It is difficult to clothe one’s speech in the detached terms of a catalogue when writing of an artist whose work always kindles fresh enthusiasm. And so I may perhaps be pardoned if, in adding something to a previous essay upon the etchings of Herman A. Webster, I venture to strike a more personal note.
Webster. Vieilles Maisons, Rue Hautefeuille, Paris
“He loves dark and dingy thoroughfares with dilapidated roofs and moldering plaster, ... for the patches of brilliant, quivering sunlight to which the shadows give so full a value.” Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 11¼ × 5⅞ inches
Webster. La Route de Louviers
“In landscape, as in his architectural work, Webster sets his theme upon the plate with fine skill of arrangement and with exquisite draughtsmanship.” Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 6 × 8¼ inches
There can be few men to whom art is more of a religion than to Webster. On two occasions when I saw him during his hurried visits to London in the spring of 1910, he spoke of his art with all the zeal of a missionary and the fervor of a convert. He seemed to be laboring in a slough of despond, beset with a feeling that his past work was something worthless, to be thrown aside like Christian’s bundle. He appeared to be torn in sunder by divers doctrines, telling me of the constant ebb and flow of argument in the Paris cafés and studios between the parti métier and the parti âme—those who maintained that finished technique, the “cuisine” of the French student, was the final aim, and those who held that the artist’s own emotion, howsoever it might find expression, was the greatest thing of all. Webster felt—and it was a fact, indeed, at which I hinted in writing of his work before—that he was sacrificing something of the âme to the métier; and his own realization of that is already becoming apparent in his outlook and his style. Then, too, his talk was all of the attainment and suggestion of light as the supreme quality in an etching; and here I could reassure him, for few have ever preached the gospel of light with more truth and earnestness than Webster himself in the Quai Montebello and many other plates.