Size of the original etching, 4¾ × 12⅝ inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
(If supported click figure to enlarge.)
JACOB RUYSDAEL. WHEAT FIELD
Size of the original etching, 4 × 6 inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
(If supported click figure to enlarge.)
Hercules Seghers is interesting because of his choice of wild, rugged mountains for his subject-matter and of his experiments in color printing, but as an etcher he is of historical importance only.
Jacob Ruysdael displays a knowledge of tree forms and an appreciation of their beauty, rare at any time. His work at its best recalls that of the great nineteenth century master, Théodore Rousseau, though the latter’s few plates show a greater economy of means and an equal affection for Nature in her wilder moods. The Wheat Field is one of Ruysdael’s most satisfying plates. The sky, with its rolling clouds, is simply treated and shows a knowledge and reticence in the use of line denied to the greater number of his more laborious contemporaries, who, in the main, when they endeavored to “finish” a plate ended by leaving it fatigued and stiff.
Claude Gellée, called Claude Lorrain, is the one seventeenth century French landscape etcher. Born in the year 1600 in the Diocese of Toul and the Duchy of Lorraine (whence he derives the name by which he is best known), early orphaned, at the age of thirteen, after a varied and picturesque boyhood, journeyed to Rome, thence to Naples, and later to Venice. In 1627 he settled permanently in Rome, where he remained until his death in 1682.
His etchings are the fruit of that indefatigable study of nature which he pursued almost until the day of his death. Heedless of fatigue, he would spend day after day, from sunrise until nightfall, noting every phase of dawn, the glory of sunrise, or the majesty of the sunset hours. For him the modest nook held no charm and exerted no fascination. He chose for his theme Nature in her more spacious aspects—wide-stretching horizons and deep overarching skies, with clumps of stately trees, between and beyond which are to be seen castle-crowned hills, or a half-ruined temple, the relic of Imperial Rome, a passionate love for which burned with a steady flame in Claude, more Roman than the Romans themselves in his worship of the Eternal City and all that could recall her vanished glory.
Claude’s paintings are to be seen in nearly every European gallery of importance, but his etchings are seldom met with. Really fine impressions (by which alone they can be judged) are unfortunately very rare. His work would seem to divide itself into two periods: 1630 to 1637, and 1662 and 1663. It is to the earlier period that his finest work belongs, the later plates being heavy and stiff in treatment. Claude’s etchings show none of that economy and suggestiveness of line which make of Rembrandt’s most summary sketch a continuous stimulus and delight. They are highly wrought pictures, as carefully and lovingly finished in all details as are the paintings themselves. Etching, dry-point, the burnisher, and a tone produced by roughening the surface of the plate with pumice-stone or some similar material, all are called into play to produce a harmonious result, and of their kind there is nothing finer.
The Dance Under the Trees shows Claude in his most purely pastoral vein—classic pastoral—seen through Virgilian eyes and interpreted in the spirit of the Eclogues. It is carefully composed and beautifully drawn; and if, to our more modern taste, there seems a little too obvious an “arrangement,” with the two vistas balancing one another at the right and left of the central group of trees, we must remember that landscape, no less than literature or costume, has its fashions, and that, in Claude’s time, balance and proportion were esteemed of greater value than the freedom and spontaneity which we today, more insistent on the individual note, esteem the chief charm of etching.