Fine prints

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

For nearly the same price the benign portrait of John Lutma, the goldsmith—an impression in the First State, however, “before the window and the bottle”—passed into the hands of the same buyer. That plate—one of the most admirable in the work of Rembrandt—affords, in its First State, an instance of the artificial advantage of mere rarity. Because certain collectors are accustomed to see it more or less worn, with the window and the bottle behind the seated figure, they will never give for it, even when it is not worn—if the window and the bottle happen to be there—one-third the sum that they pay willingly when those objects are absent, which Rembrandt knew were wanted to complete the composition. Now, in the case of the Great Jewish Bride—a portrait really of Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia, with flowing hair—the background is a loss, clearly, the earlier State being invariably the finer and the more spontaneous. With the Lutma it is not so. There is no doubt that the additions add charm, add luminousness, to the general effect; but the fine eye is wanted, the eye of the real expert, to see to it that the impression which contains these is yet an impression in which deterioration is not visible—that it is, in fact, one of the very earliest impressions after the additions had been made.

Rembrandt: Lutma.

To make an end of the record of great prices fetched by the portraits in the Holford sale, let it be said that the Cornelius Sylvius—the impression Wilson pronounced to be the finest—sold for £450; that a Second State of the rare, and on that account, as I suppose, the favourite portrait of the Advocate Van Tolling, fetched £530; whilst an exceedingly effective impression of the big portrait of Coppenol, the writing-master, realised no less than £1350.

But without touching any one of these great rarities, modest collectors, whose modesty yet does not go the length of making them satisfied with second-rate Art, may still have noble portraits. Six or seven guineas—I mean, of course, when opportunity arises—secures you the quite exquisite and delicately modelled croquis (but is it not, after all, something more than a croquis?) called Portrait of a Woman, lightly etched. Rembrandt was very young when he did that, yet his art was mature, his point unspeakably vivacious. It is a portrait of his mother. So again, the Mère de Rembrandt au voile noir—the lady sitting, somewhat austere this time, with set mouth, and the old full-veined hands folded in rest—never, I think, in its happiest impression costs more than £20—may very likely cost you a good deal less. Ten guineas will very likely be the ransom of that charming portrait of a boy-child in profile, which was once thought to record the features of Titus, Rembrandt’s son, and then those of the little Prince of Orange. It is a delightful vision of youth, demure and chubby, and in its dainty drawing of light and silky hair, does even Whistler’s Fanny Leyland rival it? Are you disposed to venture £30, £40, £50? Then may you, in due time, add to your group a First State of the most subtle portrait of that meditative print-seller, Clément de Jonghe. It is treated with singular breadth and luminousness, and of character it is a profound revelation. By the time the Third State is reached—and a good Third State may be worth fifteen or twenty pounds—the thing has changed. Indeed, it has changed already a little in the Second. But in the Third, further work has endowed the personage with the air of a more visible romance; and in the two succeeding States this is preserved, though the wear of course becomes perceptible. It is well, by way of contrast, to possess yourself of this more sentimental record—the Third, if possible, in preference to the Fourth or Fifth State—besides, of course, that subtler and far finer vision of the personage which is ensured by the First State alone. The time may soon be upon us when a First State of Clément de Jonghe will be worth, not thirty or forty, but sixty or eighty guineas. It has always been appreciated, but it has not yet been appreciated at its true worth. Nothing in all the great etched work of Rembrandt is in craftsmanship more unobtrusively magnificent, and in its suggestion of complex character nothing is more subtle.

Rembrandt: Clément de Jonghe.

It was well, perhaps, to insist particularly on the desirableness, for study and possession, of these two great branches of the etched work of Rembrandt, the Landscapes and the Portraits. It would be ridiculous to attack the authenticity of any piece that I have mentioned. No one, so far as I am aware, has ever thought of doing so; so that with these, at all events, as well as with many others, the collector is safe. But my insistence on the things I have selected will not deter explorers from adventures that interest them. The unction, the vividness, and the essential dignity even of those Sacred Subjects from which he is at first repelled by the presence there so abundantly of the ungainly and the common, will in the end attract the collector. He will recognise that there was pathos in the life Rembrandt imagined, as well as in the life that he observed. And in the Academical studies, the representations of the Nude, he will recognise that there is Style constantly, and beauty now and then. One or two of these, at least, he will like to have, if he can. Two of them seem to me better and more desirable than the rest. One is that study of a recumbent woman—Naked Woman seen from behind—which the French sometimes call Négresse couchée; but she is not “Negress” at all, but only a stripped woman beheld in deepish shadow. This is one of the least rare. Five or six pounds will often buy it. The other is the Woman with the Arrow. A slimmer, lighter, younger woman than is usual with Rembrandt, sits, with figure turned prettily, on the edge of a bed. The drawing is not academically perfect, but the picture is at least living flesh, graceful of pose, and seen in an admirable arrangement of shadow and of light. This Woman with the Arrow fetched, in the Kalle sale, £26; in the Knowles sale, £32.

The so-called “Free Subjects” are few, and the rudest of them, Ledikant, which has yet a touch of comedy in it (for Rembrandt was an observer always), is fortunately of extreme rarity. With not a single one of these ought the collector to be concerned. Some French artists have known how to make their choice of such subjects pardonable by treating them with grace; but the eroticism of Rembrandt—happily most occasional—is, in the very grossness of its obvious comedy, reeking with offence.

In regard to the arrangement of the prints by the master who is the head and front of the Dutch school, and the consummate practitioner of Etching—I mean, the arrangement in the student’s mind, and not only the arrangement in the solander-box—the question of the artist’s method of execution plays a not unimportant part. Are you to classify your possessions in order of date, or in accordance with subject, or with reference to style and manner of work? That third method, however, would be found in its result not very different from the arrangement by date. Broadly speaking, it would have affinity with that. For, as Sir Seymour Haden tells us in an interesting Lecture called “Rembrandt True and False,” which the Macmillans issued in 1895, the Burlington Club Exhibition was itself sufficient “to disclose the interesting fact that, dividing the thirty years of Rembrandt’s etching career into three parts or decades, his plates during the first of these decades were for the most part etched—‘bitten in,’ that is, by a mordant—in the second, that after having been so bitten in, their effect was enhanced by the addition of ‘dry-point’; and in the third, that, discarding altogether the colder chemical process, the artist had generally depended on the more painter-like employment of ‘dry-point’ alone.” And in regard to methods of work, Sir Seymour in this Lecture discredited the statement that Rembrandt was full of mysterious contrivances, and that his success as an etcher owed much to these. “All the great painter-engravers, in common with all great artists, worked simply and with the simplest tools. It is only the mechanical engraver and copyist who depends for what he calls his ‘quality’ on a multiplicity of instrumental aids which, in fact, do the work for him—the object of the whole of them being to make that work as easy to an assistant as to the engraver himself, and its inevitable effect, to reduce that which was once an art to the level of a métier.”