For recreation he commonly turned to some other form of his craft. He tried painting, and some of his admirers would like to prove that he was a genius in this sort, but it is fairly settled that when once he became entangled in the medium of color he was lost, producing the heaviest and most unpleasing effects, and that he produced no finished work in this kind. He contributed to the technical outfit of the etcher a new varnish, the hard varnish of the lute-makers which up to that time had not been used in etching, and which, substituted for the soft ground, enabled him to execute his marvelous little figures with great lightness and delicacy, and also made it possible for him to keep several plates going at once, as he delighted to do, turning from one to another as his mood prompted him.
This Florentine period was one of countless satisfactions for him. More fortunate than many artists, he won his fame in time to enjoy it. His productions were so highly regarded during his lifetime that good proofs were eagerly sought, and to use Baldinucci's expression, were "enfermées sous sept clefs." He was known all over Europe, and about his neck he wore a magnificent gold chain given him by the Grand Duke Cosimo II, in token of esteem. In the town which he had entered so few years before in the gipsy caravan, he was now the arbiter of taste in all matters of art, highly honored, and friend of the great. When Cosimo died and the pensions of the artists were discontinued, Callot was quite past the need of princely favors, and could choose his own path. He had already refused offers from Pope and emperor and doubtless would have remained in Florence had not Prince Charles of Lorraine determined to reclaim him for his native place.
In 1621 or 1622 he returned to Nancy, never again to live in Italy. He went back preeminent among his countrymen. He had done in etching what had not been done before him and much that has not been done since. He had created a new genre and a new treatment. He had been faithful to his first lesson from Duccio and had become eloquent in his use of simple outline to express joy, fear, calm or sorrow, his work gaining from this abandonment of shadows a largeness and clearness that separates him from his German contemporaries and adds dignity to the elegance and grace of his figures. His skill with the etching needle had become so great that technical difficulties practically did not exist for him. What he wished to do he did with obvious ease and always with distinction. His feeling for synthesis and balance was as striking as his love of the curious, and as these qualities seldom go together in one mind, the result was an art extremely unlike that of other artists. It was characteristic of him that he could not copy himself, and found himself completely at a loss when he tried to repeat some of his Florentine plates under other skies.
Arrived at Nancy, he found Henry II, the then reigning Duke of Lorraine, ready to accord him a flattering welcome, and under his favor he worked with increasing success. Among the plates produced shortly after his return is one called Les Supplices, in which is represented all the punishments inflicted throughout Europe upon criminals and legal offenders. In an immense square the revolting scenes are taking place, and innumerable little figures swarm about the streets and even upon the roofs of the houses. Yet the impression is neither confused nor painful. A certain impersonality in the rendering, a serious almost melancholy austerity of touch robs the spectacle of its ignoble suggestion. Inspection of this remarkable plate makes it easy to realize Callot's supreme fitness for the tasks that shortly were to be laid upon him.
He was chosen by the Infanta Elisabeth-Claire-Eugenie of Austria to commemorate the Siege of Breda, in a series of etchings, and while he was in Brussels gathering his materials for this tremendous work he came to know Van Dyck, who painted his portrait afterward engraved by Vosterman, a superb delineation of both his face and character at this important period of his eminent career. Soon after the etchings were completed, designs were ordered by Charles IV, for the decorations of the great carnival of 1627. Callot was summoned to Paris to execute some plates representing the surrender of La Rochelle in 1628, and the prior attack upon the fortress of St. Martin on the Isle of Ré. In Paris he dwelt with his old friend Israel Henriet, who dealt largely in prints and who had followed with keen attention Callot's constantly increasing renown. Henriet naturally tried to keep his friend with him in Paris as long as possible, but Callot had lost by this time the vagrant tendencies of his youth. He was married and of a home-keeping disposition, and all that Henriet could throw in his way of stimulating tasks and congenial society, in addition to the formidable orders for which he had contracted, detained him hardly longer than a year. Upon leaving he made over all his Parisian plates save those of the great sieges to Henriet, whose name as publisher appears upon them.
Callot's return to Nancy marked the close of the second period of his art, the period in which he painted battles with ten thousand episodes revealed in one plate, and so accurately that men of war kept his etchings among their text-books for professional reference. The next demand that was made upon him to represent the downfall of a brave city came from Louis XIII, upon the occasion of his entering Nancy on the 25th of September, 1633. By a ruse Richelieu had made the entry possible, and the inglorious triumph Louis deemed worthy of commemoration by the accomplished engraver now his subject. Neither Callot's high Lorraine heart nor his brilliant instrument was subjugated, however, and he respectfully begged the monarch to absolve him from a task so revolting to his patriotism. "Sire," he said, "I am of Lorraine, and I cannot believe it my duty to do anything contrary to the honor of my Prince and my Country." The king accepted his remonstrance in good part, declaring that Monsieur of Lorraine was very happy to have subjects so faithful in affection. Certain courtiers took Callot to task, however, for his refusal to obey the will of His Majesty, and to them Callot responded that he would cut off his thumb rather than do violence to his sense of honor. Some of the artist's historians have made him address this impetuous reply to the king himself, but M. Meaume reminds us that, familiar with courts, he knew too well the civility due to a sovereign to make it probable that he so forgot his dignity. Later the king tried to allure Callot by gifts, honors and pensions, but in vain. The sturdy gentleman preferred his oppressed prince to the royal favor, and set himself to immortalizing the misfortunes of his country in the superb series of etchings which he called "Les Misères de la Guerre." He made six little plates showing in the life of the soldier the misery he both endures and inflicts upon others. These were the first free inspiration of the incomparable later set called "Les Grandes Misères," "a veritable poem," M. Meaume declares, "a funeral ode describing and deploring the sorrows of Lorraine." These sorrows so much afflicted him that he would gladly have gone back to Italy to spend the last years of his life, had not the condition of his health, brought on by his indefatigable labor, prevented him.
He lived simply in the little town where he had seen his young visions of the spirit of art, walking in the early morning with his elder brother, attending mass, working until dinner time, visiting in the early afternoon with the persons, many of them distinguished and even of royal blood, who thronged his studio, then working until evening. He rarely attended the court, but grew constantly more quiet in taste and more severe in his artistic method, until the feeling for the grotesque that inspired his earlier years were hardly to be discerned. Once only, in the tremendous plate illustrating the Temptation of Saint Anthony, did he return to his old bizarre vision of a world conceived in the mood of Dante and Ariosto.
Callot died on the 24th of March, 1635, at the age of forty-three. Still a young man, he had passed through all the phases of temperament that commonly mark the transit from youth to age. And he had used his art in the manner of a master to express the external world and his convictions concerning the great spiritual and ethical questions of his age. He enunciated his message distinctly; there were no tender gradations, no uncertainties of outline or mysteries of surface in his work. It is the grave utterance of the definite French intelligence with a note of deeper suggestion brought from those regions of ironic gloom in which the Florentine recorded his sublime despair.