Size of the original etching, 9 × 13⅜ inches
Bracquemond. The Bather (Canards Surpris)
Size of the original etching, 14 × 10½ inches
Yet the late Walter S. Carter of Brooklyn, a most catholic print-collector, ventured fearlessly on the inviting but not always safe sliding pond of analogy, and proclaimed Bracquemond the “Michelangelo of ducks.” Without regard to the manner of the statement, we may accept the classification. For had Bracquemond never etched anything but his bird plates, he would have won his place in the annals of the fascinating art of needle and acid. Perhaps he realized that when he furnished a title-page design for the third volume, devoted to himself, of Beraldi’s “Graveurs du XIXᵉ Siècle,” consisting solely of a duck and a portfolio of prints. Much slighter in execution, but more significantly allegorical, was his frontispiece (Beraldi No. 480) for the catalogue of the second portion of the Burty collection. It represented a stand holding an open portfolio from which prints flying upward are gradually evolved into cranes. Ducks, however, have apparently been his special delight. He has pictured them in action, as in the delightful oblong picture of two ducks swimming (Beraldi No. 185) and in the equally, and amusingly, lifelike one of five ducks swimming hurriedly to a central point of common interest. Or in allegorical attitude, as in the Canard (Beraldi No. 116), the herald of “fake” news. He has observed the teal along the riverside and the Gambols of ducks (Beraldi No. 221), done with a simple and sympathetic delight in the doings of these water-fowl. Hardly ever, perhaps, has he better characterized the useful bird whose call, onomatopoetically imitated, has long served to characterize medical charlatanry, than in the plate known as The Bather or Canards surpris. The three birds, who have come down to their accustomed swimming hole only to find it already occupied by a comely young woman, are alive and moving. The beholder can fairly see and hear their wonder at the unwarranted intrusion on their rights, and regards their wagging tails with much of the fascination that Septimus and Wiggleswick (in W. J. Locke’s “Septimus”) felt in the same diversion.
While the duck apparently appealed most to him, Bracquemond was attracted also by other members of the family of Aves. The goose, cousin to the Anas, he showed collectively in Geese in a Storm (The Storm Cloud. Beraldi No. 219), which may be studied in the Avery collection at the New York Public Library, in a series of touched proofs in which the fortuitous effect of gradually added work in the sky gives somewhat the impression of a storm rising as you look at the consecutive proofs. Ducks in a Marsh also move under a lowering sky, and in It’s Raining Pitchforks (Beraldi No. 212) the flood-gates of heaven are fully opened, so that the water-fowl appear to find themselves doubly in their element.
Bracquemond. Geese in a Storm
Size of the original etching, 9½ × 13⅜ inches
