Baudouin: La Toilette.
Baudouin—in too much of his work—was the portrayer of coarse intrigue in humble life and high: Lavreince and Moreau, masters of polite Genre, with subjects wider and more varied, the chroniclers of conversations not inevitably tête-à-tête. For vividness and intellectual delicacy of expression in the individual heads, one must give the palm to Moreau. The De Goncourts claim for him also pre-eminence in composition; but in one piece at least—in the Assemblée au Concert, engraved by Dequevauviller—Lavreince runs Moreau hard. And Lavreince, I can’t help thinking, has an invention scarcely less refined. What can be gentler, yet what if gentle can be more abundant comedy than his, in the Directeur des Toilettes?—the scene in which a prosperous Abbé, an arbiter of Taste in women’s dress, dictates the choice to his delightful friend, or busily preserves her from the chances of error. And very noteworthy is Lavreince’s way of availing himself of all the opportunities for beautiful design—beautiful line, at all events—which were afforded him by the noble interiors in which there passed the action of his drama. Those interiors are of the days of Louis Seize, and are a little more severe, a little less intricate, than the interiors of Louis Quinze. Musical instruments, often beautiful of form—harp, harpsichord, and violoncello—play their part in these pictorial compositions. Prints from Lavreince, like prints from Moreau, are too gay and too agreeable not to be always valued. England and America will surely take to them, as France has done long ago.
It has been claimed for Moreau—Moreau “le jeune,” to distinguish him from his less eminent brother—that he is yet more exact than Lavreince is, in his record of the fashions of his period in furniture and dress. And sometimes, on this very account, his effect is more prosaic—just as at the contemporary theatre the accessories are apt to dominate or dwarf the persons of the drama. Yet Moreau’s people have generally some interest of individuality and liveliness, and these characteristics are nowhere better seen than in the two series which he designed to show the life of a great lady from the moment of motherhood and the daily existence of a man of fashion. These prints—such as C’est un Fils, Monsieur; La Sortie de l’Opéra; La Grande Toilette—should be possessed, let me tell the collector, with the “A.P.D.Q.” still upon them: not in a later state. Moreau, besides being a charming and observant draughtsman, was himself a delicate engraver; but he left to others (Romanet, Baquoy, and Malbeste amongst them) the business of reproducing his story of the ruling classes—of the leaders of Society—and it was sufficiently popularised. Having regard to what it was—a story, to some people, of irritating even though of elegant triviality—perhaps it was as well for those ruling classes of the Ancien Régime that it did not go further—that it was not actually broadcast. Of Beaumarchais’s pungent comedy the saying has since passed round, that it was the Revolution “en action.” So envy or contempt might surely have been fostered by the wide-spread perusal of Moreau’s exquisite, unvarnished record, and the Revolution have been advanced by a day.
With Moreau’s art, the Eighteenth Century closes. There is an end of its luxury and its amenity—an end of the lover who insists and the lady who but lightly forbids. There followed after it the boneless, nerveless, still eminently graceful pseudo-classicism of Prud’hon, and the sterner pseudo-classicism of David, which recalled the ideal of men to a more strenuous life. But that life was not of the Eighteenth Century. The inflexible David, like the dreamy Prud’hon, was an artist for another age. The graceful, graceless Eighteenth Century—with its own faults, and no less with its own virtues—had said its last word. Familiar and luxurious, tolerant and engaging, it had expressed through Art the last of its so easily supported sorrows and its so easily forgotten loves.
CHAPTER X
The range of Turner Prints—His earlier Engravers—His “Liber Studiorum”—Its etchings, proofs, completed mezzotints—Its money value—“Liber” Collectors—The “Southern Coast” Series—The “England and Wales”—The “Richmondshire” Prints—“Ports” and “Rivers of England”—The Turner Prints secure the Master’s fame.
Turner prints constitute a class apart. The prints which others made after Turner’s drawings and pictures, the prints he executed to some extent or wholly himself, the engravings in line and the engravings in mezzotint, are all of them wont to be collected not so much as part of the representation of a particular method of work, but rather as the representation of an individual genius and of a whole school of the most highly skilled craftsmen.
The Turner prints range in period from a year at least as early as 1794 to a year at least as late as 1856—for though Turner was then dead, one or two of the finest engravers whom he had employed were at that date still labouring in the popularisation of his pieces. They range in size from the dainty vignette a couple of inches high, to the extensive plate—a wonder of executive skill, yet often, too, a wonder of misplaced ingenuity—which may be three feet long. Between them come the very masterpieces of the landscape engraving of last century—line-engravings like the “Southern Coast”; mezzotint supported by etching, like the “Liber Studiorum.” They range in value between a couple of shillings or so—the price, when you can get the print, of a specimen of the early publications in the “Copper-plate Magazine”—to, say, well shall we say to £50?—the price of an exceptional proof of a fine, rare subject in “Liber.” In point of number, those of which account may reasonably be taken by the student of our greatest Landscape artists through the charming medium of his prints—or if you will by the student of Engraving who finds in pieces after Turner alone a sufficient range of method in the illustration of Landscape—in point of number those which there need be no desire to ignore or forget, reach, roundly speaking, to four or five hundred. It is possible to make the study and acquisition of them the main business of the life of an intelligent collector.
Mr W. G. Rawlinson is perhaps amongst existing connoisseurs the one whose knowledge of the engravings by Turner, and after him, is the widest and most exact. Mr Rawlinson has greatly extended the sum of his own knowledge since he penned that catalogue raisonné of the “Liber Studiorum” which remains his only published contribution to the history of the prints of Turner. The book is of much value; but though, broadly considered, it remains an adequate and serviceable guide, there must by this time be a good many corrections in the matter of “States”—rarely is it that the issue of a First Edition of a descriptive catalogue of engraved work does not elicit, from one source or another, some information, the existence of which the author had had no reason to surmise. And, moreover, it may be hoped that Mr Rawlinson’s more extended studies in the field of his particular inquiry will bear fruit some day in the production of another volume, devoted this time to the tale of the great series of Line-Engravings and the less numerous productions in pure Mezzotint. “Liber,” remember—the master-work, which is thus far the only one to have been elaborately discussed or chronicled by any critic—is the result of a combination of Mezzotint with Etching. But we will go back a little, and will take the prints—or such of them as there is cause to mention—in due order.