XIV.
FRANK SHORT.
AMONGST the original etchers remaining to be discussed I place Frank Short almost at the top of the tree. Some people will say that Shor true place would be with copyists or interpreters rather; but that is only because they do not know his original work—the very limited issue of his original plates having withheld from them a publicity won already indeed by many of his brilliant interpretations of the pictures or the drawings of long-accepted artists. No one—not even Mr. Wehrschmidt or Mr. Gerald Robinson—has done as much as Frank Short for the modern revival of mezzotint. It is more perhaps by mezzotint than by any other medium that Mr. Short has effected his delightful translations of Turner, of Constable, of Dewint, and of Watts. But if not one of these things existed—if he had never wrought those exquisite interpretations, for example, of a sketch by Constable, belonging to Mr. Henry Vaughan, and of a Dewint drawing, “A Road in Yorkshire”—if nothing of this work whatever had been done by Mr. Short, then would he still have cause to be remembered and valued by reason of the beauty and the technical virtues of his original prints.
Frank Shor original prints are, indeed, of all the greater merit because, just as Mr. Whistler himself, he has disregarded in them, from beginning to end, the taste of the everyday public. This delicate array of exquisite etching—very little of it merely tentative; most of it of complete accomplishment, if of limited aim—has been called into being, as Mozart said of his “Don Giovanni,” “for himself and two friends.” The “two friends” must be taken—one need hardly protest—cum grano salis; they represent the rare connoisseur, the infrequent person who enjoys and understands.
Two classes of subjects have hitherto to a great extent engrossed Mr. Frank Short in his original work, and to these there must now be added a third; for within the last year or so, following in the wake of his friend Mr. C. J. Watson, he has visited the land of Rembrandt, and has done charmingly suggestive and vivacious sketches of quaint town and long-stretched shore.
But the two classes of subject with which one has been wont to identify him are subjects of the English coast and of the English manufacturing districts; and, in a certain sense, even these two subjects are one, and this one theme may be described—not too imaginatively, I think, if we look into the heart of the matter—as the complete acceptance of all that is considered unpicturesque in modern life: in the manufacturing districts, the factory chimneys, the stunted, smoke-dried trees, the heavy skies, the dreary level water, along which barges make their monotonous way (see the interesting dry-point, “Wintry Blast on the Stourbridge Canal”), and, on the English coast, the massive stone pier, the harbour muddy at low tide, the tug, the sheds, the warehouses, or it may be perhaps the wooden fences that protect and preserve the foreshore—the beauty of the whole, which is unquestionable, being obtained by a particularly subtle arrangement of line, a perfect sense of proportion, a perfect delicacy of handling. Coarser people, of more ordinary vision, addressing themselves, as by a parti pris, to these themes, have treated them with brutality. But, on these themes, it is the distinction of the treatment of Mr. Short that in rendering them with fidelity and patience—even with love—he yet somehow, in the brief phrase of Robert Browning—
Yes, a certain measure of poetry must certainly be claimed not only for the “Evening, Bosham” and the “Sleeping till the Flood,” but for the “Stourbridge Canal,” which has been mentioned already, and for the print of “Ry Long Pier”—this is called indeed, poetically enough in its suggestiveness, “Low Tide and the Evening Star”—and for the curiously clever little plate, “Wrought Nails,” a scene of the Black Country, which shows the sheds of the workers, and little trees untended and decaying, and a bit of waste land, ragged and dreary, with nothing of Nature left, but only the evidence of me grimy labours, of their hard, monotonous life. And, though up to the present, or until very lately, the field of Mr. Shor own observation of the world may seem to have been limited, it is plain to any qualified student of his prints that he has gained the effects he wanted by a fine sketche economy of means, by a thorough capacity of draughtsmanship, much sense of design, and a very exceptional control over the technical resources of the etche art.
