Méryon: La Morgue.
About the Méryon collections, it may be said that M. Niel, an early friend, possessed the first important group that was sold under the hammer. Then followed M. Burty’s, M. Hirsch’s, and afterwards M. Sensier’s. These fetched but modest prices—prices insignificant sometimes—for Méryon’s vogue was not yet. Later, the possessions of M. Wasset—an aged bachelor, eager and trembling, whom I shall always remember as the “Cousin Pons” of certain bric-à-brac-crowded upper chambers in the Rue Jacob—were sold for more substantial sums. Since then, the collection of that most sympathetic amateur, the Rev. J. J. Heywood—one of the first men in London to buy the master’s prints—has passed into the hands of Mr B. B. Macgeorge of Glasgow, whose cabinet, enriched from other sources, is now certainly the greatest. The Méryons that belonged to Sir Seymour Haden went, some years since, to America, where whoever possesses them must recognise collectors that are his equals, in Mr Samuel Avery and Mr Howard Mansfield. If too many carefully gathered groups of Méryon’s etchings have left our shores, others remain—though very few. The British Museum Print-Room is rich in the works of the master: many of the best impressions of his prints, there, having belonged long ago to Philippe Burty, who early recognised something at least of their merit, and made, in the Gazette des Beaux Arts of that day, the first rough catalogue of them.
It is time we turned for a few minutes to Felix Bracquemond—a dozen years Méryon’s junior, for he was born in 1833. Among the sub-headings to this present chapter there occurs the phrase, “Bracquemond’s few noble things.” Why “few”?—it may be asked—when, in the Catalogue of the Burlington Club Exhibition of the French Revival of Etching, it is mentioned that the number of his plates extends to about seven hundred, and that the list would have been longer had not Bracquemond, in his later years, accepted an official post which left him little time for this department of work? Well, there are two or three reasons why, with all respect to an indefatigable artist, I still say “few.” To begin with, no inconsiderable proportion of Felix Bracquemond’s etched plates are works of reproduction—translations (like Rajon’s, Waltner’s, Unger’s, some indeed of Jacquemart’s) of the conceptions of another. These may be admirable in their own way—the Erasmus, after the Holbein, in the Louvre, is more than admirable: it is masterly—a monument of austere, firmly-directed labour, recording worthily Holbein’s own searching draughtsmanship and profound and final vision of human character. But we have agreed, throughout the greater part of this book, and more especially in those sections of it which are devoted to the art whose greatest charm is often in its spontaneity, to consider original work and work inspired or dictated by others as on a different level. Then again, in such of Bracquemond’s prints as are original, there is perhaps even less than is usual, in a fine artist’s work, of uniformity of excellence. No very great number of all the plates M. Beraldi industriously chronicles need the collector busy himself with trying to acquire. The largish etchings of great birds, alive or dead, are amongst the most characteristic. With singular freedom and richness—an enjoyment of their plumage and their life, and a great pictorial sense to boot—has Bracquemond rendered them. If I could possess but a single Bracquemond, I would have a fine impression of Le Haut d’un Battant de Porte, the dark birds hanging there. That plate was wrought in 1865. But Margot la Critique and Vanneaux et Sarcelles—prints of about the same period—likewise represent the artist; and there is a plate done later, at the instance of the Messrs. Dowdeswell, which is certainly a triumph of technique and of character. This is Le Vieux Coq.
Daubigny, Maxime Lalanne, Meissonier, Corot, are all amongst deceased French artists who have etched ably. The two last-mentioned—doubtless the most important or most popular artists in their own customary mediums—wrought the fewest plates. Corot’s are characteristic sketches. Daubigny worked more systematically at etching, and you feel in all his works a sympathetic, picturesque vision of Nature; but his prints never reach exquisiteness.
Lalanne, who was prolific with the needle, had elegance and charm, and sometimes power, as well as facility. And, as a little practical treatise that he wrote upon the subject shows, he was devoted to his craft. Indeed, he taught it. He was best, generally, in his smaller plates: never, I think, having beaten his dainty plate of the Swiss Fribourg, which was given in “Etching and Etchers,” though a larger Fribourg—a vision of the great ravine—is very noble, and nothing is at once more learned and spontaneous than the brilliant print of the Conflagration in the Harbour of Bordeaux. Also, Lalanne did not share, and had no need to share, most etchers’ timidity in the treatment of skies. His own are delicate and charming. In the rare proofs of his etchings we can alone prize properly this well-bred observer and graceful draughtsman, who was only occasionally mediocre.
A genius, wholly individual—and yet in a sense the founder of a school or centre of a group—now occupies us. We pass to Jules Jacquemart, who, born in 1837, died prematurely in 1880; a child of his century, worn out by eager restlessness of spirit, by the temperament, by the nervous system, that made possible to him the exquisiteness of his work. The son of a collector, a great authority on porcelain, Albert Jacquemart, Jules Jacquemart’s natural sensitiveness to beauty, which he had inherited, was, from the first, highly cultivated. From the first, he breathed the air of Art. Short as his life was, he was happy in the fact that adequate fortune gave him the liberty, in health, of choosing his work, and, in sickness, of taking his rest. With extremely rare exceptions, he did the things that he was fitted to do, and did them perfectly; and, being ill when he had done them, he betook himself to the exquisite South, where colour is, and light—the things we long for most, when we are most tired in cities—and so there came to him, towards the end, a new surprise of pleasure in so beautiful a world. He was happy in being surrounded, all his life long, by passionate affection in the circle of his home. Nor was he perhaps unhappy altogether, dying in middle age. For what might the Future have held for him?—a genius who was ripe so soon. The years of deterioration and of decay, in which first an artist does but dully reproduce the spontaneous work of his youth, and then is sterile altogether—the years in which he is no longer the fashion at all, but only the landmark or the finger-post of a fashion that is past—the years when a name once familiar and honoured is uttered at rare intervals and in tones of apology, as the name of one whose performance has never quite equalled the promise he had aforetime given—these years never came to Jules Jacquemart. He was spared these years.
But few people care, or are likely to care very much, for the things which chiefly interested him, and which he reproduced in his art; and even the care for these things, where it does exist, unfortunately by no means implies the power to appreciate the art by which they are retained and diffused. “Still-life”—the portrayal of objects natural or artificial, for the objects’ sake, and not as background or accessory—has never been rated very highly or very widely loved. The public generally has been indifferent to these things, and often the public has been right in its indifference, for often these things are done in a poor spirit, a spirit of servile imitation or servile flattery, with which Art has little to do. But there are exceptions, and there is a better way of looking at these things. Chardin was one of these exceptions—in Painting, he was the greatest of these. Jacquemart, in his art of Etching, was an exception not less brilliant and peculiar. He and Chardin have done something to endow the beholders of their work with a new sense—with the capacity for new experiences of enjoyment—they have portrayed, not so much matter, as the very soul of matter; they have put it in its finest light, and it has got new dignity. Chardin did this with his peaches and his pears, his big coarse bottles, his copper sauce-pans, and his silk-lined caskets. Jacquemart did it with the finer work of artistic men in household matter and ornament: with his blue and white porcelain, with his polished steel of chased armour and sword-blade, with his Renaissance mirrors, and his precious vessels of crystal, jasper, and jade. But when he was most fully himself, his work most characteristic and individual, he shut himself off from popularity. Even untrained observers could accept this agile engraver as the interpreter of other men’s pictures—of Meissonier’s inventions, or Van der Meer’s, Greuze’s, or Fragonard’s—but they could not accept him as the interpreter, at first hand, of treasures peculiarly his own. They were not alive to the wonders that have been done in the world by the hands of artistic men. How could they be alive to the wonders of this their reproduction—their translation, rather, and a very free and personal one—into the subtle lines, the graduated darks, the soft or sparkling lights of the artist in Etching?
A short period of practice in draughtsmanship, and only a small experience of the particular business of etching, made Jacquemart a master. As time proceeded, he of course developed; found new methods, ways not previously known to him. But little of what is obviously tentative and immature is to be noticed even in his earliest work. He springs into his art an artist fully armed—like Rembrandt with the wonderful portrait of his mother “lightly etched.” In 1860, when he is but twenty-three, he is at work upon the illustrations to his father’s “Histoire de la Porcelaine,” and though, in that publication, the absolute realisation of wonderful matter—or, more particularly, the breadth in treating it—is not so noteworthy as in the later “Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne,” there is most evident already the hand of the delicate artist and the eye that can appreciate and render almost unconsidered beauties.
The “Histoire de la Porcelaine” contains twenty-six plates, of which a large proportion are devoted to the Oriental china possessed in mass by the elder Jacquemart, when as yet there was no rage for it. Many of Albert Jacquemart’s pieces figure in the book: they were pieces the son had lived with and knew familiarly. Their charm, their delicacy, he perfectly represented—nay, exalted—passing without sense of difficulty from the bizarre ornamentation of the East to the ordered forms and satisfying symmetry which the high taste of the Renaissance gave to its products. Thus, in the “Histoire de la Porcelaine”—amongst the quaintly naturalistic decorations from China and amongst the ornaments of Sèvres, with their boudoir graces and airs of pretty luxury fit for the Marquise of Louis Quinze and the sleek young Abbé, her pet and her counsellor, we find, rendered with an appreciation as just, a Brocca Italienne, the Brocca of the Medicis of the Sixteenth Century, slight and tall, where the lightest of Renaissance forms the thin and reed-like arabesque—no mass or splash of colour—is patterned over the smoothish surface with measured exactitude and rhythmic completeness. How much is here suggested, and how little done! The actual touches are almost as few as those which Jacquemart employed afterwards in rendering some fairy effects of rock-crystal—the material which he has interpreted, it may be, best of all. On such work may be bestowed, amongst much other praise, that particular praise which seems the highest to fashionable French Criticism—delighted especially with feats of adroitness: occupied with the evidence of the artist’s dexterity—“Il n’y a rien, et il y a tout.”
The “Histoire de la Porcelaine”—of which the separate plates were begun, as I have said before, in 1860, and which was published by Techener in 1862—was followed in 1864 by the “Gemmes et Joyaux de Couronne.” The Chalcographie of the Louvre—which concerns itself with the issue of State-commissioned prints—undertook the first publication of the “Gemmes et Joyaux.” In this series there are sixty subjects, or, at least, sixty plates, for sometimes Jacquemart, seated by his Louvre window (which is reflected over and over again at every angle, in the lustre of the objects he was drawing), would etch in one plate the portraits of two treasures, glad to give “value” to the virtues of the one by juxtaposition with the virtues of the other; opposing, say, the transparent brilliance of the globe of rock-crystal to the texture and hues, sombre and velvety, of the vase of ancient sardonyx, as one puts a cluster of diamonds round a fine cat’s-eye, or a black pearl, glowing soberly.