Since writing the above, I have seen working-proofs of two new etchings of landscape. And here, too, there is high promise. They show, at least, that Webster is not going to remain a man of one subject; that he is opening his heart to the beauty and romance of simple nature. He has sought his first themes in that pleasant countryside where, between tall poplars, you get peeps of Château Gaillard, nobly set upon its hill. In landscape, as in his architectural work, Webster sets his theme upon the plate with fine skill of arrangement and with exquisite draughtsmanship. These two plates, Château Gaillard and La Route de Louviers, are exhilarating in their feeling of sunshine, and they please by their absolute simplicity of statement. They are honest, and without artifice. Printed “as clean as a whistle,” without any of the doubtful expedients that give a meretricious attractiveness to so much modern etching, they appeal by their rightness of pattern and precision of line. Those who see high promise as well as present fulfilment in Webster’s art, will not regret that he has left the town and set out where
thro’ the green land,
Vistas of change and adventure,
The gray roads go beckoning and winding.
ANDERS ZORN—PAINTER-ETCHER
By J. NILSEN LAURVIK
BROADLY speaking there are but two kinds of artists—innovators and imitators. The first may be known by the opposition they arouse in the sacred sanctums of mediocrity and by their final but reluctant acceptance by the self-appointed custodians of the Hall of Fame whose business it is to exclude genius until Time shall have tempered all its buoyant, youthful enthusiasms, which are the very signs and tokens of those starry creatures whom the gods have blessed. Youth and all its amazing prodigality are of the very essence of genius, and it is by virtue of this exuberant overflowing of the spirit that the works of Anders Zorn make their vital appeal.
He celebrates with fervent, dramatic strokes the pageant of the visible world, and all that his alert eyes can see his nimble fingers depict with an unfailing sense of the pictorial possibilities inherent in the passing procession of contemporary life. There is in his work something of childlike spontaneity,—a healthy, natural enjoyment in the mere practice of his art that is infectious. He has the same impartial love for nature as it is as had Velasquez and Frans Hals, and the same incomparable interdependence of head and hand. His art is, in the best sense of the word, purely objective, dedicated to a specific transcription of the outward semblance of things. These bright, vivacious plates are not evolved by any painful process of mental cogitation, nor are they the result of imaginative vagaries.
Zorn is concerned but little with abstract form or involved compositions. But he cannot be accused of evading difficulties through any fear of failure, as he has so convincingly demonstrated in his vivid, sun-flecked Interior of a Parisian Omnibus with its sharply characterized passengers, and in his dramatically effective Waltz with its assemblage of swaying figures moving rhythmically through the spacious ball-room, both marvels of discerning observation recorded with an almost clairvoyant magic of line that evoke the kaleidoscopic shimmer and brilliancy of the scenes depicted. The difficulties presented by these complex subjects are surmounted with the same nonchalant ease and certainty that distinguish his long series of individual portraits and figure pieces. That the latter predominate in the hierarchy of his etched work is a matter of choice rather than of chance and may, I think, be taken as an indication of his keen appreciation of the limitations as well as the possibilities of this medium. No one, not even Whistler, has realized more clearly than he that etching at its best is essentially an impressionistic art, to be practised only in the happiest moods, and his finest plates are marvels of swift, stenographic notations that have been scratched upon the copper direct from nature in a white heat of enthusiasm.
