The great European revival of etching extended to the United States in the seventies. It proved a fruitful period, with names like the Morans, Ferris, Farrar, Duveneck, Charles Platt, and many others which might be mentioned. The vogue of etching, it will be remembered, was short because mediocrities soon glutted the market and sent purchasers to other fields for a while. Interest in the process has awakened again of late, but that is matter of too recent date to be discussed in these few pages.
X
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
From a survey of prints in their varying national aspects, we have arrived now at that vast period of an art increasingly cosmopolitan, the nineteenth century. In these last hundred years nationality has blended together to a great extent; travel is not the serious matter of former times, a pastime rather than a venture; all races have intermingled in the great world-centers; students from far and near congregate in the centers of art. All these factors, and many others, contribute in making artistic expression individual, less and less national in character. No sudden phase, this, rather an insensible general trend toward individuality as the great requisite in an artist’s work. The masterpieces of the fine arts had been interpreted by means of prints since the sixteenth, and especially since the advent of the “classical” engravers in the eighteenth, century. The increasing number of these reproductive prints made it ever easier for an artist to acquaint himself, in a way, with the great achievements of the past. Finally photography, and in its wake the photo-mechanical processes, brought a flood of exact documents invaluable for study, a lure to imitation for the unimaginative or indolent, a spur to the real artist, helpful in forming his own powers.
PLATE FROM THE BOOK OF JOB
William Blake
Individuality seems the keynote of the nineteenth century; hence it may be as well not to bind ourselves to headings and subdivisions, but rather to roam at large through this enormous sphere. Goya, of whom we spoke in a preceding chapter, belongs here by right, and with Fortuny forms the Spanish contingent in the new awakening of the graphic arts. In England there lived, about the turn of the century, a visionary poet and great artist, William Blake, who fluently expressed himself in strangely fascinating compositions of religious or fantastic import, doubtless familiar to us all. Our concern is not with Blake’s drawings, in which he adds the charm of exquisite color to his command of expressive form. A plate taken from his remarkable series of illustrations to the Book of Job, shows his powerful, poetic conception of the beginning of life, when the world was young and the morning stars sang together. In a totally different way, illustrative of another phase of this same new awakening, the work of Daniel Chodowiecki shows a man concerned with the world which surrounds him. We see him here, at work in the midst of his family, on his little illustrations which went forth in their hundreds to embellish the bountiful stream of German literature.
THE HOME OF A PAINTER