I could begin life again I should do nothing I have done." There he wronged himself. As happens often in tardy repentances, he remembered past errors only to exaggerate them; but we must be juster to the engraver of the "Louis XVI." and "L'Éducation d'Achille" than he was to himself, and not forget that much of his work should be excluded from the sweeping condemnation which he launched upon the whole.

Whilst Bervic was counted the greatest French engraver, Italy boasted of a man, his inferior in reality, but whom, in the existing dearth of talent, his countrymen agreed to thrust into the glorious eminence of a master. Like Canova, his senior by a few years only, Raphael Morghen had the good fortune to be born at the right time. Both second-rate artists, they would have passed almost unnoticed in a more favoured century; as it was, in the absence of contemporary rivals, their compatriots accepted their accidental superiority as a proof of absolute merit. Moreover, by merely submitting in some sort to the dictates of opinion and of public taste, their popularity and success were easily assured. The writings of Winckelmann and Raphael Mengs had brought antique statues and Italian pictures of the sixteenth century once more into favour; so that Canova, by imitating the former more or less cleverly, and Morghen by engraving the latter, could neither of them fail to please, and it is especially to their choice of subjects that we must attribute the great reputation they both enjoyed.

Morghen, the pupil and son-in-law of Volpato, whose weak engravings from the "Stanze," in the Vatican, are known to every one, shared with that feeble artist, and with Longhi, the privilege of reproducing admirable paintings, which had either never been engraved, or not since the time of the masters. This alone gives a certain value to his plates, faulty as they are. Assuredly, for instance, the engraving of Leonardo's "Last Supper" reproduces no more than the general lines of the composition and the attitude of the figures. We look at it as we might listen to an inferior actor reading verses from "Polyeucte" or "Athalie," because the inspiration of the master is still to be felt, in spite of the intermediary of expression; only the sort of beauty inherent in the conception and arrangement of the original remains in this piece of Morghen's. What can be said of the head of the Saviour, like those of the Apostles, restored by the engraver, and unillumined by the faintest glimmer of sentiment? How is it possible, examining the work in detail, not to be offended by the arrogance of the technique and the display of mere mechanical facility, when one remembers the incomparable accuracy of Leonardo and his perfection of style?