It was the Golden Age of Portrait-painting, for they were the days of Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and that host of splendid Dutch artists for whom physiognomy had no secrets. They in turn inspired Philippe de Champaigne and, later, Lebrun and Mignard, Rigaud and Largillière. Many of their glorious canvases have long been public property and remain to-day enshrined in national museums, but many more have for years remained jealously guarded heirlooms in private collections, and have been known only to a few. Many of those which have not been destroyed have become so altered by time and damaged by faulty restoration that they hardly do justice to their creators.
Thanks to the engraver, these portraits are just as alive to-day as when they were painted, for in an engraving there is no paint to fade or darken, no values to become altered. A brilliant impression of an early state remains to-day what it was when it emerged from the master’s hand two and a half centuries ago. Such collections as are now exhibited represent more than brilliant examples of an art which is lost; they are historical and artistic documents of great importance, and the French Engravers of the Seventeenth Century deserve infinite praise for having showed all the possibilities of an art which, as Longhi claims in his book La Calcografia, “publishes and immortalizes the portraits of eminent men for the example of present and future generations, better than any other serving as the vehicle for the most extended and remote propagation of deserved celebrity.”
Among the many artists who were responsible for the Golden Age of Engraving, Jean Morin occupies a unique position. He was born in 1600 and died in 1666. Morin has the distinction of having not only immediately preceded and influenced the master of them all, Nanteuil, but also of having produced fifty portraits which, in contradistinction to all other reproductive engravers, he etched instead of engraved with the burin. It is difficult, however, to realize what a strikingly original and personal artist he was, without first considering in what stage of development his first efforts had found the art.
When had engraved portraiture begun in France? We must look for its first steps in the illustrations of the books which were published during the second half of the sixteenth century; they teem with carefully executed small-sized portraits which, as a rule, were framed in decorative cartouches and bore lengthy inscriptions. Very few of them have been drawn from life; the first engravers, not trusting their own powers, were content to copy those exquisitely sensitive and delicate drawings, the crayon portraits which the Clouets made of royalty and the court at the time of Francis I, Henry II, and Catherine de Medicis. They are a wonderful pendant to Holbein’s drawings of the courtiers of Henry VIII. The finest are now hanging in the famous Gallery of Psyche at Chantilly. Nothing can describe the subtlety with which the artist has combined refinement and realism and drawn with delicate color the features of the famous personages of those tragic times.
Morin. Louis XIII, King of France
After the painting by Philippe de Champaigne
Size of the original engraving, 11⅜ × 9⅛ inches
Morin. Anne of Austria, Regent of France
Widow of Louis XIII and Mother of Louis XIV
After the painting by Philippe de Champaigne