X.
SEYMOUR HADEN.
SEVERAL years before Mr. Whistler etched at all—in 1843 and 1844 indeed—a now veteran artist, President “de sa propre Académie,” who has been famous surgeon as well as famous etcher—founder of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, energetic advocate, by speech and writing, of the art he loves—drew delicately upon six tiny plates what were meant to be the beginnings of landscapes in mid-Italy. As rare as anything in Mr. Whistle long œuvre—though, as their author knows, in themselves far less desirable—are the impressions of those little plates, which few have seen, but which I beheld, perhaps ten or twelve years ago, strengthened here and there with pencil-work, yet even then only feebly holding their own, among the abundant treasures of an upper chamber in Hertford Street—the almost unknown initial chapter, they, in the sturdy and now celebrated volume of Seymour Hade etched work.
The days when they were executed were about the days of the Etching Club, a body which in its turn was followed by the Junior Etching Club. These clubs left us no legacy we care to inherit; their productions were for the most part fidgety, prim, at best desperately pretty and ridiculously elaborated, so that there was practically nothing in them of visible and expressive line. A little—just a little—of that visible line there was—there actually was, even in an unenlightened period—in those few trifling plates of Seymour Hade on which his first work was accomplished. He wrought nothing for many years afterwards. Then, in 1858, when Whistler, by this time his brother-in-law, was already busy, Seymour Haden—urged thereto by the knowledge of good work executed in France at that moment, and by a fitting reverence for the master etchings of Rembrandt—took up some coppers seriously; and he set down upon them, in this and the few following years, with an appreciation not less certain and immediate than Mr. Whistle of those laws to which etchings should conform, his powerful and personal impressions of English landscape, of the trout stream, and the stately river, of forest trees, a sunset over the Thames, of the yews and cedars of an English country-house (“Mytton Hall”), of the reflections, in some quiet
SEYMOUR HADEN. “THOMAS HADEN, AFTER WRIGHT OF DERBY.”
SEYMOUR HADEN. “KIDWELLY TOWN.”
water, of the homely buildings of a little whitewashed town in Wales (“Kidwelly Town”).
A few years later, when the achievements of Haden had grown numerous, the intelligent French critic, Monsieur Philippe Burty (whom the revival of etching greatly interested), praised and chronicled them in the “Gazette des Beaux-Arts.” There were fifty or sixty prints by that time. This was in 1864. And in 1865 and 1866, about thirty of them—including the minor but still attractive plates used as “head” or “tail-pieces”—were formally published in Paris, with a French text which consisted in part of an excellent analytical and didactic letter, written in the foreign tongue, by the artist to Monsieur Burty.
1864 and 1865 were years of great productiveness, and among educated lovers of Art, at home and in France, popularity, hitherto denied to the etcher—for Whistler was little appreciated and Méryon was starving—courted Haden with its blandishments, or threatened him with its dangers. Of the “Shere Mill Pond” Mr. Hamerton spoke in “Etching and Etchers” in terms of what I cannot but think was somewhat exaggerated praise. In 1870, the large and impressive plate of “The Breaking up of the ‘Agamemnon’”—“large” I say; not “huge,” for “the huge plate is an offence”—put the coping-stone upon that edifice of Seymour Hade celebrity to which the writings of Mr. Hamerton (in the now standard volume I have already referred to) had contributed an important storey. Mr. Hamerton, at that period, there can be little question, did not fully appreciate Mr. Whistler. I am not certain that he ever did. He already wrote of him—need I say?—with intelligence and interest, but his enthusiasm was reserved, so far as the moderns are concerned, for Méryon and for Haden.