Bracquemond. Sea-gulls
Size of the original etching, 10¾ × 18 inches
Bracquemond sometimes labored through a number of states on a plate. The large portrait of Edmond de Goncourt was patiently carried through a number of progressive proofs. And in the process of thus searching for ultimate satisfactoriness he may give us such pleasant surprises as the fourth state of Morning Mists (Beraldi No. 779), a pheasant piece, with its delightful background addition of trees—an airy, light impression of early morning. He has done several landscapes of a lightness which approaches a Legros-like delicacy, so that it is perplexing to compare them with such a faithfully studied but somewhat hard plate as that of the duck perplexed at sight of a turtle (L’Inconnu, Beraldi No. 174), and to realize that the same hand did both. Venturing still farther into the field of ornithology, he depicted golden pheasants, partridges, swallows, with sympathy for his subject and an open eye for its artistic possibilities. The human element enters into these pictures very rarely, and then only when absolutely in place. So in At the Jardin d’Acclimatation (Beraldi No. 214), in which two stylishly dressed young ladies are looking at golden pheasants in an inclosure. Once, at least, in Sea-gulls (Beraldi No. 782), he felt and rendered the beautiful effect of a circling, gliding flight of gulls over rolling waves, in a graceful swirl of lines combining into a harmonious pattern.
The peculiar effect of this last named plate, with its mingling of Japanese and other influences, is in striking contrast to his early and most remarkable Haut d’un battant de Porte (Beraldi No. 110, done at the age of nineteen), in which the dead bodies of three birds of prey and a bat are shown nailed to a barn door, held up as a warning example in a not too smoothly flowing quatrain. To his plates of moralizing or emblematic intention, such as the one just referred to, or the Canard (Beraldi No. 116), he delighted in adding such inscriptions, generally in rhyme. His verses in such cases partake a little of the halting metre of those which poor Meryon attached to certain of his plates. Such etched letterpress additions appear also in Margot la Critique (Beraldi No. 113) and in Le Corbeau. The last named delineation of an old bow-legged crow presents a creature so weird, so uncanny, that without adventitious effects it appears as a symbol of some sinister power, felt though not realized. But a still more famous plate, because most strongly characteristic, is The Old Cock (the original drawing for which is owned by Samuel P. Avery), a masterly portrait of chanticleer, in all the dignity and pomp of his mature vigor and serene self-sufficiency. Here is the poem for this:
Hé, vieux coq,
Vieux Don Juan,
Vieille voix, tu t’érailles,
Toi-même tu seras
La pierre du festin fait à tes funerailles
Et les convives, las