Intricate in arrangement of line, the work of Colonel Goff is in actual workmanship less elaborate than that of Mr D. Y. Cameron, who, though now and again, as in that masterpiece of Landscape work—Border Towers—a pure sketcher in Etching, much oftener devotes himself to work solid, substantial, deliberate rather in fulness of realisation than in economy of means. He is a fine engraver on the copper; addicted to massive arrangements of shadow and light—giving to these, wherever there is any fair excuse for doing so, a little of the Celtic weirdness Mr Strang bestows upon the figure. Glamour, a touch of wizardry, is in the Palace, Stirling Castle; and it is not in that only. A master, already, of the arrangement of light and shade—a master, already, of technique—Mr Cameron (who has studied Rembrandt so much, and, I should presume, Méryon) is finding his own path. Indeed, the Border Towers shows that all that he has learnt from Rembrandt he has made his own by this time. How else could he have accomplished what is certainly one of the most complete and significant suggestions of Landscape wrought in our day! A Rembrandt Farm is earlier. It is extremely clever, but, as its very name might lead one to conjecture, it is more distinctly imitative. Mr Cameron was not a master at the moment when he wrought the Flower Market; because, if he did not make in that the irremediable mistake of choosing the wrong medium—printer’s ink, where one’s cry, first and last, is naturally for “colour”—he made at all events the mistake that Mr Whistler is incapable of making (as his etching of The Garden shows), the mistake of working with a heavy hand, when what was wanted was a treatment of “touch and go,” as it were—the very lightest coquetry of line. Occasionally Mr Cameron has failed; occasionally his industry has resulted in the commonplace; but he is a young man still; the collector must take account of him; his will hereafter be a very distinguished name; and meanwhile—now even—the collector of good Modern Etching is bound to put into his folios not a few of Mr Cameron’s sterling prints.
Mr Oliver Hall—a young man also, and one who paints in water-colour as well as etches—can hardly have done as many plates as Mr Cameron, yet; and in none of them, free sketches of landscape—breezy, immediate, well-disposed—has Mr Hall been so unwise as to emulate the almost Méryon-like elaboration not inappropriate at all to the architectural subjects of Cameron. Oliver Hall’s is delightful and sufficiently masculine work. After a short period of immaturity, during which the influence of Seymour Haden was that which he most disclosed, his Trees on the Hillside and A Windy Day testified to great flexibility, and to some force. The lines of “foliage,” as people call it—it is the tree, however, rather than the leaf—the lines of the tree-form, however intricate, did not elude his point. Afterwards, Angerton Moss: Windy Day, and the Edge of the Forest, with its gust-blown trees and threatening sky, and later still, King’s Lynn from a Distance, came to assure us that here was an artist getting at the heart of Nature—an artist who could bring before us a poetic vision of natural effects.
Mr Alfred East, Mr Jacomb Hood, Mr Roussel, Mr Percy Thomas, Mr J. P. Heseltine, Mr W. H. May, Sir Charles Robinson, Mr Axel Haig, Elizabeth Armstrong (Mrs Stanhope Forbes), and Minna Bolingbroke (Mrs C. J. Watson) ought not to go unmentioned even in a book which has a wider field than “Etching in England”—in which I have named some of them less baldly.
The inexpert purchaser may like to know what is the sort of price asked generally by its producer, or by the dealer, or the Painter-Etchers’ Society—to which the print may be intrusted—for a new etching. I am here on ticklish ground; but I must make bold to answer, speaking broadly, “Far too much.” Later on—before I have quite done with the subject of the Lithograph—I shall return to the charge, on this matter of solid cash. But each class of work stands, in the matter of price, on its own peculiar footing; and here we talk, not of lithographs, but of etchings and dry-points. The wholly exceptional genius, approved by Time, and happily yet with us to benefit by the result of his fame, may be pardoned for asking twelve guineas for one of his most recent etchings. If he gets it, his rewards are delightfully contrasted with those of Méryon—who was grateful when an old gentleman in the French War Office gave him a franc and a half for an impression of the Abside de Nôtre-Dame, which, because of its beauty and of its peculiar and rare “state,” is worth to-day about a hundred and fifty pounds. But we are not all men of exceptional genius; and, in the case of etched work, which, without deterioration, may be issued to the number of fifty or a hundred or a couple of hundred impressions, is it wise to seek to anticipate what after all may prove not to be the verdict of the world?—is it wise to limit the issue so very artificially by the simple, I will not say the greedy process of asking two, three, and four guineas for an impression of a good but ordinary etching? A good etching, produced by a contemporary artist, could, quite to the benefit of the etcher, be sold for a guinea. If the etcher has not time to print it himself, or is not, at heart, artist enough to wish to do so, let him send it to a good printer, with definite instructions how to print it, and, on the average, each impression may cost him half-a-crown. Then, of course, if he sells it through a dealer, there will be something for the dealer—perhaps five shillings. Say about fourteen shillings will be left for the artist. The fee is insignificant—but, if you once interest the public, it may be almost indefinitely multiplied. The price that is prohibitive to the ordinary man of taste—the price that prevents him, not, of course, from buying an etching here and there, but from forming any considerable collection of etchings—that, if the artist only knew it, is the greatest possible disadvantage to himself. He is concerned for his dignity; his amour-propre, he sometimes says. But an etching—like a book—is a printed thing; and the author of a book conceives, and rightly, that his amour-propre is wounded rather by absence or narrow restriction of sale than by the moderation—the lowness, if you will—of the price at which his book is issued.
Now a dry-point and an ordinary etching stand on different ground in this respect. Both are printed things, indeed; but whilst the etching will, according to its degree of force or delicacy, yield, without “steeling,” from fifty to four hundred impressions—and generally quite as near the four hundred as the fifty—a dry-point will inevitably deteriorate after a dozen or twenty impressions, and may even deteriorate after three or four. Each impression, then, of a dry-point that is desirable at all, has its own peculiar value—its rarity to begin with (unless you work it to death), and its unlikeness to its neighbour. I blame no good artist, when he has made a good dry-point, for asking two or three or four, or six or seven, guineas for it. I do not as work of art—as providing me with joy—esteem it any more highly than the etching. The etching, which I ought to acquire at a guinea, may give me the gratification of a Wordsworthian poem. It may be—happy chance for every one concerned if it is!—as directly inspired as the Ancient Mariner: it may be a thing conceived and wrought in one of those “states of the atmosphere” which (it is Coleridge himself who says it) are “addressed to the soul.” Do I underrate it? Not a jot. But I discern that, like the Ancient Mariner, it can be multiplied in large numbers. The dry-point cannot.
Even at the risk of being charged with a certain repetition of my argument, I shall return—as the reader has been warned already—it will be somewhere in the chapter on modern Lithography—to this question of the too extravagant price, and therefore of the necessarily too restricted sale, of the contemporary print.
CHAPTER VII
Recent Interest in Martin Schöngauer—A graceful Primitive—Dürer the exponent of the fuller Renaissance—Some principal Dürers—Their prices at the Fisher Sale—German “Little Masters”—The Ornament of Aldegrever—The range of the Behams—Altdorfer—Other Little Masters—And Lucas Van Leyden.
Among the least reprehensible, and also among the least widely diffused, of the recent fads of the collector, there is to be reckoned a certain increase in the consideration accorded to the work of Martin Schöngauer. If Martin Schöngauer’s ingenious and engaging plates—naïve in conception, and, in execution, dainty—came ever to be actually preferred to the innumerable pieces which attest the potency and the variety of Dürer, that preference might possibly be explained, but could never be justified. As it is, however, no reasonable admirer of “the great Albert” can begrudge to one who was after all to some extent his predecessor, and not in all things his inferior, the honourable place which, after many generations of comparative neglect, that predecessor has lately taken, and now seems likely to hold. Schöngauer, even more it may be than Albert Dürer himself, was, as it were, a path-breaker. The interest of the Primitive belongs to him; and the interest of the simple. Some of his religious conceptions were expressed in prettier form—and form on that account more readily welcomed—than any that was taken on by the conceptions of the giant mind that even now draws us upon our pilgrimage to Nuremberg, as Goethe draws us to Weimar. The Virgin of Schöngauer is more acceptable to the senses than the average Virgin of Dürer, whose children, on the other hand (see especially the delightful little print, The Three Genii, Bartsch 66), have the larger lines and lustier life of the full Renaissance.
