Fine prints

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

Wenceslaus Hollar, born at Prague in 1607, and working a long while in London, under the patronage of Charles the First’s Lord Arundel, and dying here amongst us, in Gardiner Street, Westminster, in 1677, was a far more prolific etcher than either Claude, Vandyke, or Adrian Van Ostade. In fact, that is not the way to put it at all; for whilst the plates of each of these are to be counted at the most by scores, the plates of Hollar mount to the number of two thousand seven hundred. He was a craftsman of great variety and ingenuity of method. But it has, of course, to be remembered of him that in certain figure-pieces and mythological subjects at least, he was interpreter and populariser of the inventions of another, and that in most of his interesting little views he was a dainty but unmoved chronicler of pure fact. An individual note—a wholly individual note—scarcely belongs to his rendering of landscape or to his vision of the town. Yet he is a most sterling artist—not a mere monument of industry—and his quaintness, only a part of which he derives from his theme, is undoubtedly attractive. The collector who collects his work has what is a faithful record of some of the individuals and of many of the types of Hollar’s time, and a fair vision of the ordinary aspect of the outward world of Hollar’s day. The man’s industry was, as we have seen, colossal, and even at the best he was but ill-rewarded. Fourpence per hour was, says Mr Heywood, the price paid to him by the booksellers.

At present it may be that there is keener relish for his work in Germany than here with us in England; but one great connoisseur, as well as fine practitioner of Etching, of a generation not yet wholly vanished, has extolled and collected him, praising him lately, it is true, in terms more measured than those he had at first employed; and another connoisseur, not born in earlier years than Sir Seymour Haden, but earlier cut off, not living indeed to be old—I mean the Rev. J. J. Heywood, who has been named already—was a devoted student of Hollar’s endless labours. He prepared in great degree the Burlington Club’s Exhibition of a large fine representative collection of Hollar’s works, in 1875, and wrote the sympathetic preface to the Catalogue. On Hollar, Parthey has long been the chief German authority; and with Parthey Mr Heywood was familiar. But his own loving observation of the unremitting work of the great Bohemian engraver of the Seventeenth Century—a wanderer in Antwerp and in Strasburg, as well as a long resident in London—furnished him with some material of his own, and the Burlington Club Catalogue of such portion as was exhibited of Hollar’s great volume of production, should be, wherever it is possible, in the hands of the Hollar collector. It will acquaint him with very many of the most desirable pieces, and will tell him, in a form more compact and serviceable than Parthey’s, much about the recent resting-places of the rarer Hollar prints. There are a few of these, of course, which cannot pass into the hands of any private person. Of the large plate of Edinburgh, for example, a thing Parthey had never seen, and which was wrought in Hollar’s later time (in 1670), there exist in all the world but two impressions. One is at Windsor, the other at the British Museum.

When, however, the collector has got more than two thousand plates to choose from, and to watch and wait for, he need not, save in sheer “cussedness,” and because Humanity is built that way, trouble very much about what is for ever inaccessible. I do not think that even a colonial millionaire will set himself the task of collecting Hollar en masse. Life is not long enough. The task would fall more properly to a German student, since patience would be wanted yet more than money; but, after half a century of work, the student would pass from us with his self-set task still uncompleted. No: the sensible collector wants of Hollar a compact selection. Such a group as Sir Seymour Haden exhibited at the Fine Art Society’s—along with many other plates, representing the masters of original etching—would form a nucleus, at all events. Divided into classes in the following way—Topography, Portraiture, Costume, Natural History, and History, that small exhibited group included the Antwerp Cathedral, the Royal Exchange, the Nave of St George’s Chapel, Charles the First, Charles the Second, one of the plates of the Muffs—I trust it was the wonderful study of five muffs alone, with the wearer’s wrists and arms just lightly indicated—and two of the rare set of Shells, which are as wonderful as the muffs for texture, but somehow a little drier. Of the plate of the Nave of St George’s Chapel, Sir Seymour says that it is the most amazing piece of “biting” that he knows, as to gradation and finesse. Along with these plates—if he is fortunate enough to get them—or even in place of some of them, as his taste prompts him, let the collector appropriate the sets of the Seasons and the Butterflies, the little Islington set, known sometimes as Six Views in the North of London, and the exquisite single plate (these topographical plates that I am recommending are all small ones) known as London from the Top of Arundel House. Of the “simple probity” of Hollar’s work, and of its rightful charm, there will then be ample evidence.

The prices of good Hollars have not of late years risen much: certainly not much in comparison with those of other prints holding positions of about the like honour. Much of his work, therefore, is quite within the reach of modest and intelligent buyers. The latest really remarkable collection sold was that of Seymour Haden, who had long possessed many more of Hollar’s prints than he found room to exhibit, with other men’s work in Bond Street. His greatest rarities—perhaps even his best impressions—fetched good prices, but they were never sensational: indeed, in several instances they did not substantially exceed those realised twenty-three years earlier (in 1868), at Julian Marshall’s sale. Thus, at the Julian Marshall sale, the Long View of Greenwich passed under the hammer at £1, 15s., and at the Haden sale it sold for £2, 5s. London from the Top of Arundel House, an impression of singular excellence, fetched £6 in the Marshall sale; it fetched at the Seymour Haden £9 12s.; but in this case there is reason to suppose that Sir Seymour’s impression, though certainly good, was not equal to Mr Marshall’s. Sir Thomas Challoner (after Holbein) fetched £31, 10s. at the Marshall sale, and I am not sure that it was not the very same impression that afterwards, at Sir Seymour’s, fetched only £20. Each is described as a “First State,” and each had belonged in the last century to one of the greatest collectors of his time, John Barnard, whose initials, written in a slow round hand, “J. B.,” delight the collector, often, at the back of a fine print. The two impressions of Sir Thomas Challoner were surely really one. The portrait of Hollar, holding his portrait of St Catherine, reached £6 at the Marshall sale; only £5 at the Haden. On the other hand, the Chalice, which is said, generally, to be from a design by Mantegna, was sold for £3, 10s. with Mr Marshall’s things; for £5, 5s. with Sir Seymour’s. We need not make further comparisons; but it will be well to end these comments upon Hollar’s money value by some little additional quotation from the priced catalogues of the later and larger sale of his prints. The Rake’s Lament fetched in 1891 £22; the Antwerp Cathedral, in the First State, £8; that neat little set of six Views about Islington, £2, 10s. (which, if the impressions were all good, was unquestionably cheap); the Royal Exchange, in the First State, £16; The Winter Habit of an English Gentleman, £8, 10s.; the set of Sea Shells, or, rather, thirty-four out of the thirty-eight numbers that the set contains, £67. Hollar, with such a mass of work to choose from, and with the interest and excellence of much of it, appeals to the collector who can dispense, at times, with vehemence and passion, and who finds in quaintness and exactness, in steady technical achievement, some compensation for the absence of a vision of exalted beauty.

CHAPTER III

Rembrandt Catalogues—The extent of Rembrandt’s etched work—The careful buyer: how may he represent Rembrandt not unworthily?—Amongst landscape etchings, the indisputable pre-eminence of Rembrandt’s landscapes—Their influence on the most modern Art—The landscapes’ rarity—The most desirable and attainable—Prices—The landscapes in the Holford Sale—Rembrandt’s portraits—Portraits of himself—The best portraits of others—Recent prices of the portraits—Those fine ones that are cheap essentially—Sacred subjects just touched on—The Nude—The methods of Rembrandt—Etching and dry-point—Simplicity of the means Rembrandt employed.

That great old connoisseur of Rouen, Eugène Dutuit, in his two portly tomes, the Œuvre Complet de Rembrandt (produced in 1883), catalogues for the convenience of the collector three hundred and sixty-three pieces, though, from his long and careful Introduction, it is evident that he is not altogether uninfluenced by modern views, and is willing to discard some few out of that great array of prints. Wilson, the first important English cataloguer, working in 1836, had catalogued three hundred and sixty-nine. Charles Blanc, about a score of years later, had reduced the number to three hundred and fifty-three. Again, in 1879, the Rev. C. H. Middleton-Wake had brought the number down to three hundred and twenty-nine. It is hardly likely that before the present chapter is completed—a chapter that must be devoted mainly to the more fascinating works of the greatest mind that ever expressed itself in Etching—I shall have said anything of value on what is, for the student, an important question—the question of how much of Rembrandt’s long-accepted work the master really executed. For not in a part only of a single chapter of a volume on Fine Prints could it be possible to deal satisfactorily with the arguments for and against certain etchings, the authenticity of which modern Criticism disputes or doubts about. The matter would require not paragraphs, but a volume. Furthermore, for anything approaching a final settlement, it would need such opportunities for comparison as absolutely no one has yet been able to possess. Sir Seymour Haden, whose views upon the subject are more defined than most people’s—if likewise it happens that they are more revolutionary—has been pleading for a large exhibition and a committee of experts to settle the matter, and, at this time of writing, the exhibition has not been held nor the committee formed. In regard to its decision, I anticipate as likely to be delivered somewhat earlier, and perhaps with more of unanimity, the utterance of Rome upon that question of “Anglican Orders,” which now either vexes or sympathetically engages her.

But if the moment of connoisseurs’ agreement upon the question of the precise number of Rembrandt’s true etchings seems yet remote, the beginner in the study of the prints of Rembrandt’s may note with benefit two things: first, that there does exist the reasonable and long-sustained doubt in regard principally to the “Beggar” and a few of the Sacred Subjects (for certain landscapes were discarded long ago), and that thus a question has arisen into which the student may inquire cautiously, and, after much preliminary study, exercise his own mind upon; and, second (and here comes in immediate comfort for the collector), that the doubts thrown on two or three score of prints still leave untouched the plates in which intelligent Criticism has recognised masterpieces. Again, and for his further joy, if the collector be but a beginner, or with a purse not deep, he may note that the masterpieces of Rembrandt are of the most various degrees of rarity; that accordingly they differ inexpressibly as to the money value that attaches to them; and that therefore, even nowadays, though the complete or comprehensive collector of Rembrandt will have to be a rich man, a poor man may yet buy, two or three times in every year, some Rembrandt etching, noble in conception, exquisite in workmanship.

A volume like the present is not concerned primarily with the acquisitions of the millionaire, though it has, of course, to take account of them. Let us therefore, just at this stage, ask ourselves what the careful, modestly-equipped buyer does well to do, so that in his portfolios so great a master as Rembrandt shall not be altogether unrepresented, and shall not be represented unworthily? Ought the beginner to confine himself at first to making a selection from one or two groups only, out of the number of groups into which, unless chronological order is to over-ride everything, the prints of Rembrandt not unnaturally divide themselves? Or ought he to be guided in his choice by some ascertained facts of Rembrandt’s history, and by the help of dated plates—or by accepting as fixed and final the conjectures as to date which have proceeded from the newer connoisseurship—seek some representation of the art of Rembrandt at different times of his career? Or ought he, instead of either confining himself to one or two groups or classes of subject, or seeking to trace at all, by the few prints of which he may possess himself, the course of Rembrandt’s progress, the changes in his method, see rather that in his portfolios all classes of subject shall have something to represent them, so that at least in this manner the range of the master—which is one of the most marked of his characteristics—shall be suggested?

The chronological plan, though it has reason on its side and great advantages, and naturally commends itself to the advanced student who is far already on the road to be himself an expert, is scarcely good for the beginner; and this not only because the proper basis of knowledge—the date that is not a shrewd guess, but a quite certain fact—is often wanting; but also because the master’s methods in etching, as in painting, were so many, and in a measure at least (even the most varied of them) were contemporaneously exercised, that the attempt to represent periods and manners in a collection numerically insignificant becomes Quixotic or Academic. Perhaps, then, the wisest thing is to take one or two great typical groups. For my own part, I should take Portraiture and Landscape; not of course cramping oneself with such ridiculous limitations as “Portraits of Men,” “Portraits of Women”—as if the two, save for convenience of reference, should not invariably be considered together.