Fine prints

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

The best collection of Seymour Haden’s work that has ever been sold in detail was the collection of Sir William Drake. In it the First State of A River in Ireland—of which only twelve impressions had been taken—fetched £49 (Dunthorne); and the First State of Shere Mill Bond, £35; a unique impression of Battersea Railway Bridge fetched £18, 10s. (Deprez); Erith Marshes, First State, £4, 4s.; Combe Bottom, First State, £3; Sunset on the Thames, First State, £2, 12s.; and Sawley Abbey, First State, £2, 4s.

With the master-etchers of the world—Méryon’s equal in some respects, and, in some respects, Rembrandt’s—there stands James Whistler. Connoisseurs in France and England, in America, Holland, Bavaria, concede this, now. It was fiercely contested of old time, and there is not much cause for wonder in that, for the work of Mr Whistler is, and has been from the first almost, so desperately original that the world could hardly be expected to be ready to receive it. And Mr Whistler never by anything approaching to cheap issue facilitated familiarity with his work. In 1868 Mr Hamerton wrote of him: “I have been told that, if application is made to Mr Whistler for a set of his etchings”—the set, it may be said in parenthesis, was a very small one then—“he may perhaps, if he chooses to answer the letter, do the applicant the favour to let him have a copy for about the price of a good horse; but beyond such exceptional instances as this, Mr Whistler’s etchings are not in the market.” They have been in the market since, however—everybody knows—and if in 1868 a “set” (the Thames Set or the French Set was meant, presumably) was valued by Mr Whistler at the price of a horse, of late years a single print, such as the Zaandam for instance, has been valued by Mr Whistler at the price of a Humber cycle. Even in the days—some sixteen years ago, or so—when the work of the delightful master was least appreciated, there was an enormous difference in the price of a print obtained through what are known as the “regular channels” and its price if obtained in open competition, under the hammer at Sotheby’s. Those great days!—or days of great opportunities—when, as I have said before, I became possessed for six shillings of Fanny Leyland, and, for hardly more than six shillings, of the yet rarer dry-point, Battersea Dawn.

About a dozen years ago, I, with the enthusiasm of a convert, began a Catalogue of Whistler’s prints, intending it for my own use. I finished it for my brother-collectors, and for poor Mr Thibaudeau, who refreshed me with money—and a little for Mr Whistler, too, if he was minded to receive my offering. The only previously existing Catalogue—that of Mr Ralph Thomas—had been published twelve years earlier, and had meantime become of little service. There were several reasons for that, but, to justify my own attempt—which, as in the case of Méryon, has been justified indeed by my brother-collectors’ reception of it—it will suffice if I mention one. Mr Thomas, working in 1874, catalogued about eighty etchings. I, finishing my work in 1886, catalogued two hundred and fourteen. Of the additional number only a few are prints which had been already wrought when Mr Thomas wrote, and which had escaped his notice. By far the greater portion have been etched in more recent years. And many of them are unknown to the amateur—by sense of sight at least—even to this day.

Whistler’s etchings are so scattered, and so many of them are, and must ever be, so very rare, that I could not have done what I did if several diligent collectors, well placed for the purpose, had not helped me. Mr Thibaudeau himself—the erudite dealer—amassed much information, and placed it at my service. Mr Samuel Avery, when Mr Keppel took me to see him in East 38th Street, in the autumn of 1885, put at my disposal everything he knew; and his collection was even then the worthy rival of what Mr Howard Mansfield’s is now—the rival, almost, of Seymour Haden’s own collection of Whistler’s, which went to America a few years ago: drawn thither by the instrumentality of a great cheque from Mr Kennedy. Mr Mortimer Menpes—much associated with Whistler at that time, and who, I suppose, retains the fine collection of Whistler’s he then possessed—took much trouble with me in the identification of the rare things he owned, and I had to express my thanks to Mr Barrett of Brighton, to the Reverend Stopford Brooke, Mr Henry S. Theobald, and some of the best-known London dealers—to Mr Brown of the Fine Art Society, and Mr Walter Dowdeswell, an enthusiast for Whistler, who furnished me with delightful notes I never published, on the precise condition of the impressions in my own set of the “Twenty-Six Etchings.” Again, I saw—what any one may see—such of the Whistler prints as are possessed by the British Museum Print-Room. And, lastly, I had access, more than once, to Mr. Whistler’s own collection; but that unfortunately was very incomplete. It consisted chiefly of the later etchings.

It is now about forty years since Whistler began to etch; but his work in Etching has never been continuous or regular, and though he has done a certain number of things, some fine, some insignificant, since the appearance of my Catalogue, of late his work in Etching appears to have almost ceased. Looking back along his life, one may say, periods there have been when he was busy with needle and copper—periods, too, during which he laid them altogether aside. The first chronicled, the first completed plate, was done, it was believed, in 1857—when he was a young man in Paris. But he told me there existed, somewhere or other, in the too safe keeping of public authorities in America, a plate on which, before he left the public service of the States, he neglected to fully engrave that map or view for the Coast Survey which the authorities expected of him, but did not neglect to engrave upon the plate, in truant mood, certain sketches for his own pleasure. The plate was confiscated. Young Mr Whistler was informed that an unwarrantable thing had been done. He perfectly agreed—he told the high official—with that observation. In removing a plate from the hands of its author before he had completed his pleasure upon it, its author had been treated unwarrantably. Just as my Catalogue—a “Study and a Catalogue,” I call it—was going to press, there arrived from New York—sent thence to London by the courtesy of Mr Kennedy, its owner—an impression from the copper I have spoken of. It is a curiosity, and not a work of Art—a geographer’s view of the coast.

It will be noticed from my little anecdote, that, at a very early period of his life, Mr Whistler was in the right, absolutely, and other people in the wrong—and in the right he has remained ever since, and has believed it, in spite of some intelligent and much unintelligent criticism. He has been (let the collector be very sure of this) a law unto himself—has worked in his own way, at his own hours, on none but his own themes: the result of it, I dare to think deliberately, the preservation of a freshness which, with artists less true to their art and their own mission, is apt to suffer and to pass away. And with it the charm passes. Now Whistler’s newest work—his work of this morning, be it etching or lithograph—possesses the interest of freshness, of vivacity, of a new and beautiful impression of the world, conveyed in individual ways, just as much as did his early work of nearly forty years ago. When the comparatively few people whose artistic sensibilities allow them to really understand the delicacy of Mr Whistler’s method, shall but have known it long enough, they will not be found, as some among the not quite unappreciative are found to-day, protesting that there is a want of continuity between the earlier efforts and the later, and that the vision of pretty and curious detail, and the firmness and daintiness of hand in recording it, which confessedly distinguished the etchings of France and of the Thames below Bridge, are missing to the later plates or the plates of the middle period—to the dry-points of what I may term the Leyland period (when he drew all three Miss Leylands, their father and their mother too, and Speke Hall, where they lived), and to the more recent Venetian etchings. Peccavi! I have myself, in my time, thought that this continuity was wanting. I have told Mr Whistler with exceeding levity of speech, that when, in the Realms of the Blest, he desired, on meeting Velasquez and Rembrandt, not to disappoint them, he must be provided, for his justification, with his Thames etchings in their finest states. It would be a potent introduction. But I am not sure that the Venetian portfolios—the “Venice” and the “Twenty-Six Etchings,” which are most of them Venetian in theme—would not serve Mr Whistler in good stead. For—spite of some insignificant things put out not long after the appearance of my Catalogue, along indeed, or almost along with some fine ones of Brussels and Touraine—there is a continuity which the thorough student of Mr Whistler’s work will recognise. There is often in the Venetian things—as in the Doorway of the “Venice,” and in The Garden and The Balcony of the “Twenty-Six Etchings”—an advance in the impression produced, a greater variety and flexibility of method, a more delightful and dexterous effacing of the means used to bring about the effect.

The Venetian etchings—some people thought at first they were not satisfactory because they did not record that Venice which the University-Extension-educated tourist, with his guide-book and his volumes of Ruskin, goes out from England to see. But I doubt if Mr Whistler troubled himself about the guides or read the sacred books of Mr Ruskin with becoming attention. Mr Ruskin had seen Venice nobly, with great imagination; Mr Fergusson and a score of admirable architects had seen it learnedly; but Mr Whistler would see it for himself—that is to say, he would see in his own way the Present, and would see it quite as certainly as the Past. The architecture of Venice had impressed folk so deeply that it was not easy in a moment to realise that here was a great draughtsman—a man too of poetic vision—whose work it had not been allowed to dominate. The past and its record were not Whistler’s affair in Venice. For him, the lines of the steam-boat, the lines of the fishing-tackle, the shadow under the squalid archway, the wayward vine of the garden, had been as fascinating, as engaging, as worthy of chronicle, as the domes of St Mark’s.

Yet we had not properly understood Mr Whistler’s work in England, if we supposed it could be otherwise. From associations of Literature and History this artist from the first had cut himself adrift. His subject was what he saw, or what he decided to see, and not anything that he had heard about it. He had dispensed from the beginning with those aids to the provocation of interest which appeal most strongly to the world—to the person of sentiment, to the literary lady, to the man in the street. We were to be interested—if we were interested at all—in the happy accidents of line and light he had perceived, in his dexterous record, in his knowing adaptation.

I must be allowed to say, however—and it is useful to the collector that I should say it plainly—that there was some justification (much more than Mr Whistler, I suppose, would allow) for those of us who did not bow the knee too readily before the Venetian prints. In the States in which they were first exhibited, there was, with all their merits, something ragged and disjointed about several of them. Mr Whistler worked more upon them later, adding never of course merely finicky detail, but refinement, suavity. Of these particular plates, the collector should remember, it is not the earlier impressions that are the ones to be desired. It is, rather, the later impressions, when the plate was, first, perfected—then even, if need arose through any wear in tirage, suitably refreshed.

To return for a moment to Whistlerian characteristics. Though the value of many of his etchings, as Mr Whistler might himself tell us, consists in the exquisiteness of their execution and of their arrangement of line, it would be unfair not to acknowledge that amongst the many things it has been given to Mr Whistler to perceive, it has been given him to perceive beautiful character and exquisite line in Humanity—that, certainly, just as much as quaintness and charm in the wharves and warehouses of the Port, in the shabby elegance of the side canals of Venice, in the engaging homeliness of little Chelsea shop-fronts. The almost unknown etching of his mother—one of the most refined performances of his career, as exquisite, in its own way, as the famous painting which is displayed at the Luxembourg—proves his possession of the quality which permitted Rembrandt to draw with the reticence of a convincing pathos his most impressive portraits of the aged—the Lutma, the Clément de Jonghe, the Mère de Rembrandt, au voile noir.