Fine prints

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

Again the Fanny Leyland, and The Muff, and many another print that I could name, attest Mr Whistler’s solution of a problem which presents itself engagingly, attractively, to the ingenious, and uselessly to the incompetent—the problem of seeing beauty in modern dress, and grace in the modern figure. Whistler, no more than Degas, Sargent, or J. J. Shannon, sighs for the artificial dignity of the fashions of other times. Even at moments when modern Fashion is not in truth at its prettiest, he is able to descry a piquancy in the contemporary hat, and to find a grace in the flutter of flounce and frill. What else after all should we expect from an artist the sweep of whose brush would give distinction to the Chelsea Workhouse, or to the St George’s Union Infirmary in the Fulham Road, and for whom, under the veil of night or dusk, the chimney of the Swan Brewery would wear an aspect not less beautiful than King’s College Chapel? It has been given to the master of Etching to see everyday things with a poetic eye.

“Take care of the extremities,” said old Couture, to a painter who addressed himself to the figure: “take care of the extremities, for all the life is there.” But that, it may truly be answered, is what Mr Whistler has often neglected to do. It may be rejoined, however, that where he has neglected to do it, somehow “all the life” has not gone out of his work. And the hand of the man sitting in the boat, in one of the most desirable of the early Thames etchings, Black Lion Wharf, and (to name no other instance) the hands in the painting of Sarasate of a dozen years ago, are reminders of how completely it is within Mr Whistler’s power to indicate the life, the temperament, by “the extremities,” when it suits his work that he shall do so. And the avoidance, so often commented upon, of this detail here, and of that detail there, itself reminds us of something important—nay, perhaps of the central fact which determines the direction of so much of this great etcher’s labour. It reminds us that whether Mr Whistler’s work is record of Nature or not, it has at all costs to be conclusive evidence of Art. And for the one as well as for the other, he has had need to know, not only what to do—a difficult thing enough, sometimes—but a more difficult thing yet: what to avoid doing. In other words, selection plays in his work a part unusually important, and he has occupied himself increasingly, not with the question of how to imitate and transcribe, but with the question how best to imply and to suggest. In nearly all his periods he is the master of an advanced art, which gives a curious and a various and a continual pleasure.

And now a word or two on what is matter of business to the collector—the business of the acquisition of Whistler’s etchings. Unlike the thousand prints which, in these later days of “the Revival,” are the inadequate result of the laborious industry of popular people—and which have served their purpose when, framed and mounted, they have covered for a while the wall-paper in every builder’s terrace in Bayswater—works of the individuality, the flexibility, the genius in fine of Whistler, appeal to the collector of the highest class and of the finest taste, and, it may be even, to him alone. They lie already in the portfolio by the side of Rembrandts and Méryons. It is not easy to get them; or, rather, there are some which it is only difficult, and some which it is impossible, to possess. Certain of the coppers are known to have been destroyed; others, which one cannot always particularise, are in all probability destroyed. Then again there are dry-points, never very robust; some of them so delicate, so evanescent, that the plate, should it exist, would prove to be worth nothing. It has yielded, perhaps, half-a-dozen impressions, and they have gone far towards exhausting it. Many plates, again, exist, no doubt, in the late State, or in the undesirable condition, and some are yet intact, and others, like the two Venetian series—the “Venice” and the “Twenty-Six”—economically managed from the beginning, have yielded a substantial yet never an extensive array of such proofs as satisfy the eye that is educated.

Publication—if one can quite call it so—of Mr Whistler’s etchings first began in 1859, when the artist had worked seriously for only two or three years. Thirteen etchings, generally called “the French Set,” were printed then by Delâtre in Paris, in very limited numbers, on the thin Japan or China or on the good old slightly-ribbed paper that the collector loves. The “Thames Set”—sixteen in number, and consisting of the majority of the River pieces executed up to that time—were the next to be offered. But they appeared, publicly, only in 1871, when, as Mr Ellis was good enough to tell me, “Ellis & Green” bought the plates and had a hundred sets printed. Their printing was rather dry, so that it is really by the rare impressions which either Mr Whistler himself, or Delâtre it may be, had printed, years before, that these plates are to be judged. It is these impressions which represent them most perfectly—it is these the true collector demands—though I would not speak disrespectfully of the impressions printed by Mr Goulding when the Fine Art Society bought the plates of Mr Ellis, or of the subsequent ones printed when Mr Keppel, in his turn, bought the coppers of the Fine Art Society.

Of the two other recognised sets—the “Venice” of the Fine Art Society and the “Twenty-Six Etchings” of the Dowdeswells—it must be said first that neither has been subjected to the vicissitudes that attended the earlier plates. The dozen prints in the “Venice” were first issued by the Fine Art Society in the year 1880; but, as I have said earlier, very few of the fine and really finished impressions—of the hundred permitted from each plate—date from as early as that year. The “Twenty-Six Etchings,” issued by the Messrs Dowdeswell, were brought out in 1886; Mr Whistler himself printing, with consummate skill, every mortal copy, and making the most interesting little changes, repairs, improvements, at the press-side. Of most of the subjects there were but fifty impressions.

These things are wholly admirable, and mostly—it is evident—are rare; but the extremest rarity is reserved for a few of those many plates which do not belong to any set at all, and were never formally issued. Thus Paris, Isle de la Cité—etched from the Galérie d’Apollon in the Louvre—is of unsurpassable rarity; and it is singularly interesting as having, though with a date as early as 1859, very distinct characteristics of a style of which the wider manifestation came much later. The First State of the Rag Gatherers is of great, though not of quite such extraordinary rarity. The Kitchen, in the First State, is not exceptionally rare. It should be had, if possible, in the Second, for, many years after its first execution, Mr Whistler took it up again, and then, and then only, was it that he perfected it. In subtlety of illumination, in that Second State, it is as fine as any painting of De Hooch’s. Westminster Bridge is very rare and very desirable in the First State; in the Second—by which time it has gone into the regular “Thames Set” or “Sixteen Etchings”—it has lost all its delicacy and harmony: it is hard and dry. The figure-pieces of the Leyland period—dry-points, nearly always—are very rare. They include not only a little succession of portraits—the lovely print of Fanny Leyland I have referred to already—but likewise a succession of studies of paid or of familiar models, of which the Model Resting is one of the most beautiful. There is Tillie: a model, too: likewise of great rarity and charm. Of the larger etchings, three of the finest are the Putney Bridge, the Battersea Bridge, and the Large “Pool.” Beyond this scale, Etching can hardly safely go. Even this scale would be a danger to some, though Mr Whistler has managed it. But then, that art of his—like Rembrandt’s own—can “blow on brass” as well as “breathe through silver.” He “breathes through silver” in the dainty rarities of a later time, the little Chelsea shop subjects—Old Clothes Shop, Fruit Shop. Are there half-a-dozen impressions of them anywhere in the world? And then, the poetic charm of Price’s Candle Works—the easy majesty of London Bridge!

As to the prices of Whistlers in the open market? Well, they increase, unquestionably. Some of the very greatest rarities, it may be remembered, have never appeared in the auction-room. There are half-a-dozen, I suppose, for any one of which, did it appear, forty or fifty guineas would cheerfully be paid. The average price, now, of a satisfactory Whistler—to speak to the collector very roughly, and always with the difficulty of striking an average at all—the average dealer’s price might now be eight guineas. But we will look at the Catalogues; premising, as has been premised already, that there are some rarer things than any that are there chronicled. The time when Mr Heywood sold his Whistlers was the fortunate time to buy. A First State of the Rag Gatherers was sold then for less than two pounds; a First of the Westminster Bridge (then called “The House of Parliament”), for about five pounds; and many quite desirable things went for a pound a piece, and some for a few shillings. In 1892, when there came the sale of Mr Hutchinson’s collection, and of Sir William Drake’s, opinion was more formed; yet nothing like the prices that would be reached to-day were attained then. In Mr Hutchinson’s collection, the First State of the Marchande de Moutarde—rare, but not especially rare—went for £4, 10s.; the First State of the Kitchen for £8, 15s.; the Lime-Burners for £6, 10s.; a trial proof of the Arthur for £10, 15s.; a trial proof of the Whistler for £15, 10s. Again, the Weary fetched £12; the First State of Speke Hall, £9, 12s.; the Fanny Leyland, £15, 10s.; From Pickled Herring Stairs, £6, 6s.; the Palaces, £8, 15s.; the San Biagio, £7, 10s.; the Garden, £5, 10s.; the Wool Carders, £8; the Little Drawbridge, Amsterdam, £9, 15s.; the Zaandam, £10. At the Drake Sale—a smaller one, as far as Whistlers were concerned—ten guineas was given for the Kitchen; £19 for the Forge. It must be added that this Forge, which is in the second published set (the “Thames series” or “Sixteen Etchings,” call them which you will) is in the quality of its different impressions more unequal than almost any print I know. It varies from an ineffective ghost to a thing of beauty. At £19, let us hope it was a thing of beauty; but very much oftener it is an ineffective ghost—desperately overrated.

CHAPTER VI

Etchers since our great Classics—William Strang—His individuality, and obligations to Legros—That excellent Master—Legros’s nobility and dignity—His observation and imagination—Holroyd—The daintiness of Short—C. J. Watson—Goff, flexible and comprehensive—The qualities of Cameron—Oliver Hall’s Landscape—The question of prices—Contemporary Prints generally dear.

Though no very definite commercial values may yet have been established, in the auction-rooms, for their work, many living English etchers of a generation later than that of Whistler and of Seymour Haden have been for some time now appealing to the collector; and their prints—sold chiefly perhaps at the “Painter-Etcher’s,” at Mr Dunthorne’s, and at Mr R. Gutekunst’s—are worthy to be carefully considered. The best of them, at least, will rank some day as only second to the classics of their art. Indeed, if the term “the Revival of Etching” has any meaning, it is to the best men of the later generation that it must most apply; for “revival” signifies surely some tolerably wide diffusion of interest, and is a word that could scarcely be used if all we were concerned with were the efforts of two or three isolated men of genius—in France, Méryon, Bracquemond, Jacquemart; in England, Haden and Whistler.