On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

The mention of this aged dealer’s name brings back to me recollections. I saw Mr. Halsted in almost the latest of his days, when he was a less prominent but probably a more interesting figure, in the world of Art and Connoisseurship, than he had been in his prime. In his prime, his shop was in Bond Street; but when it was my privilege to go, a humble learner, sitting at the feet of a dealer who had known ‘Mr. Turner,’ and had been for at least one generation surrounded by his work, Halsted, elderly, deliberate of speech, slow and almost halting of movement, large, angular—a craft somewhat difficult to ‘bring round’ or to ‘change the course’ of, within the scanty waters of his back shop—had his abode—his mart at all events—in Rathbone Place, by the French blanchisseuse de fin and a little Swiss café. He was half retired; and there in the back shop he would cause you to sit down, in a perfect light under the window, and would show you what you had asked for, if he had it—for, in those days, he bought nothing; he was engaged merely in selling, in the most leisurely of manners, and at prices which were never open to any suggestion of abatement, the remains of his old stock. Standing over you—a little away from you—with something of a soldierly sternness, like a sergeant in a barrack-yard, he rolled out, slowly, story after story of Mr. Turner, of Sir John Hippesley, whom he had influenced to admire the ‘Liber,’ by placing before his eyes a ‘Severn and Wye,’ at breakfast-time, and then of Mr. Turner again. You bought something, of course; but the best of it is, you never were sorry for it afterwards, for Halsted’s eye was faultless: his knowledge, though he was old, was in advance of his day. I cherish as impressions which had received his imprimatur—if one may use the word of things he had thought worthy to buy and to sell—an ‘Oakhampton Castle,’ a ‘Hindoo Worshippers,’ and I forget for the moment what else. These two, I remember, bear the stamp of passage through the collection of the famous Mr. Stokes—the first ‘Liber’ collector—and of his niece, Miss Constance Clarke.

One thing amusing about a visit to Halsted’s was the occasional presence of his brother. You went to the shop perhaps once by chance, and Halsted was away. In his place was an inferior sort of person, courteous and good-natured, but humbly conscious of his own inferiority. You could do no business with him. If I remember rightly, he was not even allowed to have the keys. The fine prints were quite inaccessible. Yet this was, after all, but one of the inferior brother’s manifestations. He had another phase—another facet. Chancing, one summer evening, to walk northwards, through Camden Town, I suddenly beheld the brother standing on what proved to be his own doorstep, free of heart and with no one to say him nay. He, too, had a shop, it appeared, and here it was, come upon unexpectedly: a print shop of the third order—you wondered who they were, in Camden Town or anywhere else, who bought the cheap things which alone it contained.

Only one other of the old-fashioned dealers, the dealers of another generation, did I ever see. That was the aged Mr. Tiffin, once busy in the Strand, but, when I called upon him to inspect the remains of his possessions, living chiefly retired, slow and deaf, in the small bourgeois comfort of a villa at Canonbury. There—not to much practical purpose—I sought him out. He too was a figure of the elder world, and as such he dwells in the memory.

But I have wandered from the prints of the ‘Liber Studiorum,’ of which indeed, though one of the warmest admirers of them, I possess but a handful. Amongst them I greatly cherish one impression—the gift of a friend whose benefactions to the National collections are remarkable, and whose knowledge of Turner is profound. It is an early ‘state’ of the subject known as ‘Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne, Morning’—one of those plates engraved from end to end by Turner’s own hand. This impression was given by the Master to Lupton, the mezzotint engraver of the ‘Solway Moss,’ and, a generation ago, my friend had bought it from him. Another admirable student of Turner’s art sent me once more than one of those etchings which, in Turner’s case, are the interesting preparations for the finished ‘Liber’ plate. The rare ‘Isis’ is amongst them.

Amongst the Turner prints that I have bought, I have always been guided rather by fineness of impression than by priority of ‘state.’ Thus, side by side with a First State of the ‘London from Greenwich’ I do not fear to place a late one of ‘The Frontispiece, with the Rape of Europa.’ The impression must have been printed the moment the plate had profited by Turner’s retouch. As for the costly curiosities known as ‘engraver’s proofs’—working proofs, in fine, struck off to see how the plate was progressing—speaking broadly and roughly, I do not believe in them. They have their own interest, of course, as illustrating the means by which the effect was obtained; but, in quality, they yield to an impression taken when the effect had just been got, or, in the case of a fine Second or later State, to an impression taken when the effect, lost in the interval by wear, had just been regained.

No one who appreciates Turner can quite confine himself to the ‘Liber,’ though the ‘Liber’ is the most comprehensive expression of that infinite genius. Accordingly, in my drawers there may be found, no doubt, pieces from one or other of his engraved publications: something, it may be, from the ‘Rivers of England’—amongst them the ‘York’ and the ‘Ripon,’ which are not his indeed, but his friend Girtin’s—something from the ‘Southern Coast’; and, from the ‘England and Wales,’ that exquisite ‘Yarmouth,’ which, like the ‘Clovelly’ and the ‘Portsmouth’ (both of them in the ‘Southern Coast’) exemplifies old William Miller’s marvellous faculty of rendering the sky effects, the aerial perspective, of Turner’s maturest art. One has heard of Turner’s compliments to John Pye, over ‘Pope’s Villa,’ and they were not undeserved; but how great should his recognition have been of the Scottish Quaker, simple of nature, subtle of gift, for whom no passage of Turner’s brush-work was too intricate or too baffling! But let us turn to earlier Masters.

Only well-to-do people can buy, in any large numbers and in those fine impressions which alone rightly represent their subjects, the etchings of Rembrandt; but it is a wonder, and almost a shame, that so few well-to-do English people take advantage of their opportunities; for, as a result of their not doing so, or doing so at the best in so scanty a measure, a most undue proportion of the fine Rembrandts which have been the ornaments of English collections have within the last few years crossed the seas, and are now lodged—where they are justly appreciated—in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Baltimore, New York. Where, amongst us in England, are the successors of Dr. Wellesley, of Sir Abraham Hume, of Mr. Holford, of my kind, delightful friend, Richard Fisher? We want a new race of collectors of the highest class of ancient prints; the old is dying out; the young is too modest or too timid: it is afraid to spend its money, though its money could hardly be spent more economically. Looked at even from the financial point of view—as the great auctions prove—nothing is better justified than the investment of important sums in the prints by the Masters. Rembrandt is for all Time. Every year—taking the wide world over—there is an increase in the number of people sensible enough to desire and determine to possess themselves of some representation of his work.

Nothing but small means has prevented my buying in abundance Rembrandt’s incomparable landscapes, so well aware am I that Landscape Art reaches its topmost level in the best of Rembrandt’s work—in his ‘Cottage with Dutch Hay-Barn,’ say, and in his ‘Landscape with a Tower.’ His Sacred Subjects, with all their virtues of ‘sincerity and inwardness,’ commend themselves less to us. His Portraiture, upon the other hand, combines every artistic charm with every human interest. A few examples I have—a mere handful, but good impressions they must always be; and the two which, from their subjects, are least unworthy of mention, are, I suppose, a First State of the ‘Clément de Jonghe,’ the Amsterdam print-seller, which has a picturesqueness less obvious, but a character more subtle, than in the plate’s later states; and an early and fortunate impression from that group of studies, executed, I am convinced, in different years, and containing as its chiefest and latest ornament an energetically sketched portrait of Rembrandt himself, in that advanced middle life of his, which gave us, perhaps, the greatest number of the fine fruits of his genius. To certain of the commentators on Rembrandt, this rare little plate—a masterly collection of croquis, and nothing besides—is not, I fancy, quite sufficiently known; though our admirable English amateur, Wilson—who wrote in 1836—and the latest deceased of the great French collectors and commentators, Monsieur Dutuit, of Rouen, do it conspicuous justice. My impression belonged, a generation or two ago, to the Arozarena collection. I got it, with some other things, at that fascinating shop in Paris, whose outside is so simple and so unassuming, whose inside is stuffed with treasures—the shop a door or two from the Quai Malaquais, up the dark and narrow ‘Rue des Saint-Pères,’ at which, from the morning to the evening hours, sits placidly at his desk ‘Monsieur Jules’—Clément’s successor, once Clément’s assistant—the learned ‘Marchand d’Estampes de la Bibliothèque Nationale.’

Even the smallest of collectors may have a ‘speciality’—and I suppose my speciality to be the comparatively humble one of Méryon and of Whistler—or, perhaps, of modern etchings generally—but (let me say it for myself as well as for others) it is at one’s peril that one is specialist alone. Things are seen then out of all proportion; bias and prejudice take the place of judgment—a mere fanaticism flourishes, where there ought to be a growing critical capacity, alert and lively. On that account, in my small cabinet, a Whistler or a Méryon is liable to be confronted with an Italian of the Renaissance, a German of the day of Dürer. Zoan Andrea’s ‘Dance of Damsels,’ after a design of Mantegna’s, a Coat of Arms of Beham’s, an ornament of Aldegrever’s, instructively remind me of a delicacy earlier than Whistler’s, and of a burin sobre et mâle that was wielded three hundred years before Méryon’s. But while, in collecting, I venture to discountenance the exclusive devotion to a particular master, I am almost as strongly against the acquisition of isolated examples of very many men. If a man is worth representing at all, represent him at the least by a little handful of his works. Collect one or two masters largely, and obtain of others small but characteristic groups.

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