Prints: A Brief Review of Their Technique and History

by Emil H. Richter

VII
FRANCE

Having considered the fate of the graphic arts in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, our attention must dwell for a while on developments of the printed picture in France. In each of the countries above mentioned, we have witnessed a definite era of excellence in the sphere of prints; in Germany and in Italy, this zenith was reached in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In the Netherlands, as we have just seen, the great awakening took place fully a century later. In this same seventeenth century, toward its close, as art declines in the Low Countries, French engraving rises to its highest perfection.

We needs must deal briefly with early French productions in relief and intaglio processes. Woodcut first: some few examples of early playing-cards which have survived destruction to these days, prove the trade of the card-printer to have flourished in France as well as in Germany. Book-printing speedily grew to important proportions; great printing firms were founded in Lyons and elsewhere, and carried on an extensive trade. Men of artistic originality, like Geoffroy Tory, knew how to infuse a distinctive character into type and illustration of their books; but apart from a few choice spirits, artistic France is not conspicuous in these early productions. Not only is printing largely carried on by printers from Germany and Switzerland, but these countries likewise furnish a large share of the relief-blocks needed for illustration. The Holbein “Dance of Death” is a notable instance of this practice. That series of wood-blocks had passed to Lyons, and there one edition after another was printed from the blocks, until they were quite worn out. Woodcut never was, in France, the important means of artistic expression which we have found it to have been in Germany. Its days sped by unheeded. The chief field of usefulness of the woodcut, the decoration and illustration of books and the sphere of the devotional print, were invaded by the intaglio processes. The woodcut lost ground everywhere in the seventeenth century; it had practically no share in solving the problems set to the graphic arts by the rising schools of Dutch, Flemish, and French painters. It sank to mere imitation of the fashionable book-decorations done in etching or engraving. The true, bold language of woodcut, spoken during the sixteenth century, finds no counterpart in the seventeenth; we must, therefore, turn to engraving, to vindicate France as a great center of development in the graphic arts.

TOUR DE NESLE

Jacques Callot

In the early sixteenth century we meet in Jean Duvet an engraver of original merit. He adopts in his work the style of certain early Italian engravers. In his compositions he harks back to Dürer’s imaginative genius. A little later Etienne Delaune appears, affecting the elongated figures of contemporary Italians, while in his graver-work one discerns a resemblance with the manner of the German “little masters.” In etching a vital impulse is given to French work about the middle of the sixteenth century. At that time Francis I called Italian artists to France for the decoration of his castle of Fontainebleau. Many of these Italian artists—Primaticcio, Fantuzzi, and others—made use of etching occasionally in a hasty, sketchy style. The sensuous charm of their lithe, long figures appealed to French taste, and elicited a response in the plates etched by Jean Cousin, for instance. In all this early production we feel the dominating influence of Italian art, with an occasional echo of German thought or German technique. France seeks her own language in the graphic arts, and timidly ventures forth in an original manner of expression. This diffidence is of brief duration, however, and by the end of the seventeenth century we find her a leader in engraving, and by no means in engraving only. As we enter upon this broad development, we must cast a glance on two personalities of distinct originality, namely, Jacques Callot and Claude Lorrain. Both are natives of Lorraine, both are schooled in the art centers of Italy. Callot, endowed with an impulsive, expressive style, full of personal qualities, vividly describes in his plates the habits, customs, pleasures, the life, in short, of France and Italy at his time. He peoples his plates with multitudes of minute figures, with well-accented gestures. These little figures are written down, as it were, with consummate skill; they are expressive in their concerted action; in their grouping, these peasants, soldiers, beggars, cripples, actors, courtiers, as they troop across the scene, unfold a bird’s-eye view of the world in the midst of which the artist lived. From the vast number of his prints, let us select for illustration one of his views of old Paris, with the Tour de Nesle prominent in the foreground. In his hundreds of plates we see the miseries of warfare described as well as the gayety of public festivities and the pomp of ceremonies of state which he witnessed in Florence. Claude Lorrain, an originator and gifted exponent of landscape, has occasionally taken up the etching-needle, largely in an experimental spirit, modifying his technique at different times, and showing himself, like other noted painters and occasional etchers, infinitely more clever in the design than in the actual etching. The plate chosen for illustration, called “Le Bouvier,” is the most famous of his prints; in it we perceive (provided we see a fine early impression) the rich tonal effect, the sense of airiness, of space, the delightful composition, the knowledge of nature’s forms and of atmospheric aspects, which appear far more markedly still in the paintings of this master.

LE BOUVIER

Claude Lorrain