COTMA etchings—soft ground, for the most part—are scarcely for the average collector, any more than Crom. No one, I mean, puts them carefully in the cabinet, or, with reverence, in the shrine and sanctuary of the solander box; but, in book-form, they stand, and should stand, on the shelves of some lovers of Art. One not unwieldy volume—that “Liber Studiorum,” which, in the year 1838, Cotman brought together, not perhaps without thought of Turne accomplished triumph—contains two score or so of plates which show much, not only of Cotma capacity as a draughtsman, but of his genius for ideal composition, of his faculty for dignity of line, and for so disposing masses of light and shade that they should be not only significant, but impressive. It is here seen that this glorious and original colourist could dispense with colour and yet be fine and individual. Yet, as achievements in
the art of Black-and-White, no careful student could place them in line with the plates of the admitted masters of etching. They have not often the subtlety of technique which, allied of course with fineness of conception, is the very sign of the master. Still, they are too good to be passed by in silence. And they are a great ma work.
VIII.
SAMUEL PALMER.
SAMUEL PALMER—an English classic, by this time, as a painter of water-colours—made (from the year 1850, or thereabouts, onward to his old age in the seventies) a limited number of elaborate etchings in which the play of line is almost wholly lost: more lost, much more lost, than in the etchings of Méryon. But Samuel Palmer, like Méryon, was a great poetic artist. Slowly he built up his effects, his noble sunrise or sunset landscapes—the landscape of artistic convention and poetic vision. The unity and strength of his thought was never sacrificed or frittered by the elaboration of his labour. To condemn him then, because he was not a free sketcher, would be as pedantic as to condemn Méryon. Nay more, were any such pedantic condemnation meted out to him, it would have to be meted out to the author of the “Ephraim Bonus” in his turn; since it is a characteristic of Rembrandt that in
SAMUEL PALMER. “THE HERDSMAN.”
his engraved as in his painted work he allowed himself an amazing elasticity of method. Rembrandt, like every great man, is super grammaticam. He was a law unto himself. And so, in a measure, was Samuel Palmer, the creator of the solemn plates of “The Early Ploughman” and “The Herdsman,” and of certain hardly less admirable coppers which illustrate his own translation of the Eclogues of Virgil.