Fine prints

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

Of all these plates M. Louise Gonse has given an accurate account, in enough detail for the purposes of most people, in the “Gazette des Beaux Arts” for 1876. The Catalogue of Jacquemart’s etchings—which are about four hundred in all—there contained, was a work of industry and of very genuine interest on M. Gonse’s part, but its necessary extent, due to the artist’s own prodigious diligence in work, cannot for ever sufficiently excuse an occasional incompleteness of description making absolute identification sometimes a difficult matter. The critical appreciation was warm and intelligent, and the student of Jules Jacquemart must always be indebted to Gonse. But for the quite adequate description of work like Jacquemart’s—the very subject of it, quite as much as the treatment—there was needed not only the French tongue (the tongue, par excellence, of Criticism), but a Gautier to use it.

Everything that Jacquemart could do in the rendering of beautiful matter, and of its artistic and appropriate ornament, is represented in one or other of the varied subjects of the “Gemmes et Joyaux,” save only his work with delicate china. And the large plates of this series evince his strength, and hardly ever betray his weakness. He was not, perhaps, a thoroughly trained Academical draughtsman; a large and detailed treatment of the nude figure—any further treatment of it than that required for the beautiful suggestion of it as it occurs on Renaissance mirror-frames or in Renaissance porcelains—might have found him deficient. He had an admirable feeling for the unbroken flow of its line, for its suppleness, for the figure’s harmonious movement. He was not the master of its most intricate anatomy; but, on the scale on which he had to treat it, his suggestion was faultless. By the brief shorthand of his art in this matter, we are brought back to the old formula of praise. Here, indeed, if anywhere, “Il n’y a rien, et il y a tout.”

As nothing in Jacquemart’s etchings is more adroit than his treatment of the figure, so nothing is more delightful and, as it were, unexpected. He feels the intricate unity of its curve and flow—how it gives value by its happy undulations of line to the fixed, invariable ornament of Renaissance decoration—an ornament as orderly as well-observed verse, with its settled form, its repetition, its refrain. I will name one or two notable instances. One occurs in the etching of a Renaissance mirror (the print a most desirable little possession)—Miroir Français du Seizième Siècle, elaborately carved, but its chief grace after all is in its fine proportions—not so much the perfection of the ornament as the perfect disposition of it. The absolutely satisfactory filling of a given space with the enrichments of design, the occupation of the space without the crowding of it—for that is what is meant by the perfect disposition of ornament—has always been the problem for the decorative artist. Recent fashion has insisted, sufficiently, that it has been best solved by the Japanese; and indeed the Japanese have solved it, often with great economy of means, suggesting, rather than achieving, the occupation of the space they have worked upon. But the best Renaissance Design has solved the problem as well, in fashions less arbitrary, with rhythm more pronounced and yet more subtle, with a precision more exquisite, with a complete comprehension of the value of quietude, of the importance of rest. If it requires—as Francis Turner Palgrave said, admirably—“an Athenian tribunal” to understand Ingres and Flaxman, it needs at all events high education in the beauty of line to understand the art of Renaissance Ornament. Such art Jacquemart understood absolutely, and, against its purposed rigidity, its free play of the nude figure is indicated with touches dainty, faultless, and few. Thus it is, I say, in the Miroir Français du Seizième Siècle. And to the attraction of the figure has been added almost the attraction of landscape and of landscape atmosphere in the plate No. 27 of the “Gemmes et Joyaux” which represents scenes from Ovid as a craftsman of the Renaissance has portrayed them on the delicate liquid surface of cristal de roche. And not confining our examination wholly to “Gemmes et Joyaux,” of which, obviously, the mirror just spoken of cannot form a part—we observe there, or elsewhere in Jacquemart’s prints, how his treatment of the figure takes constant note of the material in which the first artist, his original, worked. Is it raised porcelain, for instance, or soft ivory, or smooth, cool bronze with its less close and subtle following of the figure’s curves, its certain measure of angularity in limb and trunk, its many facets, with a somewhat marked transition from one to the other (instead of the unbroken harmony of the real figure), its occasional flatnesses? If it is this, this is what Jacquemart gives us in his etchings—not the figure only, but the figure as it comes to us through the medium of bronze. See, for example, the Vénus Marine, outstretched, with slender legs—a bronze, long the possession of M. Thiers, I believe. One really cannot insist too much on Jacquemart’s mastery over his material—cloisonné, with its rich, low tones, its patterning outlined by its metal ribs; the coarseness of rough wood, as in the Salière de Troyes; the sharp, steel weapons and the infinite delicacy of their lines, as in Epées, Langues de Bœuf, Poignards; the signet’s flatness and delicate smoothness—“c’est le sinet du Roy Sant Louis”—and the red porphyry, flaked, as it were, and speckled, of an ancient vase; and the clear, soft, unctuous green of jade.

And as the material is marvellously varied, so are its combinations curious and wayward. I saw, one autumn, at Lyons, their sombre little church of Ainay, a Christian edifice built of no Gothic stones, but placed, already ages ago, on the site of a Roman Temple—the Temple used, its dark columns cut across, its black stones re-arranged, and so the Church completed—Antiquity pressed into the service of the Middle Age. Jacquemart, dealing with the precious objects that he had to portray, came often on such strange meetings: an antique vase of sardonyx, say, infinitely precious, mounted and altered in the Twelfth Century, for the service of the Mass, and so, beset with gold and jewels, offered by its possessor to the Abbey of Saint Denis.

It was not a literal translation, it must be said again, that Jacquemart made of these things. These things sat to him for their portraits; he posed them; he composed them aright. Placed by him in their best lights, they revealed their finest qualities. Some people bore hardly on him for the colour, warmth, and life he introduced into his etchings. They wanted a colder, a more impersonal, a more precise record. Jacquemart never sacrificed precision when precision was of the essence of the business, but he did not—scarcely even in his earlier plates of the “Procelaine”—care for it for its own sake. And the thing that his first critics blamed him for doing—the composition of a subject, the rejection of this, the choice of that, the bestowal of fire and life upon matter dead to the common eye—is a thing which artists in all arts have always done, and for this most simple reason, that the doing of it is Art.

As an interpreter of other men’s pictures, it fell to the lot of Jacquemart to engrave the most various masters. But with so very personal an artist as he, the interpretation of so many men, and in so many years, from 1860 or thereabouts, onwards, could not possibly be of equal value. As far as Dutch Painting is concerned, he is strongest when he interprets, as in one now celebrated etching, Van der Meer of Delft. Der Soldat und das lachende Mädchen was, when Jacquemart etched it, one of the most noteworthy pieces in the cabinet of M. Léopold Double. It was brought afterwards to London by the charming friend of many artists and collectors—the late Samuel Joseph—in the hands of whose family it of course rests. The big and blustering trooper common in Dutch art, sits here, engaging the attention of that thin-faced and eveillée maiden peculiar to Van der Meer. Behind the two, who are contentedly occupied in gazing and talk, is the bare, sunlit wall, spread only with its map or chart, and, by the side of the couple, throwing its brilliant but modulated light upon the woman’s face and on the background, is the intricately patterned window, the airy lattice. Rarely was a master’s subject, or his method, better interpreted than in this print. The print possesses, along with all its subtlety, a quality of boldness demanded specially by Van der Meer, and lacking to prints which in their imperturbable deliberation and cold skill render well enough some others of the Dutch masters—I mean the Eighteenth Century line engravings of J. G. Wille after Metsu and the rest.

Frans Hals, once or twice, is as characteristically rendered. But with these exceptions it is Jacquemart’s own fellow-countrymen whom he translates the best. The suppleness of his talent—the happy speed of it, not its patient elaboration—is shown by his renderings of Greuze: the Rêve d’Amour, a single head, and L’Orage, a memorandum of a young and frightened mother, kneeling by her child, exposed to the storm. Greuze, with his cajoling art—which, if one likes, one must like without respecting it—is entirely there. So, too, Fragonard—the ardent and voluptuous soul of him—in Le Premier Baiser.

Jacquemart, it may be interesting to add, etched some compositions of flowers. Gonse has praised them. To me, elegant as they are, fragile of substance, dainty of arrangement, they seem enormously inferior to that last century flower-piece of Jan Van Huysum’s—or rather to that reproduction of it which we are fortunate enough to know through the mezzotint of Earlom. And Jacquemart painted in water-colour—made very clever sketches: his strange dexterity of handling, at the service of fact; not at the service of imagination. In leaving him, it is well to recollect that he recorded Nature, and did not exalt or interpret it. He interpreted Art. He was alive, more than any one has been alive before, to all the wonders that have been wrought in the world by the hands of artistic men.

I have not said a word about the prices of the Jacquemart etchings. It is still customary to buy a complete series—one particular work. The “Porcelaine” set costs a very few pounds: the “Gemmes et Joyaux,” something more—and Techener’s re-issue, it is worth observing, is better printed than the first edition. Separate impressions of the plates, in proof or rare states, sell at sums varying from five shillings or half-a-sovereign—when scarcely anybody happens to be at Sotheby’s who understands them—up, I suppose, to two or three pounds. I do not think the acquisition of these admirable pieces is ever likely to be held responsible for a collector’s ruin.

In the Introductory chapter, a word of reference to two other Frenchmen—Legros and Paul Helleu—points to the importance which, in contemporary original Etching, I assign to these artists. As Legros has lived nearly all his working life in England, he is treated, in subsequent pages, with English fellow-workers. Even Paul Helleu I treated with Englishmen, in my book called “Etching in England,” because he also has done some part—though a small part—of his work here, and has been one of the mainstays of our Society of Painter-Etchers. But in the present volume—for the purposes of the Collector—Helleu must be placed with his compatriots. The character of his genius too—his alertness and sensitiveness to the charm of grace rather than of formal beauty, the charm of quick and pretty movement rather than of abiding line—is French, essentially. He is of the succession of Watteau. His dry-points, of many of the best of which there are but a handful of impressions (purchasable, when occasion offers, at three or four guineas apiece), are artist’s snap-shots, which arrest the figure suddenly in some delightful turn, the face in some delightful expression. Am I to mention but two examples of Paul Helleu’s work—that I may guide the novice a little to what to see and seek for in these elegant, veracious records—I will name then Femme à la Tasse, with its happy and audacious ingenuity in point of view, and that incomparable Étude de Jeune Fille, the girl with the hair massed high above her forehead, thick above her ears, a very cascade at her shoulders, her lips a little parted, and her lifted arms close against her chin.