BY
HADEN, JACQUEMART, WHISTLER, AND LEGROS.
LONDON:
THE FINE ART SOCIETY, LIMITED.
148, NEW BOND STREET.
1883.
PREFACE
It is well to say, in a word or two, what this short book aims at. Unavoidably inferior to Mr. Hamerton’s in merit, it is voluntarily much more limited in scheme. Taking only the four artists who seem to me most worthy of note among the many good etchers of our day, it seeks to study their work with a degree of detail unnecessary and even impossible in a volume of wider scope. In trying to do this, it can hardly help affording, at least incidentally, some notion of what I hold to be the right principles of etching, nor can it wholly ignore the relation of etching to other art, or the relation of Art to Nature and Life. But these points are touched but briefly, and only by the way.
A book of larger aim, on Etching in England and France, might justifiably have given almost as much importance to Macbeth and Tissot here, and to Bracquemond there, as has been given in the annexed pages to Haden, Whistler, Jacquemart, and Legros. But Macbeth and Tissot belong to a younger generation than do any of my four masters. Much of what the art of etching could do in modern days was already in evidence before their work began. My four masters are four pioneers. Bracquemond may be a pioneer also; but in his original work, skilled and individual as that is, he has chosen to be very limited. The place he occupies is honourable, but it is small.