Size of the original etching, 12¾ × 9⅜ inches
Bracquemond. A Flock of Teal Alighting
Size of the original etching, 12 × 9⅝ inches
The characteristic elements in his portraits—“robustness, versatility and a resourceful mastery of technique”—are peculiar to all his work. The same artist who carefully and with honest and sympathetic adaptation translated such different products of painter’s personality as Millet’s Man with the Hoe and Meissonier’s La Rixe, as well as canvases and drawings by Holbein (the magisterial portrait of Erasmus), Corot, Gustave Moreau, Gavarni and Delacroix, also, under Japanese influence, etched numerous designs for ceramic ware (he was for a time a sort of artist director at the Haviland factory at Limoges), fishes and birds in swirling, decorative outline. In contrast to these last named are his numerous well-finished pictures of birds and mammals. His hares, moles and mice done with loving emphasis on the texture of their furry pelts. (The vision of happy days, seen by poor bunny suspended by one leg, was reproduced as far afield as Poland, in Tygódnik Illustrowány.) The birds, with the delightful and strong modeling of their bodies felt under the sleek surface of their feathery coverings.
A master craftsman, he has found delight, like Buhot, Guérard and Mielatz, in technical experiments, and his interest and skill in reproductive methods are illustrated in etchings, dry-points, aquatints, lithographs, photogravures retouched with etching, engravings in color, and plates showing combinations of processes. Burty once wrote: “He contrives by repeated use of the acid on certain parts of the plate to get a black which for depth and intensity has never been equaled.” And Meryon avowed of him: “I cannot etch. That one, there, he is the true etcher.”
His active interests, and his all-embracing outlook on the life about him, found expression in such occasional productions as the etchings of figures modeled in snow by French sculptors in Paris during the Commune; the symbolical lithograph of France defending himself against the Prussian eagle, while strangling his own imperial bird; the ceramic compliment to Uncle Sam: The Old World and Young America, or the very large plate done as a memorial tablet for Meryon’s coffin. His hand recorded the placid, rural beauties of Bas Meudon and the quick impression of a steamboat, amusingly described by Beraldi (see No. 185). And a bit of woodland, possibly in the Bois de Boulogne, in winter snows, in combination with a gaunt wolf probably studied at the Jardin d’Acclimatation (the Paris “Zoo”), gave him opportunity for his effective Wolf in the Snow, also known as Winter (Beraldi No. 180), which in its spirit of desolation might be many hundred miles from Paris.
And with all this, his etchings only have been spoken of here,—and they are about 800 in number. But the catalogue (issued in an edition of 220 copies) of his work exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (Salon) in 1907, includes not only etchings, but paintings, water-colors, pastels and designs executed in embroidered silk, ceramics, iron, cloisonné enamel, jade, wood and bookbindings.
Bracquemond. Pheasants at Dawn: Morning Mists