Fine prints

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

Mr Julian Marshall, now with us in his middle age, began collecting when he was so young that his great sale occurred as long ago as 1864. Values have changed since that day, very much. Of his four prints by Mantegna, only one—The Flagellation—fetched more than £12. That one reached £21—an early perfect state of The Entombment going for £11, 10s., and Christ descending into Hell for £9. Domenico Campagnola’s Descent of the Holy Ghost then fetched £2, 2s. At the Sykes Sale the same impression had fetched £3; at the Harford, £1, 15s. At the Marochetti Sale in 1868, not a single Mantegna, unless Christ risen from the Dead, fetched a price of importance, and this only ten guineas; but among the Marc Antonios the Adam and Eve in Paradise sold to Mr Colnaghi for £136, and The Massacre of the Innocents to Mr Holloway for £40. The Two Fauns carrying a Child in a Basket—engraved by Marc Antonio, in his finest manner, after an antique—realised £56, and the Saint Cecilia £51. In the Bale collection, in 1881, the St Cecilia fetched £40, and Mariette’s impression of the extraordinarily rare Dance of Cupids £241. That was borne off by M. Clément, who was then what M. Bouillon is now—“marchand d’estampes de la Bibliothèque Nationale.” In the Holford Sale, twelve years afterwards, Marc Antonio’s Adam and Eve sold to M. Danlos for £180; the Massacre of the Innocents (from the Lely Collection) to the same dealer for £190; and the St Cecilia and Lucretia both to Mr Gutekunst—the first for £31; the second for £66. The great price fetched by a Marc Antonio at this Sale was, however, that paid for The Plague—a print which M. Danlos acquired for £370. Taking note of such a sum, one could hardly believe perhaps that Marc Antonios were not rising; but when a master falls, it is in the minor, not the more eminent pieces—or, at least, in average, not exceptional impressions—that we trace most certainly a decline of value. And, taking the St Cecilia alone—one of the most charming of the subjects, as I have said before, though not one of the rarest—we find, on the three occasions of its sale that I have cited, a high price, one less high, and then again a lower. We find, indeed, comparing the prices that were fetched by two impressions not presumably very different—for both were in great Sales—that in 1893 a St Cecilia brought little more than half of what it brought in 1868. The question now for the collector’s judgment, as far as money is concerned, is, Is it safe or unsafe for him to buy at just the present stage of a “falling market”? Have Marc Antonios touched bottom? If he buys them now, will he—in the phrase of sprightly ladies “fluttering” in “South Africans”—will he be “getting in on the ground floor”?

The collector has a right to ask himself these seemingly irreverent questions. Nor will he love Art less, or have an eye less delicate, because he is obliged to ask them. I do not know that the possessions of a prudent collector should—taking things all round—bring him, if he desires to sell, much less than he gave for them. It may be quite enough that as long as he keeps and enjoys them, he shall lose the interest of his money. If, in the interval, the value of his prints happens to increase, so much the better for him—obviously. But he enjoys the things themselves, and can scarcely exact that increase.

CHAPTER IX

French Line-Engravers of the Eighteenth Century render well its original Art—The Prints from Watteau, Lancret, and Pater—Watteau’s Characteristics—Chardin’s Interiors and Studies of the Bourgeoisie—Success of his Domestic Themes—His Portraits and Still-Life are never rendered—The lasting popularity of Greuze—Boucher Prints at a discount—Fragonard and Baudouin—Lavreince and Moreau.

The Eighteenth Century in France witnessed the rise, the development, and the decay or fall of a great School of Art of which the English public remains, even to this day, all but completely ignorant. The easy seductiveness of the maidens of Greuze, with gleaming eyes and glistening shoulders, has indeed secured in England for a certain side of that artist’s work a measure of notice in excess of its real importance; and a succession of accidents and the good taste of two or three connoisseurs out of a hundred—they were men of another generation—have made this country the home and resting-place of some of the best of the pictures and drawings of Watteau. But even Watteau is not to be found within our National Gallery. There Greuze and Lancret—Chardin having but lately joined them with but a single pleasant but inadequate picture—there Greuze and Lancret, seen at least in what is adequate and characteristic, share the task of representing French Art of the period when it was most truly French. They are unequal to the mission. And until some can join them who will fulfil it better, the painted work of the French Eighteenth Century will hardly receive its due.

Fortunately, however, French Eighteenth Century artists fared well at the hands of the line-engravers. Even of a painter who possessed more than many others the charm of colour, it could be said by one of the keenest of his critics that the originality of his work passed successfully from the picture to the print. That is what Denis Diderot wrote of Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, and it is true of them all, from Watteau downwards. Theirs was the century of Line-Engraving in France, as it was that of Mezzotint in England. And the practitioners of Line-Engraving and of Mezzotint were something beyond craftsmen. Not only were they artists in their own departments—some of them painted, some of them designed: they were in sympathy with Art and possessed by its spirit. Hence the peculiar excellence of their work with burin or scraper—the high success of labours which their intelligence and flexibility forbade to be simply mechanical.

An Exhibition which at my suggestion the Fine Art Society was good enough to venture on, eleven years ago—but which attracted so little attention from the great public we wanted to engage, that it must some day, I suppose, be repeated—aimed to show those engravings in which, with fullest effect, the line-engravers of the Eighteenth Century rendered the thought and the impression of painters or of draughtsmen who were, in most cases, their contemporaries. Watteau was the first of these painters. The prints after his pictures were chiefly wrought in the years directly following his far too early death. His friend, M. de Julienne, planned and saw closely to the execution of that best monument to Watteau’s memory. Cochin and Aveline, Le Bas and Audran, Surugue and Brion, Tardieu and Laurent Cars, worked dexterously or nobly, as the case might be, in perpetuation of the master’s dignity and grace. Lancret and Pater were often translated by the same interpreters. Chardin’s work was popularised—as far as France is concerned—a very few years after, and with substantially the same effect. Later in the century, some changes which were not all improvements, began to be discernible in the newer plates. The manly method of which Laurent Cars was about the most conspicuous master, yielded a little to the softer practice of the interpreters of Lavreince or to the airy yet not inexact daintiness of the method of the translators of Moreau. The later style of engraving was suited to the later draughtsmanship and painting. Probably indeed it was adopted with a certain consciousness of their needs. Anyhow, not one of the conspicuous figures in the history of French Eighteenth Century Design—except Latour, who practically has not been reproduced at all—can be said to have suffered seriously at the hands of his translators. What French pictorial artists thought and saw and tried to tell, upon their canvases and drawing papers, is, in the main, to be read in the prints after their works. In these prints we may note alike the triumphs and the failures of the real French School. There is no denying its deficiencies. But it is as free from conventionality as the great School of Holland—as independent of tradition—and it is as true to the life that it essays to depict.

Along the whole of the Eighteenth Century—not in France only—Watteau, who lived in it but twenty years, is the dominating master. To put the matter roughly and briefly, he is the inventor of familiar grace in Art. His treatment of the figure had its perceptible influence even upon the beautiful design of Gainsborough; and the way in which he saw his world of men and women dictated a method to his successors in France, down to the revival of the more academic Classicism. Artists—when they have been so comprehensive as to occupy themselves with other people’s Art—have known generally that Watteau’s name has got to stand among only ten or a dozen of the greatest, but the English amateurs, or rather English picture and print buyers, are still but few who are acquainted with his range and feel the sources of his power. He has not been very popular, because, according to ordinary notions, there is but scanty subject in his designs. The characters in his drama are doing little—they are doing nothing, perhaps. But as the knowledge of what real Art is, extends, and as our sensibility to beauty becomes more refined, we shall ask less, in presence of our pictures, what the people are doing, and shall ask more, what they are. Are they engaging?—we shall want to know. Are they pleasant to live with?

Watteau placed a real humanity in an ideal landscape; but it was still a chosen people that entered into his Promised Land, and the chosen people were ladies of the Court and Theatre, and winning children, and presentable men. His pictures—all the large, elaborate, finely wrought prints after them—are the record of what was in some measure in these people’s daily lives, yet it was even more in his own dream. “Toute une création de poëme et de rêve est sortie de sa tête, emplissant son œuvre de l’élégance d’une vie surnaturelle.” Through all his art he takes his pleasant company to the selected places of the world, and there is always halcyon weather.

Sometimes it is only the comedians of his day—whose mobile faces Watteau had seen behind the footlights of the stage—who make modest picnic, as in the Champs Elysées (the engraving by Tardieu)—find shade as in the Bosquet de Bacchus (the engraving by Cochin), or enjoy at leisure the terraced gardens, the vista, the great trees of the Perspective (the engraving by Crepy). And sometimes—inhabitants no more of a real world—the persons of his drama prepare, with free bearing, to set out upon long journeys. It is now a pilgrimage to Cythera (L’Embarquement pour Cythère, or the Insula Perjucunda)—suddenly they have been transported indeed to the “enchanted isle” (Le Bas’s drawing of the distant mountains in L’Ile Enchantée, is, I may say in an underbreath, a little indefinite and puzzling). In any case the land that Watteau’s art has made more beautiful than ordinary Nature, is peopled by a Humanity keenly and finely observed, and portrayed with an unlimited control of vivacious gesture and of subtle expression.