“The ordinary observer will delight in Notre Dame des Andelys for its beautiful rendering of a noble fragment of architecture. Those who have real knowledge of etching will appreciate it still more for its clever biting and for its subtle delicacy of line so cunningly used for the indication of stone, glass, and woodwork with their different surfaces and textures.” Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 11 × 7⅛ inches
Webster. Porte des Marmousets, St. Ouen, Rouen
“Gothic canopies and tracery are drawn with loving care in the Porte des Marmousets, St. Ouen, Rouen, but here again it is the mystery of shadow in the deep porch that supplies the true theme.” Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 10⅛ × 7 inches
Mr. Webster has not learned from Meryon at the cost of his own individuality, and one reason for the freshness that characterizes his work is that he is one of those who like to transfer their first impressions of nature direct to the plate in the open air. With very few exceptions, that is how his etchings have been made. A certain amount of work is necessarily done afterward in the retirement of the studio, but the straightforward method of rendering nature gives a vividness and spontaneity that careful work from intermediate studies in pencil or color can rarely produce. This spontaneity is the very essence of good etching, for with etching, as with water-color, its highest charm is inevitably troubled by mechanical labor; it is essentially a method of which one feels that “if ’twere done, ’twere well done quickly.” The etcher should no more be able to stay the quick gliding of his needle in the middle of a line than the skater to stand still upon the outside edge. And I think that the etcher who works straight from nature is more apt to search out the notes and accents of character and to seize upon those structural lines which are a fundamental necessity to his work.
Another chief excellence in Mr. Webster’s work lies in the fact that from the first he has been his own printer. He is no believer in the principle followed by many other etchers of biting their plate and leaving it to some one “with the palm of a duchess” to do the rest. Patient acquisition of craftsmanship is bound to tell, for the paid printer, be he never so skilled, cannot hope to understand an artist’s intentions quite so well as the artist himself. Mr. Webster, however, has no need of any artifice; there is no trace in his etchings of the meretricious printing which Whistler condemned as “treacly.” Light and shade enter into charming alliance in his prints, but line is always of the confederacy, and it is to purity of line that the shadows which tell so strongly owe their strength. In the very depths of them there is always a luminous gloom, never a trace of the harshness and opacity that come from slurred workmanship and reliance upon printer’s ink.
Perhaps I have said too much already, for Mr. Webster’s work is well able to speak for itself. But there is one noteworthy feature, common to all his plates, that claims attention, and that is his power of rendering sunlight. If he loves dark and dingy thoroughfares with dilapidated roofs and moldering plaster, it is for the sake of those quaint shadows that peep from their recesses and climb the high walls, and still more for the patches of brilliant, quivering sunlight to which the shadows give so full a value. He seems to hear, like Corot, the actual crash of the sun upon the wall—“l’éclat du soleil qui frappe.”
Part II