Le Bouvier, etched in 1636, is accounted Claude’s masterpiece. “For technical quality of a certain delicate kind it is the finest landscape etching in the world. Its transparency and gradation have never been surpassed.”[13] It is the work of a real nature lover and true poet, and sums up in a few square inches all that is best of Claude’s art when it has shaken itself free from the “set scene” and theatricalities. Technically it is not less admirable. The copper has been caressed, so to speak, with the needle, until it responds by yielding all those elusive half lights and luminous shadows which play among the leaves of the noble trees to the left, while on the right the landscape fairly swims in light and air. For this same quality of sunlight Claude tries again and again in his etchings, in Sunrise with complete success. When he essays to interpret Nature in her sterner moods, as in the Flock in Stormy Weather (his one plate of the year 1651), he is far less happy. The clouds, which should be heavy with rain, are unconvincing, though the suggestion of movement in the trees is excellent, and in no other plate has he treated architecture with a firmer touch or in a more picturesque manner.
[13] Etching and Etchers. By Philip Gilbert Hamerton. London; Macmillan & Co. 1868. p. 178.
After the middle of the seventeenth century, etching, as an original, creative art, is increasingly neglected for almost two hundred years, though it grows in popularity as an easy and expeditious mode of “forwarding” a plate to be finished with the burin.
CLAUDE LORRAIN. LE BOUVIER
Size of the original etching, 5⅛ x 7¾ inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
(If supported click figure to enlarge.)
CHARLES JACQUE. TROUPEAU DE PORCS
Size of the original etching, 5⅛ × 8½ inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
(If supported click figure to enlarge.)
To Charles Jacque, in the early “forties,” belongs the honor of having restored etching to its proper and legitimate place as a suggestive and linear art. His method is based on a thorough understanding of its limitations and qualities as exemplified by Rembrandt and his lesser contemporaries in Holland; and both by his work (he has left between five and six hundred plates) and by his influence, he is the father of the nineteenth century revival of etching, not only in France, where its possibilities were appreciated at once by the Romantic group and the “Men of 1830,” but in England, through Seymour Haden and Whistler.