INSTRUCTION PATERNELLE (The “Satin Gown”)
Georg Wille
In France the triumphs which painter-etching achieved in the Netherlands had but a faint echo: Callot and Claude Lorrain have already been mentioned. Painters like Lebrun or Largillière left the graphic arts to the engravers; they viewed their skillful translations of painting into black and white as the work of colleagues, not craftsmen. We have noted the influence of Watteau on the “etcher-engravers”; he himself handled the etching-point at times, in a few sketchy plates; Boucher, Fragonard, and others dabbled in etching a little, nothing more. Jean Jacques de Boissieu and Jean Pierre Norblin, the latter an enthusiastic student of Rembrandt’s perplexing technique, should be mentioned as leading exponents of etching before the great nineteenth-century revival to which we shall presently turn. Now we must leave France, with the classical engravers at the helm, their formula spreading far and wide and with the vignettists busy on their portrayal of French society at the end of the ancien régime. As Watteau had shown us the customs of the grandfathers, at the beginning of the century, so Saint-Aubin, Eisen, Moreau, and other clever artists show us the life of the grandchildren: a society bound up in the pursuit of pleasure, blindly rushing on toward exile or the guillotine of the French Revolution.
PLATE FROM THE CAPRICHOS
Francisco Goya
Before proceeding to English prints, let us glance at the one prominent figure in Spanish etching: Francisco Goya. A painter-etcher of intense feeling, fiery, impulsive, he feels acutely the evils under which his country is groaning. In an art largely allusive and bitterly satirical, he conjures before us an abyss of human wretchedness, greed, and misrule in those strange “Caprichos” from which an illustration has been selected. In other series he shows with the same graphic power the hazards of the bull-fight, and again the fearful consequences of warfare. Filled with his thought, he compels the copper to express the intensity of his conception. His medium is whatever will convey the message, usually an etched outline, modeled into with aquatint in a bold sketchy manner. His few, rare lithographs have the same powerful characteristics, and it is this energy of expression which makes his prints distinctive and desirable.
VIII
ENGLAND
In point of time England is last, among European countries, in bringing forth any important manifestation in the realm of prints. During the early centuries of engraving the artistic demands of the country were supplied by foreigners. In the seventeenth century Wenzel Hollar accompanied the Earl of Arundel to England, and the name of this prolific etcher is, without a doubt, the most important for that period. Among his 2750 plates are landscapes, views, portraits, plates of costumes and events of the day, allegories, and what-not: all done with the skill of the practiced etcher, though not exalted by the master-touch of genius. Other foreign-born engravers are not lacking; among native Britons, Faithorne, Robert White, and George Vertue are the most noted. A portrait by William Faithorne gives an idea of early English work. It cannot offer anything new, relying as it does on the art of the Continent for every artistic impulse; imitative, not yet creative. Even well-known men of the eighteenth century—Robert Strange, William Sharp, and William Woollett, with his large ideal landscapes—hark back to the teachings of the Continent and follow in the beaten track. One personality stands out prominently in this period, a man with a message delivered by means of his prints, the painter-engraver William Hogarth, who, like Goya, uses the needle and graver as a medium for a powerful crusade against the social evils of his day. These he castigates with biting satire and forceful preachment. His might be called a literary art, with the stress laid on the moral theme, not on technical perfection.