Fine prints

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

A comparison between Lithography and Etching in particular—putting other mediums aside—leads to further reflections. Lithography lacks the relief of etched work. “You can’t have grey and black lines”—a skilled etcher says to me, who enjoys Lithography as well as Etching, and sometimes practises it—“you can’t have grey and black lines, in that the printing of a lithograph is surface-printing, and every mark upon the stone prints equally black. Therefore for grey work in Lithography, you must have a grain upon the stone—or on the transfer-paper—that your drawing is made on.” And he adds, “Whatever can be done upon a lithographic stone, can be done with a much higher quality upon a plate.” And the soft grey line, he says, when got upon the stone—“well, if that is what you want, in a soft-ground etching it can be got much better.”

As to Mezzotint again, to compare the quality of a fine mezzotint from copper, with any quality that is obtainable in stone, would, generally, be absurd. We are brought back, however, to that which is Lithography’s especial virtue and convenience—it gives the autographic quality of the pencil drawing, of the chalk drawing, of the drawing that is washed.

When, in these last words, I tried to indicate Lithography’s natural limits, and said, practically, that its main function was to produce “battalions” where ordinary drawing must produce but “single spies,” I said nothing that need encourage readers to suppose that its process lay perfectly at the command of every draughtsman, and that the first-comer, did he know well how to draw, would get from the lithographic stone every quality the stone could yield. And this being so, it can surprise no one if in a chapter on the Revival of Lithography I give conspicuous place to the young men who have really fagged at it, rather than to the possibly more accomplished, the certainly more famous artists who have drawn just lately on the tracing-paper, oftener than not in complimentary recognition of the fact that now a hundred years have passed since Alois Senefelder invented the method which, half a century later, Hulmandel did something to perfect.

Mr C. H. Shannon—pre-eminently noticeable among these younger men—has been discussed already. We will look now at the work of another of them—Mr Will Rothenstein, whose mind, whose hand-work, is conspicuously unlike Mr Shannon’s, in that, though he can be romantic, he can scarcely be poetic. A vivid realism is his characteristic, and, with that vivid realism, romance, phantasy, caprice—either or all—may find themselves in company; but poetry, hardly. Mr Rothenstein—as there is some reason, perhaps, for telling the collector—is not only young, but extremely young. His series of Oxford lithographs were wrought, most of them, when he was between twenty and two-and-twenty years old. It was an audacious adventure, with youth for its excuse. For this set of Oxford portraits was to be the abstract of the Oxford of a day. In it, Professors and Heads of Houses are—men who for perhaps a generation remain in their place—but in it, too, are athletes, engaging undergraduates, lads whose achievements may become a tradition, but whose places know them no more. The first part of the “Oxford Characters”—that is the proper name of it—appeared in June 1893. In it, is the portrait of that great Christ Church boating man, W. L. Fletcher, and a portrait of Sir Henry Acland, for which another more august-looking rendering of the same head and figure was after a while substituted. Again, there is an admirable vision of Max Müller—Mr Rothenstein’s high-water mark, perhaps, in that which he might probably suppose to be the humble art of likeness-taking.

Quite outside the charmed Oxford life are the subjects of some of Mr Rothenstein’s generally piquant portraits. There is the portrait of Emile Zola, for instance. I never saw the man. This may or may not be a terre-à-terre view of him. Most probably it is. But certainly the face, with its set lips and hollow cheeks, is cleverly rendered, though in such rendering we may fancy not so much the author of the Faute de l’Abbé Mouret and of the Page d’Amour, as the author of Nana and of Le Ventre de Paris. Again, there is a portrait, at once refined and forcible, of that great gentleman, path-breaking novelist, and dainty connoisseur, Edmond de Goncourt, elderly, but with fires unquenched in the dark, piercing eyes, and the great decoration, so to say, of snow-white hair. Then again, the pretty, pleasing lady, the fresh young thing with her big bonnet—the lady seen full-face, her lips drawn so tenderly. Such flesh and blood as hers, had the Millament of Congreve. If sometimes in them the anatomy of the figures is expressed insufficiently, these works are at least executed with well-acquired knowledge of the effects to which Lithography best lends itself. It can escape no one that, whatever be their faults, the artist utters in them a note that is his own.

To trace, with fairness, the revival of Lithography, even in England only, it should be mentioned that a generation after the achievements of Samuel Prout—his records of architecture in Flanders and in Germany—and the somewhat overrated performances of Harding, the members of the Hogarth Sketching Club made one night, at the house of Mr Way, the elder—the date was the 15th of December, 1874—a set of drawings on the stone. They must be rare, now. Indeed the only copy I have seen was that shown to me at the printing-house in Wellington Street. One of the best was Charles Green’s drawing of two men—ostlers, both of them, or of ostler rank—one of them lighting his pipe. The hand is excellently modelled: the light and shade of the whole subject has crispness and vigour. Sir James Linton contributed a Coriolanus subject, in something more than outline, though not fully expressed—and yet it is beautifully drawn. Mr Coke sent a Massacre of the Innocents, classic and charming in contour; while to look at the Sir Galahad of Mr E. J. Gregory is to recall to mind completely the great Romantic Gregory of that early day.

In the Paris Exhibition of Lithographs and in that at Mr Dunthorne’s, there have figured a group of subjects done lately by well-known Academicians and others, and printed—some of them with novel effects—by or under the close direction of Mr Goulding, that famous printer of etchings, who now, it seems, has the laudable ambition of rivalling, as a printer of lithographs, the great house of Way. He has his own methods. The original work is of extremely various quality. Much of it was produced somewhat hurriedly. I do not mean that the drawings were done rapidly, or that it would have been wrong if they had been; for, obviously, the rapid drawing of the capable is often as fine as the slowest, and has the interest of a more urgent message. I mean that they were done, for the most part, by those not versed, as yet, in such secrets as Lithography possesses. Yet, coming often from artists of distinction, many of them have merits. Not much is finer than a girl’s head, by Mr Watts. It is mostly “in tone”; and it is scarcely too much to say of it that it is strong as anything of Leonardo’s—as anything of Holbein’s, one might as easily declare, did not Holbein’s name suggest, along with strength, a certain austerity which Mr Watts mostly avoids. There is a graceful figure-drawing by Lord Leighton, who was interested in the new movement, but who was far too sensible to set vast store by what—as I remember that he wrote to tell me—was the only lithographic drawing he had ever executed. There are strong studies by Sargent—rather brutal perhaps in light and shade—of male models, whose partial nudity there is little to render interesting.

We are brought back then to the work of artists not Academicians at all—men some of them comparatively young in years, but older in a faithful following of the lines on which the craft of Lithography most properly moves. There is Mr C. J. Watson, for instance. The personal note—which, I cannot conceal it, I esteem most of all, and most of all must revel in—the personal note may be, with him, a little wanting; but thorough craftsman he undeniably is. And by Mr Oliver Hall, one of the most delightful of our younger etchers, who as an etcher has been treated in his place, there is a vision of some grey sweeping valley—Wensleydale—with trees only in middle distance, or in the remote background. In it, and perhaps even more especially in that quite admirable lithograph, The Edge of the Moor, we recognise that way of looking at the world which we know in the etchings; but the intelligence and sensitiveness of the artist have suffered him, or led him rather, to modify the work: to properly adapt it to the newer medium. The Edge of the Moor is, I have implied, quite masterly; and then again there is a tree-study in which Mr Hall recalls those broad and massive, yet always elegant sketches made by the great Cotman, in the latest years, generally, of a life not too prolonged.

Again, among fine lithographs exhibited or not exhibited, there is, by Mr Raven Hill, The Oyster-Barrow—a marvellously vivid, faithful study of “Over the Water” (or of Dean’s Yard, it may be) by night—and the equally momentary, spontaneous vision of The Baby, with the rotundity of Boucher, and more than the expressiveness of the late Italian: a baby lost, one must avow, to all angelic dreams, and set on carnal things. Perhaps Mr George Thomson’s best lithograph remains the Brentford Eyot, though there is charm of movement in at least one figure-study. By Mr Charles Sainton there is a luxurious head of just the type one might expect from the author of silver-points seductive and popular. Mr Walter Sickert’s work, whether you like it or not, at least has, visibly, its source in personal observation and deliberate principle.

By M. Théodore Roussel there are a whole group of lithographs, dainty and delightful, exquisite and fresh—with so much of his own in them, as well as something, of course, of Mr Whistler’s. By the side of his Scene on the River—a quaint Battersea or Chelsea bit, I take it—place one of his supple nudities, and against his supple nudity, place his Opera Cloak. Charming! all of them. The man is a born artist—he not only draws but sees: sees with refinement and distinction. And there must come a time when Roussel’s work will be appreciated far more widely.