Fine prints

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

There were exceptions, of course, to the common rule that in the period of our first Georges, and of Louis the Fifteenth, engraver’s work was translation. Hogarth, in the first half of the century—about the time when the French line engravers were occupied with their quite exquisite translations of the grace of Watteau, Lancret, and Pater—wrought out on copper with rough vigour his original conceptions of the Rake’s and of the Harlot’s Progress, and not a few of his minor themes; but when it came to the rendering into black and white of those masterly canvases of Marriage à la Mode, professional engravers, such as Ravenet and Scotin, were employed to admirable purpose, and a little later the very colours of the canvas seemed to live, the painter’s very touch seemed to be reproduced, in the noble mezzotints of Earlom. And the immense successes of this reproductive engraving, with the art of Hogarth, brings us back to the truth of our earlier proposition; the period was a period of interpretation, not of original work, with the engraver. The whole French Eighteenth Century School, from Watteau down to Lavreince, is to be studied, and collected, too, in Line Engraving. The School is not invariably discreet in subject: Lavreince has his suggestiveness, though rarely does he go beyond legitimate comedy, and Baudouin, François Boucher’s son-in-law, has his audacities; but against these is to be set the dignified idyl of the great master of Valenciennes; the work of Watteau’s pupils, too; the works of Boucher; Massard’s consummate rendering, in finest or most finished line, of this or that seductive vision of Greuze; the stately comedy of Moreau le jeune; and, as I have said already, the excellent interpretations of the homely, natural, so desirable art of Chardin.

Mezzotint really did for all the English painters of importance of the Eighteenth Century, and in a measure for certain earlier Dutchmen, all that Line Engraving accomplished for the French. “By these men I shall be immortalised,” Sir Joshua said, when the work of M‘Ardell and his fellows came under his view. Gainsborough, it is true, was not interpreted quite so much or quite so successfully. But Romney has as much justice done to him in later English Mezzotint as the luxurious art of Lely and Kneller obtained from one of the earlier practitioners of the craft—John Smith. Morland’s continued and justified popularity in our own time is due to nothing half as much as to the mezzotints by Raphael Smith, and Ward, and Young, and others of that troop of brethren. And it was mezzotint, in combination with the bitten line for leading features of the composition, that Turner, early in our own century—in 1807—decided to employ in the production of those seventy plates of Liber Studiorum upon which, already even, so much of his fame rests.

Liber Studiorum occupies an interesting and a peculiar position between work upon the copper wholly original and work wholly reproductive. Turner etched the leading lines himself. In several cases he completed, with his own hand, in mezzotint, the whole of the engraved picture; but generally he gave the “scraping” to a professional engraver, whose efforts he minutely supervised and most elaborately corrected. In recent years, almost as much, though not quite as much sought for as the Liber plates of Turner, are certain rather smaller mezzotints which record the art of Constable; but Constable himself did nothing on these plates, though he supervised their production by David Lucas. Turner’s connection with professional engravers was not confined to the priceless and admirable prints of the Liber. He trained a school of line engravers, welcoming at first the assistance of John Pye and of George and William Cooke. These two brothers were the engravers mainly of his Southern Coast, and nothing has been more manly than that; but the work of William Miller, in the Clovelly of that Southern Coast, and in a subsequent series, interpreted with quite peculiar exquisiteness those refinements of light which in Turner’s middle and later time so much engaged his effort.

With Turner’s death, or with the death of the artists who translated him, fine Line Engraving almost vanished. It had all but disappeared when, nearly fifty years ago, there began in France and England that Revival of Etching with which the amateur of to-day is so rightly concerned. A few etchings by Bracquemond—of still-life chiefly—a larger number by Jules Jacquemart, of fine objects in porcelain, jewellery, bronze, and noble stones, are amongst the more precious products of the earlier part of the Revival of Etching, and they are so treated that they are inventions indeed, and of an originality that is exquisite. But the greatest event of the earlier years of the Revival was the appearance, as long ago as 1850, of the genius of Méryon, who, during but a few years, wrought a series of chefs-d’œuvre—inspired visions of Paris—and died, neglected and ignored, in the great city to which it is he who has raised, in those few prints of his, the noblest of all monuments.

Two other men of very different genius and of unsurpassed energy we associate with this revival of Etching. Both are yet with us in the fulness of their years; and both will occupy the collector who is wise in his generation, and will be, one may make bold to say, the delight of the far Future as well as of the Present. I mean Sir Seymour Haden and Mr. James Whistler. The prints of Seymour Haden shame no cabinet; the best of Whistler’s scarcely suffer at all when placed beside the master-work of Rembrandt. But it is dangerous treating much of contemporaries when one’s task is chiefly with the dead; and though I might mention many other not unworthy men, of whom some subsequent historian must take count—nay, who may even be referred to at a later stage of this volume—I will confine myself here, in this introductory chapter, to just the intimation that Legros and Helleu are, next after the etchers I have already named, those probably who should engage attention.

CHAPTER I

The use and object of this book, and necessary limitations of its service—Monographs for the specialist—The point of view of the individual—The vastness of the Print-collector’s field—Fashions and silly fads—Bartolozzi best in his “Tickets”—The Exaltation of the coloured print—Its general triviality—The task of the Collector—The fine impression—Brilliance—Condition—The conservation of prints.

A little Guide to Print Collecting such as the present one, even if written on very personal lines, not in the least concealing the writer’s own prepossessions, and giving therefore, quite possibly, what may seem disproportionate notice of certain masters, cannot, of course, hope to entirely suffice for the special student of any particular man. The special student will not, if he is reasonable, find that the little book falls short of its aim, and fails to do its proper work, because it does not and cannot possibly supply within its limited volume all the information of which the accomplished student is himself possessed, and which he feels to be more or less indispensable even to the beginner who desires to be thorough. He will know—and will scarcely need that I should here remind him—that not one book, nor even a hundred books, can make an expert, can turn the tyro into a practical connoisseur. What the tyro wants is experience, all that is learnt by loss and gain, and by brushing shoulder to shoulder with dealers and brother-collectors and the auctioneer in the auction-room. He wants that, to become a practical collector at all, and to become a specialist he wants that and something more. He wants access to and acquaintance with a large and considerable branch of what is now unquestionably an immense literature. There are larger books than this of mine on the general theme of Print Collecting, and they have been written at different times, with different prepossessions, with different prejudices, from different points of view. But over and above these larger books there is a library of monographs on particular masters, works which are nearly always Catalogues raisonnés, and often treatises to boot; and while no one of these monographs can be altogether neglected by the would-be student of the artist with whom it is concerned, some of them must be among the most cherished of his companions, among the voiceless but instructive friends whose society is education. No little book then, like the present one, can take the place of experience and of the study of many books; and least of all perhaps can a book which does not affect to be the abstract and brief chronicle of what has been done before, but which prefers rather to approach its large subject from the point of view of an individual collector, who yet, it must be said, while cultivating specialties, has not been inaccessible to the charm of much that lies beyond the limits of any fields of his own.

So much by way of explanation—by way, too, of disarming the kind of criticism which would judge a general endeavour only by the success with which it seemed to meet the needs of a particular case. A Bibliography of the subject, which will be found on later pages, and which must itself be a selection, comparatively brief, from the mass of material that bears upon the theme, will suffice to set the student of the special school or master upon the desirable track; and meanwhile one thing may be done, nor, as I hope, that one thing only: the would-be tiller of the particular plot may be reminded of the vastness of the land. Even of print collecting it is true, sometimes, that the trees prevent you from seeing the forest.

I have said just now, in the print-collector’s world, how vast is the land! Time, of course, tends to extend it—would extend it inevitably, by reason of new production, did not Fashion sometimes intervene, and, while opening to the explorer some new tract, taboo a district over which he had aforetime been accustomed to wander. The fashions of the wise are not wholly without reason, but the fashions of the foolish have also to be reckoned with. As an instance, the very generation that has seen the most just appraisement of original Etching has witnessed too the exaltation of Bartolozzi and of his nerveless School, a decline of interest in Marc Antonio, even to some extent in Albert Dürer, and a silly rage for the coloured print which fifty years since was the appropriate ornament of scrapbook and nursery.