Again, the Whistlerian spirit finds appropriate expression in the vivacious prints of Mr. Walter Sickert and of Monsieur Roussel—many of them engaging, interesting, and unconcealed impromptus, towards which any word of adverse criticism would be but ill-addressed. And, lastly, ere I turn to treat at greater length the work of one who is a born etcher, and an etcher
W. HOLMES MAY. “SUNRISE IN WALES.”
ALFRED EAST. “A HURRYING WIND.”
chiefly—Monsieur Paul Helleu—let there be brief recognition of the true artis instinct which caused Mr. Alfred East, our admirable landscape painter, to record, with the solidity and massiveness so possible to dry-point, his impression of “A Hurrying Wind.”
XXIV.
HELLEU.
THE copper on which some master of etching will, sometimes in an hour, engrave in dry-point the latest of his conceptions, the newest impression he has received from the world, is, like the pages of a draughtsma sketch-book, the revelation of just that thing that strikes him the most. The character—in a sense, the temperament—of the artist is betrayed or hinted at by his selection; notwithstanding that the selection, if the man is wise at all, owes something to his knowledge of what are the bounds of his capacity. The work of the great etchers—Rembrandt apart, and he was practically unlimited—shows this. The subtleties of the figure interested Sir Seymour Haden less than the curve of a great stream, the light and shade in an old garden, or the broken surface of a Dorset heath. It is, at least, not emotional incidents that have been the mainspring of the art of Mr. Whistler; for he has been
