Size of the original dry-point, 5⅜ × 8½ inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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SEYMOUR HADEN. SAWLEY ABBEY
Size of the original etching, 10 × 14⅞ inches
In the Collection of the Author
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A Water Meadow (incidentally, a plate which the artist himself liked) is a fine transcript of a sudden shower in the Hampshire lowlands. It is bold and painter-like, admirable from every point of view, though some may prefer On the Test, with its truly noble sky, etched later in the day from a somewhat different point of view. Cardigan Bridge is a model of what a sketch should be, free, suggestive, spontaneous, yet full of knowledge. It is one of five similar plates, etched in a single day, August 17, 1864, a “good day” indeed, such as rarely comes to etchers or to painters! The more one sees of modern etching, the more one is inclined to value work of this order. It is so easy, so fatally easy, to make wriggles in the water and scribbles in the sky; but to suggest, by these seeming careless loops and latchets, the flow of the river, the movement of clouds, the splendor of the setting sun—that indeed is another matter! Yet all this, and more, Seymour Haden has done in a magisterial manner.
By-road in Tipperary is the largest and most highly prized of his woodland plates and well deserves the reputation it so long has enjoyed. Structurally the trees are very fine, both as to branch and stem drawing; and, as in the two plates of Kensington Gardens, the suggestion of foliage with the light filtering through the leaves is quite beautiful. Sunset in Ireland is a plate which the artist, the collector, and the general public all unite in praising. “That is the plate,” said Seymour Haden, shortly before his death, “which, in years to come, will fetch the enormous prices!” And his prophecy has come true. Both in its earlier states, less rich in burr, with a luminous evening effect, and in the later and darker impressions, it is “a thing of beauty”—one of the most remarkable landscape plates of modern times, wherein the artist has captured, for once, all the poetry and melancholy sentiment of the twilight hour. Sawley Abbey, on the River Ribble in Lancashire, has, to some of us, however, a “swing” and pattern, which make of it a better and more manly plate. It must be seen in an early state to be adequately judged. For some inexplicable reason the artist saw fit later to “clean up” the sky and all the foreground to the right, leaving the plate cold, empty, and almost meaningless.
Nine Barrow Down, a dry-point, is in Haden’s happiest vein. It is instinct with that priceless quality, the “art which conceals art,” and is so seeming simple that one may readily forget that its “simplicity” is the result of a most rigid selection of the essential lines, guided by the knowledge of a lifetime.
There is a growing tendency among the younger and more “advanced” collectors to belittle Seymour Haden and his work. Unquestionably there are many etchings which fall far short of his best; but at his best, in the dozen or two plates of which he himself approved, he towers far above any of his contemporaries, and there seems little likelihood of his supremacy in landscape being seriously threatened.
J. A. McN. WHISTLER. ZAANDAM (First State)