Etching in England / With 50 illustrations.

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

C. J. WATSON. “ST. ETIENNE-DU-MONT.”

XV.
C. J. WATSON.

THE work of Mr. C. J. Watson is nearly always absolutely sturdy and sterling. It has tended, too, to become delicate; and when one compares it with Mr. Shor, very likely the only thing which puts it at an obvious disadvantage is that (though one can hardly explain the matter) it has an air of being less personal. That, I admit, is no small affair. Judging from the work alone—and no one would desire to make the comparison except from the work only—one would say, “Here is a strong and capable hand, stirred to expression by a nature much less sensitive than that which reveals itself in the etched lyrics of Frank Short.” Mr. Short records facts—not great and doleful dreams, like Mr. Strang or Mr. Legros—but he records facts poetically. More absolutely matter-of-fact is Mr. Watson, who (I am speaking of him, of course, apart from his agreeable gift of colour) so far portrays things realistically that the personal, the individual, is comparatively absent, and his art can hardly be described in the phrase which does define Art generally—Nature beheld “à travers n tempérament.”

But Mr. Watson, who has long been interesting, has of late years become within certain limits a first-rate craftsman, albeit still a little wanting in vivacity. It may be that his individuality—such individuality as he possesses—has to be sought for in the soundness of his technique, and in the ripe judgment which he shows in treating subjects which at least are true etche subjects. Practising his art during early manhood in Norwich, and being himself, with his sturdy realism, as it were, a last echo of that “Norwich School” in which only Cotman was essentially and primarily poet—and Cotman could be realistic, too—Mr. Watson came, a few years since, to London, and here he has developed his powers a stage further, there is no doubt; producing, in the first instance—since his residence in town, with its wider associations and its greater activities—plates admirable for directness and certainty, such as “The Mill Bridge, Bosham,” and then the “Chartres,” its gabled and dilapidated houses, rather; the back of Chartres—Chartres on the wrong side—and then the “St. Etienne du Mont,” its west front—that is, the front of one of the most curious and characteristic of the churches of Paris—and then the “Ponte del Cavallo,” a refined, if scarcely individual vision of Venice.

Some greater delicacy and flexibility of method than were before possessed, or than were even desirable, perhaps, for the subjects to which Mr. Watson in his earlier days addressed himself, are evident in the “Chartres;” but they are yet more marked in the “St. Etienne” etching, which no true lover, no properly equipped student, of the achievements of the great original aquafortists will be able to examine without some thought of the wonderful plate of Méryon which bears the same title. Of the relative correctness of the two presentations—not, in my opinion, an all-important, though still an interesting matter—I will say nothing, or at least very little; possibly it was Watson who had looked the hardest at the actual façade of which it was his one business to convey the impression. Still, the immense solidity of Méryo etching gives it a realism as much its own as is all the wealth of its poetry. The very simplification of the facts must have been deliberate, and it accomplished its end. It would be ridiculous to suggest that a draughtsman of architecture so patient and thorough as Méryon, could not have set forth each detail, as well as the general character, had it been his aim. He had other aims, and this detail accordingly had to be at times subordinated; for him there was not the church alone, but the Collège de Montaigu and the corner of the Panthéon, and the weird shadows and the passing women, and the dark mystery of the Paris street. In a word, there was his genius and his message—fancy or fantasy. For Mr. Watson there was “land, the solid and safe,” as Mr. Browning moralizes; the solid earth, or what the architect had put there—nothing else. And what the architect had put there Mr. Watson noticed—portrayed it with strength—portrayed it, too, as afterwards the “Ponte del Cavallo,” with perhaps unwonted flexibility.

In simpler subjects than the “St. Etienne du Mont,” Mr. Watson shows as well as, or better, than there, a quality very characteristic of the truest of modern etchers—of Mr. Whistler and Mr. Short particularly—I mean, in what is more or less architectural draughtsmanship, after all, an enjoyment of the evidences of construction. Very likely it may be said that that is a quality belonging to him as a good draughtsman, whether, at the moment etching happens to be, or happens not to be, the medium of his work. I think not. There is something in the etched line that reveals especially the presence of this enjoyment—that calls for the certain display of it.

OLIVER HALL. “LANDSCAPE WITH TREES.”