Fine prints

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

Turner is represented on many a side by the engraver’s art, and in most cases with singular good fortune. For some, there are the vignettes which have the finish of Cellini work. For some, it may be, the large, more recent plates, the Modern Italy and Ancient Italy, that hang, I cannot help considering, rather ineffectively upon the wall: too big, not for their place, but for their method of execution—and yet, like so many, wonderful. He is represented best of all perhaps in works of middle scale—in the virile line of the “Southern Coast,” and the unapproachable mezzotint and etching of the “Liber.” If everything that he has wrought with brush or pencil were extinguished, these things, living, would make immortal his fame.

CHAPTER XI

The healthy appreciation of Mezzotint—Its faculty of conveying the painter’s very touch—Landscape Scenes in Mezzotint—Comparative Rarity of Landscapes—The Constables—Vast volume of Rare Pieces and Portraits—The Prints after Sir Joshua Reynolds—Dr Hamilton’s Catalogue—The smaller number of Gainsboroughs—Increased appreciation of Romney—Mr Percy Horne’s book on these men—George Morland—The cost of Mezzotints now, and when first issued.

Of modern fashions in Print Collecting, the appreciation of mezzotints is assuredly one of the healthiest, and—apart from the question of the very high prices to which mezzotints have lately been forced—there is only one drawback to the pleasure of the collector in bringing them together: the collector of mezzotints has to resign himself to do without original work. The scraping of the plate in these broad masses of shadow and light—a method immensely popular as means of interpretation or translation of the painter’s touch—has from the days of the invention of the process by Ludwig von Siegen to the days of its latest practice, never greatly commended itself to the original artist as a method for fresh design. There are a few exquisite exceptions; and perhaps there is no sufficient reason why there should not be more; but the exceptions best known, and most likely to be cited, the prints of Turner’s “Liber Studiorum,” are exceptions only in so far as regards that small proportion of the whole—about ten amongst the published plates—wrought by Turner himself.

David Lucas: Constable’s Spring.

And, further, the collector, if he cares much for Landscape subjects, will note that landscapes in mezzotint are comparatively few. It was in the Eighteenth Century that the production of mezzotint was most voluminous; and the Eighteenth Century took little interest in Landscape. In the earlier half of our own century—ere yet the art had almost ceased to be practised—the world was given a few famous sets of landscapes in mezzotint; but they were very few. Turner’s “Liber” (with its backbone of etching) was followed by the half-dozen pieces of the “Ports of England,” and by “Rivers of England,” or “River Scenery,” as it is sometimes called, “after Turner and Girtin.” And then, well in the middle of the half-century, we were endowed with the delightful, now highly prized mezzotints, which were executed by David Lucas after the works of Constable, homely when they were sombre, homely too when they were most sparkling and alive. They too, the “Constable’s English Landscape”—like the “Liber” prints of Turner—were influenced, for better or worse, by the supervision of the creative artist. The tendency of Lucas may have been to make them too black—even Constable never blamed him for making them, likewise, massive. Sparkle and vivacity, as well as obvious breadth and richness, were wanted in adequate renderings of Constable; and all these, by the adaptability of Lucas’s talent, by his rare sympathy, were obtained.

In our own day, several meritorious artists—Wehrschmidt and Pratt and Gerald Robinson and others—have done, in several branches, interesting work in mezzotint; and Frank Short, in one print especially that I have in my mind, after a Turner drawing—an Alpine subject—and again in a decisive mezzotint, A Road in Yorkshire, after Dewint (a road skirting the moors)—is altogether admirable. And, to name yet a third instance of the art of this flexible translator, there is the quite wonderful little vision of the silvery grey Downs, after a sketch by Constable in the possession of Henry Vaughan, whose greater Constable, the Hay Wain, was generously made over to the nation. The work of David Lucas, himself—even in the radiant Summerland, or in the steel-grey keenness of the Spring—did not excel in delicacy of manipulation Frank Short’s delightful rendering of Constable’s vision of the Downs.

But I am not to dwell longer upon particular instances. We are brought back to the fact that it is not, generally speaking, in examples of Landscape Art that the collector of mezzotints must find himself richest. The collector’s groups of landscapes will be limited—and in the first place are the rare Proofs—Lucas’s Proofs—after Constable. In the collection of religious compositions, of genre pieces, of theatrical subjects, of “fancy” subjects—in which that which is most “fancied” is the prettiness of the female sex—in sporting and in racing subjects (amongst the latter there are a few most admirable prints after George Stubbs), and most of all, of course, in portraits, from the days of Lely to the days of Lawrence, there will be opportunities of filling portfolio after portfolio, drawer after drawer.

It is difficult, I think, for the collector—still more for the student who has not a collector’s practical interest in the matter—to realise what is actually the extent of that contribution to the world’s possessions in the way of Art, which has been made, and all within about two hundred years, by the engravers in mezzotint. Some eighteen years ago, an Irish amateur, Mr Challoner Smith, began the publication of a Catalogue which, when it was concluded, several years later, had extended to five volumes. It was a colossal labour. Styled by its compiler “British Mezzotint Portraits,” it really includes the chronicle of many firings which at least are not professedly portraits—yet it excludes many too. Whatever it excludes, its bulk is such, that, amongst the mass of its matter, it comprises full descriptions of between four and five hundred plates by one artist alone. The man is Faber, junior. Fifty plates are chronicled by an engraver more modern of character, more popular to-day—Richard Earlom; amongst them, more than one of the genre or incident pictures after Wright of Derby (in which a difficult effect of chiaroscuro—an effect of artificial light—is treated boldly, vigorously, not always very subtly), and the marvellously painter-like plates of Marriage à la Mode, so much more pictorial than the brilliant line-engravings executed much earlier after those subjects. But not, be it observed, mentioned by Challoner Smith amongst the Earloms, are two other prints in which, in the reproduction of still-life, engraving in mezzotint reaches high-water mark; I mean the now most justly sought-for plates after the Fruit and Flower Pieces of Van Huysum. By James Watson, a contemporary of Earlom’s, more or less, about a hundred and sixty prints are described. By J. R. Smith—who engraved so many of the finest of the Sir Joshuas—there are described two hundred, but by the John Smith who, a century earlier, recorded almost innumerable Knellers, there are all but three hundred. The difference in the number of plates produced by the younger men and by the elder—James Watson, Earlom, and J. B. Smith upon the one hand; John Smith and Faber on the other—finds its explanation in the tendency of mezzotint to become more elaborate, more refined, more perfect, presumably slower, during the hundred years or so that separated the beginning, not from the end indeed (for the end, strictly speaking, is not yet), but from the very crown and crest of the achievement. Much of the early work is very vigorous. John Smith, especially, was within limited lines a sterling artist; though mainly, like the portrait painters that he worked after, without obvious attractiveness and indeed without subtlety. The exceedingly rare examples of Ludwig von Siegen and of Prince Rupert show that these men—at the very beginning even—were artists and not bunglers. But when one compares that early work, John Smith’s even—done, all of it, when the art was but in its robust childhood—with the infinitely more refined and flexible performance of the men of the Eighteenth Century, one wonders only at the great body of achievement, dexterous, delicate, faultlessly graceful, vouchsafed to the practitioners of mezzotint during the last decades of that later epoch. And between the distinctly later work and the distinctly earlier, of the less engaging executants, there came, be it remembered, the masculine art of M‘Ardell, a link in the chain; for M‘Ardell learnt something from the early men, and was the master of more than one of the more recent. He is admirable especially in his rendering of the portraits of men.