Dürer: Coat of Arms with the Cock.
A reference to the Richard Fisher Sale Catalogue (at Sotheby’s, May 1892) affords as ready and as correct a means as we are likely to obtain of estimating the present value of fine Dürer prints. Mr Fisher’s collection was unequal; but it was celebrated, and it was, on the whole, admirable. It was, moreover, practically complete, and in this way alone it represented an extraordinary achievement in Collecting. Its greatest feature was Mr Fisher’s possession of the Adam and Eve in a condition of exceptional brilliancy, and with a long pedigree, from the John Barnard, Maberly, and Hawkins collections. This was the first Albert Dürer that passed under the hammer on the occasion, and so opened the sale of the Dürers with a thunderclap, as it were—Herr Meder paying £410 to bear it off in triumph. Then came the Nativity, the charming dainty little print, which Dürer himself speaks of as the “Christmas Day.” Mr Gutekunst gave £49 for it. A fine impression of the Virgin with Long Hair fetched £51; an indifferent one of the more beautiful Virgin seated by a Wall, £10, 15s. The St Hubert sold for £48—a finer impression of the same subject selling, in the Holford Sale, just a year later, for £150—the Melancholia, £39; but, it must be remembered, the Melancholia, though always one of the most sought for, is not by any means one of the rarest Dürers. The Knight of Death passed, for £100, into the hands of Mr Gutekunst. An early impression of the Coat of Arms with the Cock was bought by Mr Kennedy for £20; the Coat of Arms with a Skull going to Messrs Colnaghi for £42. In the Holford Sale a yet finer impression of this last subject was bought by Herr Meder for £75.
Before I leave, for a while at least, the prosaic questions of the Sale-Room, and pass on to direct attention to the artistic virtues of the “Little Masters,” let the “beginning collector,” as the quaint phrase runs, be warned in regard to copies. It has not been left for an age that imitates everything—that copies our charming Battersea Enamel, tant bien que mal, and the “scale-blue” of old Worcester, and the lustre of Oriental—it has not been left for such an age to be the first to copy Dürer. In fact, no one nowadays bestows the labour required in copying Dürer. He is copied nowadays only in the craft of photogravure. But, of old time, Wierix, and less celebrated men, copied him greatly. This is a matter of which the collector—at first at least—has need to beware. It must be stamped upon his mind that Dürer’s work at a certain period did much engage the copyist. It engaged the copyist only less perhaps than did the work of Rembrandt himself, through successive generations.
And now we speak, though briefly, of the seven German “Little Masters,” of whom the best are never “little” in style, but, rather, great and pregnant, richly charged with quality and meaning: “little” only in the mere scale of their labour. The print-buyer who is in that rudimentary condition that he only considers the walls of his sitting-rooms, and buys almost exclusively for their effective decoration, does not look at the Little Masters. Upon a distant wall, their works make little spots. But in a corner, near the fire—on the right-hand side of that arm-chair in which you seek to establish your most cossetted guest, the person (of the opposite sex, generally) whom you are glad to behold—a little frame containing half-a-dozen Behams, Aldegrevers, to be looked at closely (pieces of Ornament perhaps; exercises in exquisite line), adds charm to an interior which, under circumstances of Romance, may need indeed no added charm at all from the mere possessions of the collector. Still—there are moods. And if the German Little Masters come in pleasantly enough, on an odd foot or so of wall, now and then, how justified is their presence in the portfolio—in the solander-box—when the collector is really a serious one, and when he no longer bestows upon living, breathing Humanity all the solicitude that was meant for his Behams!
To talk more gravely, the German Little Masters should indeed be collected far more widely than they are, amongst us. Scarcely anything in their appeal is particular and local. Their qualities—the qualities of the best of them—are exquisite and sterling, and are for all Time.
The seven Little Masters, on whom the late Mr W. Bell Scott—one of the first people here in England to collect them—wrote, in an inadequate series, one of the few quite satisfactory books, are, Altdorfer, Barthel Beham, Sebald Beham, Aldegrever, Pencz, Jacob Binck, and Hans Brosamer. One or two of these may quickly be discerned to be inferior to the others; one or two to be superior; but it would be priggish to attempt to range them in definite order of merit. It may suffice to say that to me at least Aldegrever and the Behams appeal most as men to be collected. The Behams—Sebald especially—was a very fine Ornamentist. Aldegrever, it may be, was an Ornamentist yet more faultless. Some examples of his Ornament the collector should certainly possess. And then he will come back very probably to the Behams, recognising in these two brothers a larger range than Aldegrever had, and a spirit more dramatic—an entrance more vivid and personal into human life, a keen interest in human story. They were realists, not without a touch of the ideal. And in design and execution, they were consummate artists, and not only—which they were too, of course—infinitely laborious and exquisite craftsmen.
Adam Bartsch has catalogued, in his industrious way, according to the best lights of his period, the works of the Little Masters. His volumes are the foundation of all subsequent study. To Altdorfer he assigns ninety-six pieces (I speak of course here, and in every case, of pieces engraved on metal); to Barthel Beham, sixty-four; to Sebald Beham—whose life, though not a long, was yet a longer one than Barthel’s—two hundred and fifty-nine; to Jacob Binck, ninety-seven; to George Pencz, a hundred and twenty-six; to Heinrich Aldegrever, no less than two hundred and eighty-nine; to Brosamer, four-and-twenty. But of late years, as was to be expected, certain of these masters have been the subjects of particular study. Thus we have, in England, the dainty little catalogue of Sebald Beham, by the Rev. W. J. Loftie—a book delightfully printed in a very limited edition. That book brings up the number of Sebald Beham’s assured plates to two hundred and seventy-four. Dr Rosenberg has also, in much detail, written in German upon the plates of this fascinating artist; and still more lately M. Edouard Aumüller has published, at Munich, in the French tongue, elaborate, though indeed scarcely final, studies of the Behams and of Jacob Binck.
Of the German Little Masters, Albrecht Altdorfer is the earliest. He was only nine years Dürer’s junior; nearly twenty years separate him from others of the group. Born it really even at the present moment seems difficult to say where, Altdorfer, Dr Rosenberg considers, was actually a pupil of Dürer’s—an apprentice, an inmate of his house, probably, soon after Dürer as a quite young man, already prosperous and busy, took up his abode, with his bride, Agnes Frey, at the large house by the Thiergarten Gate. But whatever was the place of Altdorfer’s birth and whatever the place of his pupilage—and neither matter, as it seems, is settled conclusively—Ratisbon is the city in which his life was chiefly spent. There he was architect as well as painter and engraver; an official post was given him; and during the last decade of his career his architectural work for Ratisbon caused, it is to be presumed, the complete cessation of his work of an engraver. Merits Altdorfer of course has—variety and ingenuity amongst them—or his fame would hardly have survived; but Mr W. B. Scott, whose criticism of him was that of an artist naturally rather in sympathy with the methods of his endeavour, never rises to enthusiasm in his account of him. His drawing is not found worthy of any warm commendation, nor his craftsmanship with the copper. The great lessons he might have learnt from Dürer, he does not seem fully to have appropriated. His design is deemed more fantastic. But his range was not narrow, and apart from his practice in what is strictly line-engraving, he executed etchings of Landscape—caring more than Dürer did, perhaps, for Landscape for its own sake: studying it indeed less lovingly in detail, but with a certain then unusual reliance on the interest of its general effect. Some measure of romantic character belongs to his Landscape: “partly intensified,” says Mr Scott, “and partly destroyed, by the eccentric taste that appears in nearly everything from his hand.” The pine had fascination for him. “And he loaded its boughs with fronds, like the feathers of birds, and added long hues, vagaries of lines, that have little or no foundation in Nature.”
Of both the Behams, Mr Loftie assures us that they were pupils of Dürer. Greater even than the artist I have just been writing about, they show, it seems to me, at once an influence more direct from Dürer, and an individuality more potent, of their own. Barthel, the younger of the two brothers—one whose designs Sebald, with all his gifts, was not too proud to now and then copy—was born at Nuremberg in 1502. “Le dessin de ses estampes,” writes M. Aumüller, “est savant et gracieux, et son burin est d’une élégance brillante et moelleuse.” The words—though it is impossible, in a line or two, to generalise a great personality—are not badly chosen. Exiled from Nuremberg, whilst still young, Barthel Beham laboured at Frankfort, and, later, in Italy—a circumstance which accounts for something in the character of his work. For, in Barthel, the Italian influence is unmistakable; he is, as Mr Scott says truly, “emancipated from the wilful despising of the graces.” In Italy, in 1540, Barthel died.
Sebald Beham, the more prolific brother, whose years, ere they were ended, numbered half a century, was born in 1500. He remained at home—not indeed at Nuremberg, but long at Frankfort—yet, remaining at home, his work was somehow more varied. A classical subject one day, and peasant life the next, an ornament now, and now a design symbolical like his Melancholia—these interested him in turn; and, as for his technical achievement, his Coat of Arms with the Cock (for he, like Dürer, had that, as well as a Melancholia) would suffice to show, had he nothing else to show, his unsurpassable fineness of detail. “Cette superbe gravure,” M. Aumüller says—and most justifiably, for technical excellence cannot go any further, nor is there wanting majesty of Style. At the Loftie Sale some happy person acquired for £4 this lovely little masterpiece: at the Durazzo Sale, £5 was the price of it. Analysis of Sebald Beham’s prints shows that of his noble work on metal seventy-five subjects are suggested by sacred and nineteen by “profane” history. Mythology claims thirty-eight designs, and Allegory thirty-four. Genre subjects, treated with the various qualities of observation, humour, warmth, absorb some seventy plates. Of vignettes and ornaments, there are about two score.