HELLEU. “LE SALON BLANC.
dignity of age as Rembrandt realised it in the etched portrait of his mother smiling, and in that other etched portrait of his mother, with a black veil and folded hands. But several times Helleu has realised what Whistler realised in the dry-point of “Fanny Leyland”—the dignified beauty, the reticent tenderness, the mood, courageous or contemplative, of the better order of young girlhood. Admirable in this way is that “Etude de Jeune Fille,” which shows the quick and earnest, fearless glance—the girl with the lifted elbow and the streaming dark hair. Hardly less admirable, that other study of a child a little younger, the head on a large scale, and the head alone. It may be added, as a detail of both these rare plates, that no others, either by M. Helleu or by any other etcher, show quite so obvious a mastery in the treatment of hair. Dry-point, as M. Helleu handles it, would seem to have been made for the magical suggestion of all that you may notice in hair, except its colour—of its flow and texture, weight and life.
“Femme à la Tasse,” a study of two uplifted hands, holding between them, lightly, in the fingers, a porcelain cup out of which the reclining figure drinks, is a most delicate arrangement of “line,” and of amazing economy of means. And the “Salon Blanc,” or one especially of the several plates which bear that name, is to be noted not for the figure only, not, perhaps, for the figure even chiefly, but for the brief and dainty suggestions of tasteful furniture, the line of a screen, the mouldings of a mantelpiece, the curve of a girandole.
We have etchers amongst us, and clever ones, too, to whom the presence of character in their living models, and in those models’ backgrounds, has been, above all things, precious; to whom the presence of the eccentric has been valuable, and the presence of beauty, superfluous, not to say burdensome. But, with M. Helleu, beauty—beauty of no conventional order, the rapid charm of movement, of expression, of contour—is the inspiring and satisfactory thing. He lives in its intimacy. And he reveals it—much as Watteau did, yet in ways how fearlessly modern!—to the spectator of his work.
CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
MR. WEDMOR SHORT STORIES.