The Abside is accounted the masterpiece of Méryon, in right of its solemn and austere beauty. A rich and delicate impression of this print is, then, the crown of any Méryon collection. It must be obtained in a State before the dainty detail of the apse of the cathedral, and the yet daintier and more magically delicate workmanship of its roof, in soft and radiant light, have suffered deterioration through wear. It must be richly printed. The First State is practically not to be found. I suppose that there are scarcely in existence seven or eight impressions of it. It is at the British Museum, and in the collections of Mr B. B. Macgeorge, Mr Avery, Mr Mansfield, Mr R. C. Fisher, and Mr Pyke Thompson. For the last that changed hands, fully 125 guineas was paid. Méryon had received for it—and gratefully, in his depression and poverty—one shilling and threepence. I have seen his receipt. But money now will not acquire it. A Second State is therefore the one to aim at; and, just because there were so very few impressions taken of the First, that I ought, in my Catalogue, to have described them as proofs—more especially as there was no change whatever in the work, but only in the lettering—it stands to reason that the earliest and best impressions of the Second (I mean these only) are, in their exquisite quality, all that good judges can desire. These are on thin and wiry paper—old Dutch or French—often a little cockled. The green, or greenish, paper Méryon was fond of, he never used for the Abside. The poorer impressions of the Second State are on thick modern paper. After the Second State, which, when carefully chosen, is apt to be so beautiful—and is worth, then, forty or fifty guineas—there comes a Third, a Fourth, a Fifth: none, fortunately, common; and deteriorations, all of them; downward steps in the passage from noble Art to the miserable issue of a thing which can rejoice the soul no longer, nor evidence the triumph of the hand.
Not much more need be said in detail here as to the larger prints of the great “Paris,” but there is still a little. In the shape and size of the plate, and by its breadth of distant view, the Pont-au-Change is the companion to the Abside. There are some impressions on the greenish paper, and some on the thin Dutch that yields the best of the Absides. The impression of the First State in the De Salicis Sale sold for £33. The Pont-au-Change is one of those prints which have submitted to the most serious alterations. A wild flight of giant birds against the rolling sky is the first innovation—it occurs in the Second State—and though it removes from the picture all its early calm and half its sanity, it has, as many think, a charm of its own, a weird suggestiveness. A good impression, in this State, is worth, it may be, £6 or £7. The next change—when the flight of birds gives place to a flight of small balloons (unlike the large balloon which, in the First State, sails nobly through the sky, before ever the dark birds get there)—the next change, I say, is a more pronounced mistake. The Tour de l’Horloge—of which a First State fetched in the Wasset Sale £10, and in the De Salicis £22—has also submitted to change, but scarcely in a State in which it need occupy the careful collector. In certain late impressions, Méryon, convinced, in the restlessness of mental ill-health, that one side of the tall Palais de Justice was left in his picture monotonous and dull, shot great shafts of light across it, and these became the things that caught the eye. He had forgotten, then, the earlier wisdom and more consummate art by which, when first he wrought the plate, he had placed the quiet space of shadowed building as a foil to the many-paned window by the side of it. The change is an instructive and pathetic commentary on the ease with which artistic conceptions slip away, they themselves forgotten, and the excellence that they had beautifully achieved ignored even by the mind that gave them birth.
The St Etienne-du-Mont is one of those etchings which possess the abiding charm of perfect things. In it a subject entirely beautiful and dignified is treated with force and with refinement of spirit, and with faultless exactitude of hand. It shows—nothing can better show—the characteristic of Méryon, the union of the courage of realism and the sentiment of poetry; in other words, its realism, like the realism of the finest Fiction, has to be poetic. You have the builder’s scaffolding, the workmen’s figures, for modern life and labour; the Gothic stones of the Collège de Montaigu, the shadow of the narrow street, the closely-draped women hurrying on their way, for old-world sentiment and the mystery of the town. But I suppose a chapter might be written upon its excellent beauty. I mention it here, partly because it too submits to change, though change less important than that in the Pont-au-Change, and less destructive than that in the Tour de l’Horloge. Not to speak of sundry inscriptions, sundry “posters,” which Méryon, in mere restlessness, was minded to alter, he could never quite satisfy himself about the attitude of one of the workmen on the scaffolding. Three States represent as many changes in this figure, and all these—as a matter, at all events, of minor interest—it is pleasant to collect. Here, in the St Etienne, as so often in the etchings of Méryon, the First State (£16 in the De Salicis Sale) is the one of which the impressions are the most numerous, though even in this piece of writing, which does not take the place of a catalogue, I have had occasion to note one instance out of some in which it is not so. But generally it is so. And so the Méryon collector has to be even more careful than the collector of “Liber” about the impression which he buys. He must have an early State, but it is not enough to have an early State. He must most diligently teach himself to perceive what is really a fine example of it. He must not fall into the commonest vice of the unintelligent purchaser—be captivated by the mere word, forego his own judgment, and buy First States with dull determination.
Presently the collector of the “Paris” will legitimately want the smaller pieces, some of which I have called “tail-pieces”: all are commentaries and connecting-links. Some are beautiful, complete, and significant, as has already been said, but generally the significance is more remarkable than the beauty. They bind together, almost as an appropriate text itself might bind together, what might otherwise be detached pictures. They complete the thought of Méryon in regard to his “Paris,” and make its expression clear. Thus, the etched cover for the Paris Set bears the title, “Eaux Fortes sur Paris,” on a representation of a slab of fossiliferous limestone, suggesting the material which made it possible to build the city on the spot where it stands. Then, there is a set of etched verses wholly without other ornament than may be found in their prettily-fantastic form, verses that bewail the life of Paris. Again, lines to accompany the Pont-au-Change and its great balloon. These things recall William Blake—the method by which the “Songs of Innocence” first found their limited public. Again, the Tombeau de Molière—Méryon thinks there must be place in his Paris for the one representative French writer of imaginative Literature, the cynic, analyst, comedian. And to name one other little print, but not to exhaust the list, there is a graceful embodiment of wayward fancy to accompany the Pompe Nôtre-Dame. It is called the Petite Pompe—represents the Pompe in small; gives us verses regretting half playfully, half affectionately, the removal of so familiar a landmark, and surrounds all with a flowing border of rare elegance and simple invention.
But a few other brilliant and poetical records of Paris lie, it has been said already, outside the published Set, claim a place almost with the greater illustrations I have spoken of earlier, and must surely be sought. The Tourelle, dite “de Marat” is one of these, and it is Méryon’s record of the place where Charlotte Corday did the deed by which we remember her. Except for the interest of observing a change, due, I may suppose, to the dulled imagination of a fairly shrewd tradesman—a change by which all symbolism and significance passed out of this wonderful little print—it is useless to have this little etching in any State after the First published one. For, after the First published one, the picture and the poem became merely a view: there is nothing to connect the place with Marat’s tragedy, and Méryon has been permitted to represent, not the Tourelle, dite “de Marat,” but “No. 22, Street of the School of Medicine.” And the First State is already rare. There were very few impressions of it. It was too imaginative for the public. But here is an instance in which Trial Proofs, generally to be avoided, may fairly be sought for, along with the First State. Distributed among different collectors is a little succession of Trial Proofs with different dates of May and June written by Méryon in pencil on the margin. The first and second belong to Mr Macgeorge; the third was Seymour Haden’s; the fourth belongs to Sir James Knowles; the eighth—which is the last—belongs to me (I got it, if I recollect, for £8, 10s. and a commission, at the Wasset Sale). Even at the beginning of this little sequence of proofs the work is not ineffective; and at the end it is complete.
Also outside the published Set of “Paris” are two little etchings which are particularly noteworthy, and which, by reason of the extreme, even astounding, delicacy of some of their work, it is, I think, well to secure in the early state of Trial Proof—when one can get the chance. These are the Pont-au-Change vers 1784—which no one can possibly confuse with the larger Pont-au-Change—and Le Pont Neuf et la Samaritaine. Unlike most of Méryon’s Parisian work, both are, not indeed transcripts from, but idealisations of, drawings by another. The first dry draughtsman, in the present case, was one Nicolle. As far as the practical presentation of all the subject is concerned, the Trial Proofs of these prints, which have been sold under the hammer for about £10 each, are all that can be wanted, and they possess, moreover, an exquisite refinement of light, of which the published, and especially the later published, examples give no hint. All impressions of these two little plates are worthy of respect, for these plates were never worked down to the wrecks and skeletons of some of the others; but, nevertheless, it is only in the earliest impressions that we can fully see the lovely lines and light and shade of the background in the Pont-au-Change vers 1784—it must be had “before the great dark rope”—and the sunlit house-fronts (Van der Heyden-like, almost) of the Pont Neuf et la Samaritaine.
Of the Bourges etchings, which are good, though none are of the first importance—and they are but few in all—the best is the Rue des Toiles. It is a varied picture, admirably finished. The rest are engaging sketches.
Amongst the remaining etchings by which Méryon commends himself to those who study and reflect upon his work, it is enough, perhaps, here, to speak of three. Océanie: Pêche aux Palmes is almost the only quite satisfactory record of that acquaintance that he made with the antipodes. The Second State—with the title—is not scarce at all, and can never be costly. You may pay, perhaps, one or two pounds for it, and for the first, say, four or five. The Entrée du Couvent des Capucins Français à Athènes—a print devoted in reality to the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates—is the single and the very noble plate which a visit to Athens, when he was a sailor, inspired Méryon to produce. This rare plate was done for a book that is itself now rare—Count Léon de Laborde’s “Athènes au XVme, XVIme, et XVIIme Siècles.” Even in the Second State the Entrée du Couvent has fetched about £12, in more sales than one. Rochoux’s Address Card, albeit not particularly rare, is curious and worth study. It was executed for the only dealer who substantially encouraged Méryon; and Méryon contrived to press into his little plate much of what he had already found and shown to be suggestive in the features of Paris. Symbolical figures of the Seine and Marne recline at the top of the design. Then there are introduced bits from the Arms of Paris, from the Bain Froid Chevrier (the statue of Henri Quatre), from Le Pont Neuf, and from La Petite Pompe. No one, of course, can ask us to consider Rochoux’s Address Card very beautiful or grandly imaginative; but it is ingenious, and, like La Petite Pompe, though in more limited measure, it is good as a piece of decorative design.
The impressions of Méryon’s etchings are printed on papers of very different sorts. A greenish paper Méryon himself liked, and it is one of the favourites of collectors. Its unearthly hue adds to the weirdness of several of the pictures, often most suitably; but it is not always good. Méryon knew this, and many of his plates—amongst them, as I have said already, that unsurpassable masterpiece, the Abside—were never printed on it. I have a Rue des Mauvais Garçons—the thing was Baudelaire’s favourite—upon very bluish gray. A thin old Dutch paper, wiry and strong, white originally and softened by age, gives some of the finest impressions. Other good examples are on Japanese, and there are fine ones on thinnest India paper that is of excellent quality. Modern Whatman and modern French paper have been used for many plates; and a few impressions, which, I think, were rarely, if ever, printed by any one but Méryon himself, are found on a paper of dull walnut colour. If I seem to dwell on this too much, let it be remembered that very different effects are produced by the different papers and the different inks. The luxurious collector, possessing more than one impression, likes to look first at his “Black Morgue,” and then at his “Brown.” The two make different pictures.
