A vast proportion of the work of the first practitioners of Mezzotint appeals rather to the collector of portraits for likeness’ sake, than to the collector of prints for beauty’s sake and Art’s. Such a collector is a specialist the nature of whose specialty obliges him to amass a certain amount of artistic production without necessarily having any great regard for the Art that is in it. We are not concerned, in this volume, with this specialty, honourable and serviceable as it may be—a book which, by reason of more pressing claims, leaves out of consideration the manly and yet highly refined labours of Nanteuil, Edelinck, the Drevets (masters of reproductive work in pure “line ”), may well be pardoned if it does not pause over mere portraiture—I mean, the less artistic portraiture—in mezzotint. The collector who is as yet but a beginner should be encouraged to direct his eye to the more statedly and purposely artistic—to the hill-tops where he will find already, as his comrades in research, those who have brought to the task of collecting a long experience and a chastened taste. In other words, the generation of Reynolds and of Gainsborough, or else the generation of Romney and of Morland, has to be reached before the mezzotint collector can lay hands on the great prizes of his pursuit. The perfectly translated art of these painters is amongst the few things which may be accounted popular and yet may be accounted noble.
In saying this, I do not preclude myself from saying also that I think the sums given at present for the most favourite instances of mezzotint engraving are distinctly excessive. We will look at a few of them in detail, on a later page. Fashion knows little reasonableness—but little moderation—and hence it is that a translation of Reynolds, gracious and engaging, commands, if it happens to be at all rare, the price, and often more than the price, of an original and important creation of Dürer’s, or even of Rembrandt’s. But what shall we say when we have to recollect that, at the present moment, even the mezzotints after Hoppner are ridiculously dear!
Of all the masters of the Eighteenth or early Nineteenth Century, it is Sir Joshua Reynolds who has been engraved most amply. It is safe to say that there are something like four hundred prints after his painted work—prints of the great time, I mean, ending not later than 1820, and taking, amongst others, no account of the smaller plates of which S. W. Reynolds executed so many. The latest and best Catalogue of these great Reynolds prints is that of Dr Hamilton—a labour of diligence and loving care undertaken in our own generations. Of the painters of the British School, Morland probably comes next to Reynolds, in respect of the number of engravings executed after his work. Apart from prints in stipple, there exist after Morland something like two hundred mezzotints. A systematic Catalogue, with states and all, is still to be desired, as a sure practical guide to the collector of Morland; but meanwhile useful service has certainly been rendered by the Exhibitions at the Messrs Vokins’s, for these were wonderfully comprehensive, and with them careful lists—only just short of being catalogues raisonnés—have been issued. William Ward—Morland’s brother-in-law—and J. R. Smith, with whom he was associated, were his two principal engravers; but many another accomplished craftsman had a hand in popularising his labours by reproducing his themes—amongst them John Young, the author of the rare and little known, and poetic plate, Travellers. Mr Percy Horne—himself, like Dr Hamilton, a well-known collector—has done for Gainsborough and Romney what Dr Hamilton has done for Sir Joshua. In one volume, charmingly illustrated with a few specimen subjects, Mr Percy Horne has issued a Catalogue of the engraved portraits and fancy subjects painted by Gainsborough and by Romney—the Gainsborough pieces of which he has taken note having been published between 1760 and 1820; the Romneys, between 1770 and 1830. By Gainsborough, there are eighty-eight, of which seventy-seven are portraits. The numbers include some in stipple and a few even in line, but the bulk are, of course, mezzotints. By Romney—somehow more popular with the engravers, and, it would seem, with the public—there are no less than a hundred and forty-five, of which a hundred and thirty-six are portraits. But it is difficult, in this matter, to draw the line very sharply, owing to the habit of the beauties of that day to be painted not only as themselves, but “as Miranda,” “as Sensibility,” and the like. Mr Horne himself reminds us, by cross references in his index, that even of the few Romneys which he has chosen to catalogue as “fancy subjects,” some are in truth portraits. Among the engraved Romney portraits, no less than twenty are avowed representations of the fascinating woman who inspired Romney as did no other soul, and without whose presence he not seldom pined. She came to him first as Emma Hart, or Emma Lyon, mistress of Charles Greville. He knew her afterwards as the wife of Sir William Hamilton. The modified and unforbidding Classicism of her beauty accorded well with his ideal—helped perhaps to form it—and, admirable as is much of the work of his in which she had no place, Romney is most completely Romney when it is Lady Hamilton he is recording.
The value of an average Romney print is to-day at least as high as that of an average Reynolds, and much higher than that of an average Gainsborough. An exceptional print like his Mrs Carwardine, than which nothing is finer—a well-built gentlewoman, seen in profile, in close white cap, her head bent prettily over a nestling child, and her arms clasped at his back—sells for about a hundred guineas, and, in a fine impression, is scarcely likely to fetch less. It was engraved by J. R. Smith in 1781. Very beautiful and delicate, though not perhaps so extremely rare, is the Elizabeth, Countess of Derby, engraved by John Dean. Two hundred pounds has been fetched by Raphael Smith’s engraving of Romney’s Lady Warwick. Of Gainsboroughs, perhaps the very finest is one engraved by Dean; this is the Mrs Elliot, a print of 1779; a very great rarity; a thing of delightful and dignified beauty, and in its exquisite delicacy, quite as characteristic of the engraver as of the original artist. It is a long time since any impression has been sold. About £70 was the last chronicled price for it. It would fetch more, so experts think, did it reappear to-day.
Reynolds: Miss Oliver.
The highest price ever yet paid for a print after Sir Joshua is, as I am told, £350; and this was given for an impression of Thomas Watson’s print after the picture sometimes called “An Offering to Hymen”—the Hon. Mrs Beresford, with the Marchioness Townshend and the Hon. Mrs Gardiner. For a while, the Ladies Waldegrave, engraved by Valentine Green, was considered at the top of the tree. £270 has been cheerfully paid for it. Mr Urban Noseda—than whom no dealer in England is a greater specialist in mezzotint, for he has inherited, it seems, his mother’s eye—the eye which made that lady so desirable a friend to the collector, a quarter of a century ago—Mr Urban Noseda (if I can get somehow to the end of a sentence so involved and awkward that I am beginning to feel it must necessarily be very clever too) tells me, from Notes to which he has had access, that the original price of even the most important of these Sir Joshua prints was never more than a guinea and a half, and that not a few were issued at five shillings.
The Morland prices still seem moderate when compared with those of average Sir Joshuas: actually cheap when compared with those that are finest and rarest. Lately, the charming pair, A Visit to the Child at Nurse and A Visit to the Child at School, fetched, at Sotheby’s, twenty-seven guineas; the Farmer’s Stable fetched, at the Huth Sale, £11, 10s.; the Carrier’s Stable, not long since at Christie’s, fetched twenty-one guineas; Fishermen going out, by S. W. Reynolds, has realised £17; The Story of Letitia, a small set, has realised £30, but would to-day fetch more—in fine condition. Mr Noseda says—and I suppose those other great authorities on Mezzotint, Messrs Colnaghi, would confirm him—that the original prices of the Morlands ranged from seven and sixpence to a guinea. Great as the difference is between the sum first asked and the sum now obtained, I cannot in the case of this so genial, graceful, acceptable, observant master, think it is excessive. A generation that has gone a little mad over J. F. Millet, and other interesting French rustic painters, may allow itself some healthy enthusiasm when George Morland is to the front.
CHAPTER XII
Lithography, the convenient invention of Senefelder—Its recent Revival due to the French and Whistler—Legros—Fantin—Whistler’s Lithographs only inferior to his Etchings—C. H. Shannon’s Lithographs the best expression of his art—Lithography and Etching compared—Will Rothenstein—Oliver Hall—The Lithographs of Roussel—Other Draughtsmen—The contemporary Lithograph foolishly costly.