It was not a literal imitation, it must be said again, that Jacquemart made of these things. These things sat to him for their portraits; he posed them; he composed them aright. Placed by him in their best lights, they revealed their finest qualities. He loved an effective contrast of them, a comely juxtaposition; a legitimate accessory he could not neglect—that window, by which he sat as he worked, flashed its light upon a surface that caught its reflection; in so many different ways the simple expedient helps the task, gives the object roundness, betrays its lustre. Some people bore hardly on him for the colour, warmth, and life he introduced into his etchings. They wanted a colder, a more impersonal, a more precise record. Jacquemart never sacrificed precision when precision was of the essence of the business, but he did not care for it for its own sake. And the thing that his first critics blamed him for doing—the composition of his subject, the rejection of this, the choice of that, the bestowal of fire and life upon matter dead to the common eye—is a thing which artists in all Arts have always done, and will always continue to do, and for this most simple reason, that the doing of it is Art.
Not very long after the Gemmes et Joyaux was issued, as we now have it, the life of Frenchmen was upset by the war. Schemes of work waited or were abandoned; at last men began, as a distinguished Frenchman at that time wrote to me, “to rebuild their existence out of the ruins of the past.” In 1873, Jacquemart, for his part, was at work again on his own best work of etching. The Histoire de la Céramique, a companion to the Histoire de la Porcelaine, was published in that year. To an earlier period (to 1868) belong the two exquisite plates of the light porcelain of Valenciennes, executed for Dr. Le Jeal’s monograph on the history of that fabric. And to 1866 belongs an etching already familiarly known to the readers of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and to possessors of the first edition of Etching and Etchers—the Tripod—a priceless thing of jasper, set in golden carvings by Gouthière, and now lodged among the best treasures of the great house in Manchester Square.
But it is useless to continue further the chronicle of the triumphs that Jacquemart won in the translation, in his own free fashion of black and white, of all sorts of beautiful matter. Moreover, in 1873, the year of the issue of his last important series of plates, Jules Jacquemart, stationed at Vienna, as one of the jury of the International Exhibition there, caught a serious illness, a fever of the typhoid kind, and this left him a delicacy which he could never overcome; and thenceforth his work was limited. Where it was not a weariness, it had to be little but a recreation, a comparative pause. That was the origin of his performances in water colour, undertaken in the South, whither he repaired at each approach of winter. There remains, then, only to speak of these drawings and of such of his etched work as consisted in the popularisation of painted pictures. As a copyist of famous canvasses he found remunerative and sometimes fame-producing labour.
As an interpreter of other men’s pictures, it fell to the lot of Jacquemart, as it generally falls to the lot of professional engravers, to engrave the most different masters. But with so very personal an artist as he, the interpretation of so many men, and in so many years, from 1860, or thereabouts, onwards, could not possibly be always of equal value. Once or twice he was very strong in the reproduction of the Dutch portrait painters; but as far as Dutch painting is concerned, he is strongest of all when he interprets, as in one now celebrated etching, Jan van der Meer of Delft. Der Soldat und das lachende Mädchen was one of the most noteworthy pieces in the rich cabinet of M. Léopold Double. The big and somewhat blustering trooper common in Dutch Art, sits here engaging the attention of that pointed-faced, subtle, but vivacious maiden peculiar to Van der Meer. Behind the two, who are occupied in contented gazing and contented talk, is the bare sunlit wall, spread only with its map or chart—the Dutchman made his wall as instructive as Joseph Surface made his screen—and by the side of the couple, throwing its brilliant, yet modulated light on the woman’s face and on the background, is the intricately patterned window, the airy lattice. Rarely was a master’s subject or a master’s method better interpreted than in this print. Frans Hals once or twice is just as characteristically rendered. But with these exceptions it is Jacquemart’s own fellow-countrymen whom he renders the best. Seldom was finish so free from pettiness or the evidence of effort as it is in the Défilé des populations lorraines devant l’Impératrice à Nancy. Le Liseur is even finer—Meissonier again; this time a solitary figure, with bright, soft light from window at the side, as in the Van der Meer of Delft. The suppleness of Jacquemart’s talent—the happy speed of it, rather than its patient elaboration—is shown by his renderings of Greuze, the Rêve d’amour, a single head, and L’Orage, a sketchy picture of a young and frightened mother kneeling by her child exposed to the storm. Greuze, with his cajoling art—which, if one likes, one must like without respecting—is entirely there. So, too, Fragonard, the whole ardent and voluptuous soul of him, in Le Premier Baiser. Labour it is possible to give in much greater abundance; but intelligence in interpretation cannot go any further or do anything more.
Between the etchings of Jacquemart and his water-colour drawings there is little affinity. The subjects of the one hardly ever recall the subjects of the other. The etchings and the water colours have but one thing in common—an extraordinary lightness of hand. Once, however, the theme is the same. Jacquemart etched some compositions of flowers; M. Gonse has praised them very highly: to me, elegant as they are, fragile of substance and dainty of arrangement, they seem inferior to that last-century flower-piece which we English are fortunate enough to know through the exquisite mezzotint of Earlom. But in the occasional water-colour painting of flowers—especially in the decorative disposition of them over a surface for ornament—Jacquemart is not easily surpassed; the lightness and suggestiveness of the work are almost equal to Fantin’s. A painted fan by Jacquemart, which is retained by M. Petit, the dealer, is dexterous, yet simple in the highest degree. The theme is a bough of the apple-tree, where the blossom is pink, white, whiter, then whitest against the air at the branch’s end.
But generally his water colour is of landscape, and a record of the South. Perhaps it is the sunlit and flower-bearing coast, his own refuge in winter weather. Perhaps, as in a drawing of M. May’s, it is the mountains behind Mentone—their conformation, colours, and tones, and their thin wreaths of mist—a drawing which M. May, himself an habitual mountaineer in those regions, assures me is of the most absolute truth. Or, perhaps, as in another drawing in the same collection, it is a view of Marseilles; sketchy at first sight, yet with nothing unachieved that might have helped the effect; not the Marseilles, sunny and brilliant, parched and southern, of most men’s observation—the Marseilles even of the great observer, the Marseilles of Little Dorrit—but the busy port, with its ever-shifting life, under an effect less known; the Marseilles of an overcast morning: all its houses, its shipping and its quays, grey or green and steel-coloured. Such a work is a masterpiece, with the great quality of a masterpiece, that you cannot quickly exhaust the restrained wealth of its learned simplicity. To speak about it one technical word, we may say that while it belongs by its frank sketchiness to the earlier order of water-colour art, an art of rapid effect, as practised best by Dewint and David Cox, it belongs to the later order—to contemporary art—by its unhesitating employment of body colour.
The true source of the diversity of Jacquemart’s efforts, which I have now made apparent, is perhaps to be found in a vivacity of intellect, a continual alertness to receive all passing impressions. That alone makes a variety of interests easy and even necessary. That pushes men to express themselves in art of every kind, and to be collectors as well as artists, to possess as well as to create. Jacquemart inherited the passion of a collector; it was a queer thing that he set himself to collect. He was a collector of shoe-leather; foot-gear of every sort and of every time. His father, Albert Jacquemart, had held that to know the pottery of a nation was to know its history. Jules saw many histories, of life and travel, and the aims of travel, in the curious objects of his collection. Their ugliness—what would be to most of us the extreme distastefulness of them—did not repel him. Nor were his attentions devoted chiefly to the dainty slippers of a dancer—souvenirs, at all events, of the art of the ballet, very saleable at fancy fairs of the theatrical profession. He etched his own boots, tumbled out of the worst cupboard in the house. He looked at them with affection—souvenirs de voyage. The harmless eccentricity brings down, for a moment, to very ordinary levels, this watchful and exquisite artist, so devoted generally to high beauty, so keen to see it.
What more would he have done had the forty-three years been greatly prolonged, a spell of life for further work accorded, Hezekiah-like, to a busy labourer upon whom Death had laid its first warning hand? We cannot answer the question, but it must have been much, so variously active was his talent, so fertile his resource. As it is, what may he hope to live by, now that the most invariably fatal of all forms of consumption, the most fatal while the least suspected, la phthisie laryngée, has arrested his effort? A very gifted, a singularly agile and supple translator of painters’ work, he may surely be allowed to be, and a water-colour artist, perfectly individual, yet hardly actually great; his strange dexterity of hand at the service of fact, not at the service of imagination. He recorded nature; he did not exalt or interpret it. But he interpreted Art. He was alive, more than any one has been alive before, to all the wonders that have been wrought in the world by the hands of artistic men.