Fine prints

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

A final chapter I devote to another of the most justifiable and reasonable of the more recent fads in Print Collecting—to a branch of the collector’s pursuit far less important, indeed, and far less interesting than Etching, far less historic than Mezzotint, but far more creditable than the mania of the inartistic for the pretty ineptitude of the coloured print. I am speaking of Lithography.

Men who are familiar with the later development of artistic work, know that not exactly alongside of the very real and admirable Revival of Etching, but closely following behind it, there has proceeded some renewal of interest in the art of drawing upon stone, which, in 1796, was invented by Senefelder. Often, however, nowadays, it is not literally “on stone.” Without defending the change—and yet without the possibility of violently accusing it, seeing the achievements which at least it has not forbidden—I may note that, as a matter of fact, a transfer-paper, and not the prepared stone, is, very frequently in our day, the substance actually drawn on.

Well, the renewal of interest in the art of Lithography owes much to Frenchmen of the present generation, and much to Mr Whistler. I say “the present generation” in talking of the French, because (not to speak of the qualities obtained two generations ago by our English Prout), Gavarni’s “velvety quality” and the “fever and freedom of Daumier” were noticeable, and might have been influential long before the days of our present young men. The work of Fantin-Latour, has been to them an example, and the noble work of Legros, and the work of Whistler. Fantin-Latour—that delightful painter of flowers and of the poetic nude—has endowed us in Lithography as well as in Painting with reveries of the nude, or of the slightly robed. They are all done in freely scraped crayon. A few of them—such as The Genius of Music, or the quite recent To Stendhal or Les Baigneuses—the collector of lithographs is bound to possess. But I must turn, in detail, to Mr Whistler.

Mr Tom Way, who knows as much about Lithography as any one—and more, perhaps, than any one about the lithographs of Whistler—assured me, a year since, that something like a hundred drawings on the stone, or transfer-paper (for Mr Whistler sometimes uses the one and sometimes the other), had been wrought by one whose reputation is secure as the master-etcher of our time. Since then Mr Way has accurately and eulogistically catalogued them. They amount now, or did when Mr Way finished his catalogue, to exactly a hundred and thirty. But Mr Whistler is always working. Let us recall a few of them—most, though indeed by no means all of them, were first seen in an exhibition held in the rooms of the Fine Art Society. Before then, they were wont to be shown privately, to Amateurs, by one or two dealers. Earlier still, they were not shown at all; though a few of the finest of them had been long ago wrought. There was that most distinguished drawing that was published for a penny in the Whirlwind—the lady seated, with a hat on, and one arm pendant. It is called The Winged Hat. As in Mr Whistler’s rare little etching of the slightly-draped cross-kneed girl stooping over a baby, one enjoys, in The Winged Hat, the suggestion of delicate tone on the whole surface: the working of the face is particularly noteworthy by reason of the subtle way in which the draughtsman had suggested, by means of the handling of his chalk, a different texture. “By means of the handling of his chalk,” did I write?—perhaps a little too confidently. One can’t quite say how he did really get it. But he has got it, somehow.

Then there is that admirable portfolio, of only five or six, the Goupils published—containing the Limehouse, mysterious, weird, and unsurpassable, and a Nocturne, wholly exquisite. Again, there is Battersea Bridge, of 1878, which, good though it is, does not stand comparison with Mr Whistler’s etchings of the same and similar themes. Then there is a rare subject which people learned in Lithography are wont to account a masterpiece in the method—a drawing tenderly washed: a thing of masses and broad spaces, more than narrow lines. It is called Early Morning, and is a vision of the River at Battersea. It is faint—faint—of gradations the most delicate, of contrasts the least striking—a gleam of silver and white.

Later, among many others, there have been that drawing of a draped model seated which appeared in the now rare “L’Estampe Originale”; the fin portrait of M. Mallarmé—a writer so difficult to understand, that by the faithful his profundity is taken for granted—some slender, lissome nudes or semi-nudes, most characteristic of Whistler; the St Giles’s Church, the Smith’s Yard, Lyme Regis, the Belle Dame paresseuse, with the quality of a chalk drawing; the Belle Jardinière, which has something, but by no means all of the infinite freedom of the etching of The Garden; again, The Balcony with people peering down from it, as if at a procession—and procession indeed it was, since the thing was wrought on the day of Carnot’s funeral. Then, in the Forge and The Smith of the Place du Dragon there is the tender soft grey quality which people learned in these things conceive, I think generally, to be impossible to “transfer.”

But of the younger artists who have worked in Lithography it is time to say something. Mr Frank Short, with his placid dream of Putney, with the intricate rhythm of line of his Timber-Ships, Yarmouth, should not be passed by. Nor Mr Francis Bate, who, to draw as he has drawn, and see as he has seen, The Whiting Mill, could not possibly have been wanting in originality of expression or of sight. Nor Mr George Clausen, again, whose Hay Barn bears witness not only to his easy command of technique, but to his flexibility. It is one of those treatments of rustic life in which Mr Clausen has been wont to show the influence of Millet, if not of Bastien Lepage. It is of a realism artistically subdued, yet undeniable. Of the work of C. H. Shannon I must speak a good deal more fully, for of C. H. Shannon, Lithography is the particular art. He is no beginner at Lithography: no maker of first experiments. I do not know that he—like Mr Short—is an engraver in any way. He is not, like Mr Whistler, celebrated on two continents as etcher and painter to boot. He is above all things draughtsman—draughtsman poetic and subtle. The air of Lithography he breathes as his native air.

C. H. Shannon’s art it is by no means easy for the healthy normal person to appreciate at once. It is possible even for a student of the matter to lose sight of Shannon’s poetry and sensitiveness, in a fit of impatience because the anatomy of his figures does not always seem to be true, or because his sentiment has not robustness. I have a lurking suspicion that I was myself rather slow to appreciate him. Few people’s appreciation of the original in Art, comes to them all at once. And touchy folk—unreasonable, almost irresponsible—are apt to blame one on this account. One has “swallowed one’s words,” they say—because one has modified an opinion. The world, even the intelligent world, they querulously grumble, was not ready to receive them. Is that so very amazing? Themselves, doubtless, were born with every faculty matured—they possessed, upon their mother’s breasts, a nice discrimination of the virtues of Lafitte of ’69. Some of us, under such circumstances, can but crave their tolerance—we were born duller.

Of lithographic technique, Mr C. H. Shannon—to go back to him, after an inexcusable digression—is a master; and here let it be said that not only does he draw upon the stone invariably, whilst Mr Whistler (it has been named before) sometimes does and sometimes does not draw on it, but he insists also upon printing his own impressions. He has a press; he is an enthusiast; he sees the thing through. The precise number of his lithographs it is not important to know. What is important, is to insist upon the relative “considerableness” of nearly all of them. With him the thoroughly considered composition takes the place of the dainty sketch. Faulty the works of Charles Shannon may be, in certain points; deficient in certain points; but rarely indeed are they slight, either in conception or execution. Of each one of them may it be said that it is a serious work: the seriousness as apparent in the more or less realistic treatment of The Modeller as in Delia, ideal and opulent and Titianesque. The Ministrants, of 1894, is perhaps his most important. What is more exquisite than the just suggested movements of The Sisters? Sea-Breezes is noteworthy, of course, in composition, and refined, of course, in effect.

Before I go on to discuss a few others of the modern men, it may be more interesting to remind the reader—it may be, even to inform him—what is and what may hope to be Lithography’s place. In such signs of its revival as are now apparent, he will surely rejoice. One does rejoice to find an artist equipped with some new medium of expression—some medium of expression, at all events, by which his work, while remaining autographic, may yet be widely diffused. And the art or craft of Lithography, whatever it does not do, does at least enable the expert in it to produce and scatter broadcast, by the hundred or the thousand if he choose, work which shall have all or nearly all the quality of a pencil or chalk drawing, or, if it is desired, much of the quality even of a drawing that is washed. This is excellent; and then again there is the commercial advantage of relatively rapid and quite inexpensive printing. But what the serious and impartial amateur and collector of Fine Art will have to notice on the other side, is, first of all, that Lithography is not richly endowed with a separate quality of its own. With work that is printed from a metal plate, this is quite otherwise. Mezzotint has a charm that is its own, entirely. And Line-Engraving has the particular charm of Line-Engraving. And Etching—the biting, which gives vigour now, and now extreme delicacy; the printing, which deliberately enhances this or modifies that; the burr, the dry-point work, its intended effect; the papers, and the different results they yield, of tone or luminousness—all these things contribute to, and are a part of, Etching’s especial quality and especial delight.