On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

Allow me a reflection! The cheapest way of enjoying objets d’art is to enjoy them in etchings; and it is often the easiest way, since you have but to sit in your chair and look; and it is often not the least true, since the etcher himself has seen with trained eye before his trained hand came to draw. Well, to enjoy objets d’art in that fashion, with tolerable completeness and extreme satisfaction, the intelligent poor man has really but to get the two chief series of Jacquemarts (those that are still lacking to me, the ‘Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne,’ are, I know Seymour Haden would tell me, the bigger, broader, richer, more spontaneous of the two), and those fifty plates by different etchers, of whom Courtry, Greux, and Le Rat were among the principal, which Holloway published about a score of years since—‘Works of Art in the Collections of England.’ In that excellent folio, the men who have just been mentioned, and several others, followed hard on Jacquemart’s heels. What a treatment of jade, in some of those plates! Mr. Addington’s vase in particular—absolutely unctuous. What a treatment of cristal de roche! Desgoffe’s painted panel at the Luxembourg is only a little finer. What a treatment of ivory!—that extraordinary Moorish casket, that was Malcolm of Poltalloch’s.

But this is only copyist’s etching, some people may say. ‘Copyists’—No! You would not enjoy it so much, were it merely servile imitation. It is interpretation, significant and spirited, alert and vivid.

Of the original etchers of the younger school in England, Frank Short and William Strang have long seemed to me the most interesting, notwithstanding the as yet somewhat marked limitations of theme of the one, and that possessing ‘devil’ of the love of ugliness which I have now almost ceased to hope may be exorcised from the other. Strang, for all the presence of that which is repulsive to many, is a man of great qualities. A Celt to the depths of him, he is wildly imaginative. He is dramatic, and his prints are dramatic, however much he may profess to be busy with line and tone. Besides, there are moments in which he confesses to being a poet. He has the instinct of tragedy. Technically, his etchings are almost always good; nor is it, to my mind, a sin in them that so many of them set you thinking. I have but a few of Mr. Strang’s prints; of Frank Short’s I have more, and when he can interpret a Dewint like that ‘Road in Yorkshire,’ and a Constable like that sketch of Mr. Vaughan’s, I see no reason for not putting those mezzotints—interpretations so brilliant, translations so faithful yet so free—by the side of his work in Etching, inspired not by familiarity with the art of another, but by the presence of charming line or charming vista in Nature. Frank Short, in his original work, is a most delicate draughtsman of form in landscape. ‘Evening, Bosham,’ and ‘Sleeping till the Flood,’ sufficiently show it.

Of another good man, Mr. C. J. Watson, I have not enough to judge him at my ease; but he is a sterling etcher, distinctly gifted, and without artifice and trick. An actually imaginative vision one must not perhaps ask of him, but mental flexibility—can he but cultivate it—may enable him to go far.

‘Profil de Jeune Fille,’ a rare dry-point by Paul Helleu, has, it seems to me, like much of the work by that most modern of Parisian pastellists and etchers, a delightful spontaneity and force and freedom. It is an inevitable chef-d’œuvre—the greatest, perhaps, of a facile and exquisite master.

My gossip stops. Grant me only the grace of one more line, to avow the satisfaction with which, even after having enjoyed the companionship of at least some little work that is admittedly classic, I can look upon the prints of Mr. Charles Holroyd, a young etcher of our latest day. In them so much of what is generally, and often even rightly, seductive, is frankly abandoned, that they may keep unimpaired at least the distinction and reticence which are the very soul of Style.

(Art Journal, January and March 1894.)

ANNE OLDFIELD

‘Mrs. Oldfield, the celebrated comedian,’ is the title inscribed by a contemporary—who knew how the lady should be spoken of—upon the copper which Edward Fisher engraved in mezzotint from the picture by Richardson. A photogravure reproduction from this rare, desirable print—which shows the lissome grace and flexible charm of a young woman who enchanted the town, and who was the delight of Mr. Mainwaring before she was the delight of General Churchill—forms the frontispiece to the slight and gossipy and unscientific, but by no means disagreeable volume which Mr. Robins has compiled—we cannot say written—about the actress whom he dubs familiarly ‘Nance.’ A cheaper reproduction of another portrait of her—the original also by Richardson—is to be found upon a later page. In both portraits she is represented in propria persona, of which we need not complain, but which it is expedient to chronicle, inasmuch as such portraiture throws no direct illumination upon the achievements of her art. Deprived of any such assistance as might well have been given, at all events had the compiler of the volume been dealing with a comedian of later time—with Garrick, say, whose Abel Drugger is known to us by the canvas of Zoffany; with Siddons, who not only as the ‘Tragic Muse’ reveals the characteristics of her power; or even with Mrs. Abington, whose performance as Miss Prue in Love for Love we seem to witness by dint of familiarity with Sir Joshua’s picture—we are thrown back entirely, for our acquaintance with Mrs. Oldfield, upon the written records produced for our survey.

These are remarkably scanty. Of the life of the fascinating woman much remains in mystery. Of the achievements of the actress there is what is called, in stilted language, ‘a consensus of opinion,’ but singularly little of definite chronicle. Certain passages in the Spectator discuss the appropriateness of her delivery of a comic epilogue to a tragic play—for it was the fate of Mrs. Oldfield to act Tragedy sometimes, though she preferred, upon the whole, that the management should ‘give such things to Porter’—and a few other contemporary allusions to her were printed in her day; but her day was before the era of very penetrating criticism, either professional or not professional: no Lamb, no Hazlitt, had the chance of making her a peg for whimsicality or pungent brilliance; and the appreciative amateur who, a generation before her, had, in the diary that the world cherishes, chronicled his sense of the delightfulness of Mrs. Knipp and of Nell Gwynne—‘all unready, pretty, prettier than I thought’—was deprived by Fate of the occasion of waxing cordial over the personal grace of Mrs. Oldfield.