Fig. 9—Saying Grace. By Ostade. B. 34.
IV
Ostade’s etched work is, considered as etching, unequal. Sometimes, as for instance in The Cobbler (B. 27), the first biting was not a success; at other times, as in the Man Laughing (B. 4), the Saying Grace (B. 34), or the Fiddlers (B. 45), the plate has been over-bitten. The plate which Bartsch calls La Fileuse (The Wife Spinning. B. 31) [Plate I.], is one which represents very fully some of Ostade’s characteristic excellences as an etcher. It is a fine example of his success in bathing his subject in atmosphere. One feels the quiet afternoon warmth upon the cottage-front, as the woman who spins feels it, as the child feels it, as the two basking pigs feel it. That softness of air, which in our northern climate gives even to the near trees a kind of impalpable look, and which seems to clothe things with itself—that is what Ostade has sought to render with mere etched lines; and he has triumphed over immense difficulties. His figures detach themselves with a wonderful reality, with no hard brilliancy, no superfluous shadows. There is a fine absence of cleverness in such quiet mastery of means.
More remarkable still is the little plate (B. 42) which is reproduced in Fig. 8. The amount of knowledge, of feeling for light and shadow, of subtle and sure draughtsmanship in this small etching is astonishing. The problem of painting daylight as it is diffused in a room through the window, which, of all painters in the world, Jan Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch, and, in a different way, Rembrandt and Ostade himself, have most fully mastered, is here attacked in etching, and with extraordinary success. What seems strange is that a problem so fascinating, one which had evidently a strong seduction for Ostade in his painting, should have been attempted by him so rarely in his etchings. The Painter in his Studio (B. 32) is another success in the same line, while the Players at Backgammon (B. 39) is partly a failure, through the biting having gone wrong. But, as a rule, Ostade prefers out-of-door effects.
None of the etchings quite rivals, in the writer’s judgment at least, this little plate, Peasant Paying his Reckoning. But there are several typical small pieces which have a great charm. The Spectacle-seller (B. 22, Fig. 1), for instance, is an admirable composition, and the
etching rich. The Humpbacked Fiddler (B. 44, Fig. 7), and the Man and Woman Conversing (B. 25, Fig. 5), though the needle has been used somewhat differently in each, have similar merit.
But the plates that interest, perhaps, most, are not always those which are etched the best. The chief glory of Ostade is his imaginative draughtsmanship, and akin to this are his vivid human sympathy and his humour. These are not so manifest in the plates we have mentioned as in some others.