A Belgian draughtsman—established in Paris, and now approaching old age—has seen of late his reputation extending, not only amongst collectors of the cleverly odious; and he has shown imagination, draughtsmanship, a nimble hand, a certain mastery of process. But in a volume from which I must exclude so much of even wholly creditable Art—a volume in which the subject of Woodcuts, which of old was wont to interest, is, deliberately, almost ignored—I adopt no attitude of apology for refusing serious analysis to the too often morbid talent of Félicien Rops. A portfolio containing the delightful inventions of Helleu, and the great things of Méryon, could have no place for the record of Rops’ disordered dream. Were I to be occupied with any living Belgian, it would be with one whose work M. Hymans, the Keeper of the Prints at Brussels, showed me at the Bibliothèque Royale—M. de Witte.

CHAPTER V

The Revival in England—Whistler and Haden, Classics—Haden’s first works—The “Agamemnon”—Dry-points—Etchings on Zinc—Prices—Whistler’s French Set—His Thames series—The Leyland period—The Venetian work—His rarest Dry-points—Whistler’s Prices at the Heywood Sale, the Hutchinson Sale, and now.

In England, the Revival of Etching, so far as one can fix its origin at all, seems due, in chief, to the great practical work of two etchers of individual vision and exceptional power—Whistler and Seymour Haden. Much writing on the subject—and some of it, I hope, not bad—has also scarcely been without its effect. It has at least roused and sustained some interest in Etching, amongst the public that reads. It cannot, fairly, ever have been expected to produce great artists.

Whistler and Haden are, it is now allowed, amongst the Classics already. Each has a place that will not be disturbed. Each is an honoured veteran. The work of Seymour Haden has been closed long ago. It is years since he gave his etching-needle to Mr Keppel of New York; saying, with significant gesture, “I shall etch no more.” From the other delightful veteran no such formal declaration has—so far as I understand—as yet proceeded. Mr Whistler may even now surprise us by a return from Lithography. His lithographs, which will be considered more or less in the final chapter of this book, are indeed admirable and engaging. But it is by his etchings that Mr Whistler’s fame will live. And though he began to etch two score of years ago, one would be sorry even now to feel it was quite certain that the last of his etchings had been done.

We will speak of Seymour Haden first. He is the older of the two, and his practical work is admittedly over. His etching, though conceived always on fine lines, has somehow always been much more intelligible to the large public than Whistler’s. For years, in England and America, he has enjoyed something as near to popular success as sterling work can ever get; and in days when I was able to pick up for six shillings, in Sotheby’s auction-rooms, the dry-point of Whistler’s Fanny Leyland—which would now be considered ridiculously cheap at just as many guineas—Seymour Haden’s River in Ireland was selling (when it appeared and could be bought at all) at quite substantial prices. His published series of Etchings, with the text by Monsieur Burty, and then the eulogies of Mr Hamerton, had done something, and justifiably, towards what is called “success”—the success of recognition, I mean, as distinguished from the success of achievement, which was certainly his besides. And then—in the nick of time—there had come the Agamemnon, almost the largest fine etching one can call to mind; for, in Etching, “important size” often means vulgarity. The Agamemnon had an immense sale. It was seen about so much, in the rooms of people who aspired to Taste, that it became what foolish men call “vulgarised.” As if the multiplication of excellent work—its presence in many places, instead of only a few—was positively a nuisance and a disadvantage! Anyhow, Seymour Haden had already entered into fame.

In 1880, the late Sir William Drake—an intimate friend who had collected Haden and admired him—issued, through the Macmillans, a descriptive Catalogue of Haden’s etched work. The Catalogue takes note of a hundred and eighty-five pieces. Scarcely anything, I think, is omitted. Of the substantial work none bears an earlier date than 1858; but fifteen years before that—when he was a very young man, journeying—Haden had scratched on half-a-dozen little coppers sparse notes of places of interest he had seen in Italy; and very long ago now (when Sir Seymour was living in Hertford Street) he showed me, I remember, the almost unique impressions from these practically unknown little plates. They were impressions upon which a touch or so with the brush had—if I remember rightly—a little fortified the dreamy and delicate sketch which the copper had received. There is neither need nor disposition to insist too much on the existence of these plates, or rather upon the fact that once they were wrought. They scarcely claim to have merit. But the fact that they were wrought shows one thing a collector may like to know—it shows that Seymour Haden’s interest in Etching began before the days of that French Revival in which was executed undoubtedly the bulk of his work.

These little prints, then, as far as they went, were in quite the right spirit. They were jottings, impressions—had nothing of labour in them. But in the interval that divides them from the important and substantive work of 1858, 1859, 1860, and later years, the artist must have studied closely, though he was in full practice, most of that time, as a surgeon. In the interval, he had lived, so to put it, with Rembrandt; he had become familiar with Claude. And though they influenced, they did not overpower him. By 1864, there were fifty or sixty prints for M. Burty to chronicle and eulogise, in the Gazette des Beaux Arts. The greatly praised Shere Mill Pond had been done in 1860. Mytton Hall—which, unlike Mr Hamerton, I prefer to the Shere—had been wrought one year earlier. It shows a shady avenue of yew-trees leading to an old manor-house which receives the full light of the sun; and in that print, early as it may seem, there was already the breadth of treatment which as years proceeded became more and more a characteristic of Seymour Haden’s work. In 1863 came, amongst many other good things, Battersea Reach, which in the First State bore on it this inscription of interest: “Old Chelsea, Seymour Haden, 1863, out of Whistler’s window.” To the same year belongs the charming plate, Whistler’s House, Old Chelsea. The tide is out, the mud is exposed; on the left is Lindsay Row; and beyond, and to the right, Chelsea Old Church and Battersea Bridge: the picturesque wooden pile-bridge of that privileged day. It was not till 1870 that there came the Agamemnon—the Breaking-up of the Agamemnon, to give it its full title—a view, in reality, of the Thames at Greenwich, seen under sunset light, the hull of the old ship partially swung round by the tide. This very favourite print exists in a couple of States. The Second, though less rare, is scarcely perceptibly less fine than the First. In it a smoking chimney, a brig under sail, and two small sailing-boats—all of them objects in extreme distance—have been replaced by indications of the sheds of a dockyard. In the Heywood Sale, a rich impression of the Agamemnon—the State not specified, but in all probability a First—sold for £7, 10s. In the Sir William Drake Sale, twelve years afterwards—in 1892—a First State fetched £7, 7s.; a Second, £6, 15s.

For convenience’ sake, I will name a few more excellent and characteristic works—prints which have Seymour Haden’s most distinguishing qualities of frankness, directness, and an obvious vigour. His etchings are deliberately arrested at the stage of the sketch; and it is a sketch conceived nobly and executed with impulse. The tendency of the work, as Time went on, was, as has been said, towards greater breadth; but unless we are to compare only such a print as Out of Study-Window, say (done in 1859), with only the most admirable Rembrandt-like, Geddes-like dry-print, Windmill Hill (done in 1877), there is no greatly marked contrast; there is no surprise; there is but a steady and not unnatural development. I put this down, in part at least, to the fact that when Seymour Haden first took up Etching seriously (in 1858, remember) he was already middle-aged. He had lived for years in the most frequent intercourse with dignified Art; his view of Nature, and of the way of rendering her—or of letting her inspire you—was large, and likely to be large. Yet as Time went on there came no doubt an increasing love of the sense of spaciousness and of potent effect. The work was apt to be more dramatic and more moving. The hand asked the opportunity for the fuller exercise of its freedom.

Sawley Abbey, etched in 1873, is an instance of this, and not alone for its merits is it interesting to mention it, but because, like a certain number of its fellows amongst that later work, it is etched upon zinc—a risky substance, which succeeds admirably, when it succeeds, and when it fails, fails very much. Windmill Hill—two subjects of that name—Nine Barrow Down, Wareham Bridge, and the Little Boathouse, and again that Grim Spain which illustrates my “Four Masters of Etching” are the prints which I should most choose to possess amongst those of Haden’s later period; whilst—going back to the period of 1864 and 1865—Sunset on the Thames is at the same time a favourite and strong, and Fenton Hook remarkable for its draughtsmanship of tree-trunk and stump. Yet earlier—for they belong to 1860 and 1859—there are the Mytton Hall, which I have spoken of already, and the Combe Bottom. Combe Bottom is unsurpassed for sweetness and spontaneity. And Mytton Hall has its full share of that priceless element of Style which is never altogether absent from Seymour Haden’s work. Again—and most acceptable of all to some of us—The Water Meadow (which has been circulated very largely) is, in a perfect impression, to be studied and enjoyed as a vivacious, happy, sympathetic transcript of a sudden rain-storm in the Hampshire lowlands, where poplars nourish and grass grows rank. The collector who can put these things into his folios—and a little diligence in finding them out, and three or four guineas for each print, will often enable him to do so—will have given himself the opportunity of confirmation in the belief that among modern etchers of Landscape, amongst modern exponents in the art of Black and White of an artistic sympathy with pure and ordinary Nature, Seymour Haden stands easily first. And to say that, is not to say that he succeeds equally, or has equally tried to succeed, with portraiture or figure-studies. It is not to compare him—to his advantage or disadvantage—with any other artist in the matter of the etcher’s peculiar skill and technical mastery.