Fine prints

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

CHAPTER IV

Geddes, a link between Rembrandt and the French Revival—The Etchings of Millet—Charles Méryon’s work—The best, accomplished in but few years—His “Paris”—The Méryons the Collector wants—The prices of some masterpieces—Papers—Méryon Collectors—Bracquemond’s few noble things—Maxime Lalanne—Jules Jacquemart’s Etchings—His still-life pieces practically original—Jacquemart interpreter, not copyist, of his subject—The “Porcelaine”—The “Gemmes et Joyaux”—The dry-points of Paul Helleu.

Between the period of the work of Rembrandt and the middle of the Eighteenth Century very little fine work was done in Etching. The practitioners of the art, such as they were, seemed to lose sight of its greater principles. What they lacked in learning and in mastery, they made up for—so they probably thought—by elaboration and prettiness. Only here and there did such a man as our English Geddes—our Scottish Geddes, if the word is liked better—and he not later than the second and third decades of our own century—produce either portrait or landscape in the true method, with seeming spontaneity, with means economised. It was in landscape chiefly—most particularly in On Peckham Rye and Halliford-on-Thames—that Geddes most successfully asserted himself, as, in his smaller way, Rembrandt’s true follower, though in his few portraits (his mother’s, perhaps, most notably) the right decisiveness, simplicity, and energy of manner may not be overlooked. In some measure, it may be supposed, Geddes influenced David Wilkie, who was his friend, and Wilkie, amongst several etchings which were inferior at least to the dry-points of his fellow-workman (for his small portfolio is not, on the whole, worth much), produced one or two memorable things: a perfect little genre piece, called The Receipt—an old-world gentleman searching in a bureau, while a messenger waits respectfully at his side—being by far the best, and obviously a desirable possession.

But the middle of our century had to be reached before the true revival of the art of Etching, anywhere. Before it, Ingres, in a single plate, practised the art in the spirit of the line-engraver. Just as it approached, Delacroix and Paul Huet and Théodore Rousseau showed, in a few plates, some appreciation of the fact that etching is often serviceable chiefly as the medium for a sketch. But the middle of the century had actually to arrive before the world was in possession of the best performances of Millet, Méryon, Bracquemond, and Jules Jacquemart.

Jean François Millet executed but one-and-twenty etchings, according to the Catalogue of Monsieur Lebrun, the friend and relative of Sensier, Millet’s biographer. Of M. Lebrun’s Catalogue—originally issued as an Appendix to the Paris edition of Sensier’s Life of the artist—Mr Frederick Keppel, of New York, has published a translation, with some additional facts which are of interest to the precise student. The etchings of Millet are, at the very least, masterly notes of motives for his painted pictures. But they are often much more than that. Often they are entirely satisfactory and final and elucidatory dealings with the themes they choose to tackle. They are then, quite as much as the pictures themselves, records of peasant life, as the artist observed it intimately, and at the same time vivid and expressive suggestions of atmosphere and light and shade. In effect they are large and simple. In Etching, Millet was scarcely concerned to display a skill that was very obvious, a sleight-of-hand, an acrobatic triumph over technical difficulties. Etching was to him a vehicle for the expression of exactly the same things as those to which he addressed himself in mediums more habitual. And so we have his Glaneuses and his Bêcheurs, his Départ pour le Travail—worth perhaps, each one of them, in good state, a very few pounds each. In America Millet has of late years been particularly appreciated. I should dare to say even that he has been overrated, owing to a skilfully-worked craze about his painted pictures, ending with the immense, ridiculous sensation of the sale of the Angelus. But in France—which, in the appreciation of all work of art, is certainly not less enlightened, but is cooler and more questioning—Millet is also appreciated; nor, in England, in 1891, was there substantial difficulty in borrowing for the Burlington Club Exhibition of the French Revival of Etching, the eleven prints, lent by Mr Justice Day, Sir Hickman Bacon, Mr H. S. Theobald, and Mr Alfred Higgins, which were deemed a sufficient representation of Millet’s work with the needle.

In that Exhibition the representation of the great work of Méryon was confined to twenty-five prints. It practically included all his masterpieces; but it would have been made more extensive had not the Burlington Club, soon after I published the first edition of my little book upon this master—and when Burty’s Memoir was yet fresh—organised a splendid gathering of the prints we owe to Méryon’s high imagination, keen sensitiveness, and unstinted labour.

I am not concerned to deal here at any length with the story of Méryon’s life, or with the analysis of his poetic temperament. The question asked about him by the reader of this present book is a comparatively simple one, but I shall have to answer it with fulness—which to possess of the “sombre epics,” and lovely lyrics, wrought during the time in which his spirit was most brilliant and his hand firmest?

Méryon’s fame rests on the achievements of a very few years. The period comprised between 1850 and 1854 saw the production, not indeed of everything he did which may deserve to live, but of all that is sufficient to ensure life for the rest. Many of his pretty and carefully planned drawings were made earlier than 1850, and several of the more engaging of his etchings were made after 1854; but the four years between these dates were the years in which he conceived and executed his “Paris,” which was something more than a collection of etched views—it was a poem and a satirical commentary on the life he recorded. Moreover, Méryon is quite pre-eminently the etcher of one great theme. Among richly endowed artists who have looked at Life broadly, it is rare and difficult to discover one whose work has evidenced such faithful concentration. It is rare enough to find that concentration even in the labour of such artists as are comparatively unimaginative, of such as are content to confine themselves to the patient record of the thing that actually is—of such an engraver, say, as Hollar. It is doubly rare to find an imaginative artist of wide outlook and of deep experience so much the recorder of one set of facts, one series of visions. He will generally have been anxious to give form to very different impressions that came to him at various times and under changing circumstances. Now it may have been Landscape that interested him, and now Portraiture, and now again ideal composition or traditional romance. And in each he may have fairly succeeded. But Méryon, though stress of circumstance obliged him to do work beyond the limits of his choice, did such work, generally speaking, with only too little of promptings from within, to lighten the dulness of the task. There are, of course, exceptions—one or two in his Landscape, if there are none in his Portraiture. But the beginning and the end of his art, as far as the world can be asked to be seriously concerned with it, lay in the imaginative record, now faithfully simple, now transfigured and nobly visionary, of the city which requited him but ill for his devotion to its most poetic and its most prosaic features. It is the etchings of Paris, then, that the collector will naturally first seek.

Nearly all the etchings of Paris are included in what is sometimes known as “the published set.” Not that the twelve major and the eleven minor pieces comprised in that were ever really published by fashionable print-sellers to an inquiring and eager public. But they were at least so arranged and put together that this might have happened had Méryon’s star been a lucky one. In Méryon’s mind they constituted a “work,” to which the few other Parisian subjects afterwards came as a not unsuitable addition. Like the plates of “Liber Studiorum,” they were to be looked at “together.” Together, the plates of “Liber” represented, as we shall see better in another chapter, the range of Turner’s art. Together, the etchings “sur Paris”—“on” and not “of” Paris, let it be noted—represented Méryon’s vision of the town, and of its deeper life.

In beginning a collection of Méryon’s, I imagine it to be important not only to begin with one of the “Paris,” but with a very significant example of it—a typical, important etching. The twelve views—the twelve “pictures,” I should prefer to call them—Méryon himself numbered, when, rather late in life, he issued the last impressions of them. These numbered impressions, being, as I say, the very last States, are not the impressions to cherish; but these are the subjects of them (and the subjects, in finer impressions, will all be wanted)—the Stryge, the Petit Pont, the Arche du Pont Nôtre-Dame, the Galérie de Nôtre-Dame, the Tour de l’Horloge, the Tourelle, Rue de la Tixéranderie, the St Etienne-du-Mont, the Pompe Nôtre-Dame, the Pont Neuf, the Pont-au-Change, the Morgue, and, lastly, the Abside de Nôtre-Dame. Before these, between them, and again at the end of them, are certain minor designs, not to be confused with that “Minor Work,” chiefly copies and dull Portraiture, described but briefly in my little book on Méryon, which is devoted more particularly to the work of genius with which it is worth while to be concerned. Those minor designs which are associated with the “Paris” are an essential part of it, doing humble, but, as I am certain Méryon thought, most necessary service. In a sense they may be called head-pieces and tail-pieces to the greater subjects of which the list lies above. Sometimes they are ornament, but always significant, symbolic ornament; sometimes they are direct, written commentary. Either way, they bear upon the whole, but yet are less important than those twelve pieces already named. So it was, at all events, in Méryon’s mind; but of one or two of them it is true also that they have a beauty and perfection within their limited scheme, lacking to one or two of the more important, to which they serve humbly as page or outrider. The one lyric note of the Rue des Mauvais Garçons, for instance, is in its own way as complete a thing as is the magnificent epic of Abside or Morgue—it is greater far than the Pompe Nôtre-Dame, or, it may be, than the Petit Pont. The late Mr P. G. Hamerton—an admirable specialist in Etching, but a writer making no claim to the narrower speciality of minute acquaintance with Méryon—has praised the Pompe Nôtre-Dame. He has praised it for merits which exist, and it is only relatively that the praise is, as it seems to me, undeserved. The plate is really a wonderful victory over technical difficulties; but, in the ugly lines of it, its realism is realism of too bold an order. The Petit Pont is a fine piece of architectural draughtsmanship, and an impressive conception to boot; but, like Rembrandt’s wonderfully wrought Mill, it is one-sided—it wants symmetry of composition.