Size of the original etching, 7⅞ × 5⅛ inches
Webster. Le Pont Neuf, Paris
“A fitting companion to this vision of Notre Dame is Le Pont Neuf, another of the etcher’s largest and most distinguished plates. The stern solidity of the bridge, with its massive masonry, its corbeled turrets, and its deeply shadowed arches, makes pleasing contrast with the irregular sky-line of the sunlit houses that rise beyond.” Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 8⅛ × 11¾ inches
It is of some of the chief works produced and exhibited during the last three years that I have now to speak, and in doing so may perhaps indicate a few leading characteristics of the etcher’s work. His chief delight is in the nooks and corners of old-world thoroughfares and culs-de-sac, where deep shadows lurk in the angles of time-worn buildings, and sunlight ripples over crumbling walls, seamy gables, and irregular tiled roofs. Of such is a series of subjects found in old Rouen—the St. Ouen; the Rue du Hallage, where the cathedral spire towers high above old timbered houses; and that charming plate with the title Old Houses, Rouen, a quaint corner of tenements whose high-pitched roofs stand propped against one another for all the world like a castle of cards. The etcher of this and of the St. Ouen was welcomed with warm sympathy by the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, which said that “never before has there been so fervent and skilled an interpreter of the bowed timber and crumbling plaster of the old houses of Rouen, which line the street ending in the cathedral with its pointed spire against the open sky.” And so we pass to two courtyard scenes—belonging, like the Rouen subjects, to the year 1906—the Cour, Normandie, and Les Blanchisseuses. In both we find the artist becoming more adept in using broad and balanced disposition of light and shade to give not merely chiaroscuro but the suggestion of actual color, and more skilled in adding exquisiteness of detail to refined truth of visual impression. Les Blanchisseuses, in particular, with its rich mystery of shadow, with its sunshine falling on white walls and lighting the seamed interstices of plaster and timber, has an indefinable charm that, for myself at any rate, makes it a high-water mark in Mr. Webster’s art. Of similar type is the Old Butter Market, Bruges, where a cobbled street curves beneath a shadowed archway; and then for variety you step from Bruges la Morte, from the silent cobbles that centuries ago were a busy thoroughfare for ringing feet, to the Bruges of to-day. It is Bruges in a very different aspect, this free and spirited study made on July 27, 1907, on the day of the Fête de l’Arbre d’Or, giving a quick impression of gay holiday crowds, of banners fluttering against the open sky, and of the “belfry old and brown” whose carillon inspired America’s poet, as its tall form and fretted outline have inspired the American etcher of whom I write. This Bruges en Fête, and Paysanne, a clever and direct figure-study of an old peasant at Marlotte, come as an episode of pleasing variety in Mr. Webster’s work, and tend to show that, though he has his preferences, he is not really fettered by any limitation of subject or treatment.
Webster. La Rue Cardinale
“La Rue Cardinale has affinity of general treatment with Rue de la Parcheminerie, and is not the less interesting for an amazing tour de force in the rendering of color and texture in the striped blind over a shop-front.” Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 10⅞ × 7⅝ inches