On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

I take it, he and Méryon are quite the greatest of the etchers this century has seen, and if so (since of great true etchers the Eighteenth Century was barren), they are the greatest since the days of Claude and Rembrandt. To no one who has studied any group of their plates for a single quarter of an hour, can it be necessary to insist upon the essential unlikeness of these two remarkable men. Unity of impression—almost a test of excellence, the one note dominant, the rest subordinated—that is found, I know, and found almost equally, in the work of both. But by what different measures has it been maintained! Whistler, in so much of his work, has shown himself the flexible, vivacious, and consummate sketcher, the artist whose choice of economical and telling ‘line’ is faultless and perhaps well-nigh immediate. Méryon, upon the other hand, has been remarkable for building up, with learned patience worthy of Albert Dürer, little by little, his effects; so that when the thing is done, and that sombre vision of his has become a realised performance, he has not so much made a drawing upon a plate, as erected a monument (for so it strikes one) from base to coping-stone. Such work has at least the permanence of the very monuments it records. An œuvre de longue haleine—a task severe and protracted—is each one of Méryon’s important coppers. Yet all the length of Méryon’s labour witnesses to no relaxing hold of his first thought, and in the great complexity of ordered line there is revealed no superfluous, no insignificant stroke.

Each man is discovered in his work. In Méryon’s ‘Abside’ say, in the ‘Pont Neuf,’ in the ‘Saint-Etienne-du Mont,’ is his brooding spirit, his patient craftsmanship, his temperament intense and profound. He was poor; he was often weary; he spent himself on his work. In Whistler’s ‘Garden,’ in his ‘Piazzetta,’ in his ‘Florence Leyland,’ in the ‘Large Pool,’ in that wonderful tiny thing, ‘The Fruit Shop,’ there is the boyish freshness, the spirit of enjoyment, which he has known how to preserve till the present time. Whistler has never been tired, or, if he has, he and his work have parted company at that moment. Wonderful as is his gift of observation and handling, his plates are a lark’s song. As you see the man before you, elastic, joyous, slim, and débonnair, having never known the heavy and sad wisdom of our modern youth, nor the cares of our middle age, his appearance almost persuades you that all his exquisite craftsmanship, practised now for forty years, is but the blameless recreation of an hour snatched from life’s severer tasks—the task of sipping duly, à l’heure de l’absinthe, one’s apéritif, on the Boulevard; of pulling on the River, in the long June days; of condensing every rule of life into perhaps three epigrams, effective at a dinner-party. Who would not envy this possessor of a craft fantastic, airy, and immortal! Though Mr. Whistler may entertainingly insinuate that long life has been denied to his friendships, he will agree with me, I know, when I assert that it is secured to his etchings.

That my print-drawers contain but four or five etchings by Seymour Haden is at once my misfortune and my reproach. As one looks at them one conjures up visions of bygone sales at Sotheby’s, when as yet Mr. Wilkinson, benign and aged, sat in the chair, to wield the ivory hammer—what opportunities neglected, of which the more diligent have availed themselves! For I cannot accept Seymour Haden’s too modest estimate of the value of his own work. Labour so energetic and decisive is not destined to be prized by one generation alone, and in esteeming it comparatively lightly, his connoisseurship, accurate enough when it is concerned with Claude and Rembrandt, Méryon and Whistler—all of whom, in his time, he has loved and collected—is for once at fault.

I am somewhat poor again in those etchings which are the creation of the austere genius of Legros. Popular they will never be, for Legros is almost alone among men of genius in not belonging to his own day—in receiving well-nigh no influence from the actual hour. He is a belated Old Master—but a ‘master’ always: never an affected copyist, who pranks ‘in faded antique dress.’ Had he but humoured the affectations of the time, it is quite possible that the time would at all events have talked about him, and, denied actual popularity, he might yet have been solaced by an æsthetic coterie’s hysterical admiration. But that has not been for Legros. As it is, with his gravely whispered message, his general reticence, his overmastering sense of Style, his indifference to attractive truths of detail, his scorn of the merely clever, he is placed at a disadvantage. But his work remains; not only the etchings, of which Messieurs Thibaudeau and Poulet-Malassis catalogued a hundred and sixty-eight as long ago as 1877, but the grave pictures in which the peasant of the Boulognais devoutly worships, or in which the painted landscape is as the landscape of a dream, and the vigorous oil portraits—not one of which, perhaps, reaches the nobility of his etched portrait of Watts—and the pencil drawings of the nude, several of which Legros has given to the Museum of his birthplace, Dijon, where the stray Englishman who stays to look at them finds that they are as finely severe as are the pencil drawings of Ingres. I have his one big etching, ‘La Mort du Vagabond’—the scale too large to be effective generally, but, pace Mr. Whistler, I do not, in this case, find it ‘an offence,’[4]—and amongst others, two that have, it may be, no particular rarity, but that are worthily, and I think even exceptionally, characteristic. The one is ‘La Communion dans l’Eglise Saint-Médard’: in line and in feeling an instance of the most dignified treatment of ecclesiastical function or religious office. And the other is ‘Les Chantres Espagnols,’ the singing-men, aged and decayed, eight of them, in a darkened choir—was ever a vision of narrow and of saddened lives more serious or more penetrating!

[4] ‘The huge plate,’ writes Mr. Whistler—on the whole truthfully—‘the huge plate is an offence: its undertaking an unbecoming display of determination and ignorance, its accomplishment a triumph of unthinking earnestness and uncontrolled energy.’

From these grave things it is sometimes a relief to turn to Jacquemart’s etchings of still-life. The man himself had troubles: not difficulties about money, nor, like Méryon, the knowledge that he was little appreciated—for appreciation came to him early—but lack of health during years that should have been vigorous, and a compulsory flight towards the sunshine, which yet did not appreciably lessen the distance that divided him from Death. But his work, from end to end, in its serene, deliberate accomplishment, suggests no chances and changes, no personal emotion, and even no actual experience of human life. One says at first, it might have been done at any period; then one recognises perhaps what one may call a modern feeling for the object portrayed; then one thinks of Hollar’s ‘Five Muffs,’ and of Rembrandt’s ‘Shell,’ and remembers that both have a freedom, a delicate skill, akin, after all, to the skill and the freedom in the etchings of Jacquemart. Of Jacquemart’s two great series, the prints for his father’s Histoire de la Porcelaine and those of the ‘Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne,’ I possess only the first, and these in book form, as they were sent me by Madame Techener, the widow of Jacquemart’s publisher and friend. In a simple, russet-coloured half-binding, done afterwards by Zaehnsdorf, they stand on a shelf I go to. Elsewhere are such proofs of Jacquemart etchings as the occasional good fortune of auction rooms—snatched in a spare half-hour—has brought to a life-long lover of engravings. There is a certain plate of sword-handles and daggers—things, some of them, that ‘rend and rip’—

‘Gash rough, slash smooth, help Hate so many ways,

Yet ever keep a beauty that betrays

Love still at work with the artificer, through all his quaint devising—’

as Robert Browning wrote, describing weapons that lay, as I remember, at peace at last, on his own drawing-room table. How Jacquemart etched such blades! By this print of his there is one of a seventeenth-century watch—just such a watch as I said used to be fished up from the bed of the Seine, for quaint old Monsieur Wasset—and with it the presentment of Renaissance jewel; and, perhaps, of a carved mirror, or a bit of Valenciennes porcelain.