Size of the original engraving, 11½ × 9¼ inches
Here is Henry IV as a careless youth next to the terrible Catherine when she was an innocent-looking young bride; further on are the baby daughter of Francis I and the indomitable head of the house of Guise. The sad Charles IX is represented here as a mere boy; there, a week before his death, shaking with fever and tortured by remorse for the fearful massacre which he had instigated. The ill-fated Mary Stuart wears becomingly her widow’s mourning, and is surrounded by the chivalry and the beauty of the court. The success of these drawings was so great that every one desired complete sets of them, and the result was that they were copied over and over again, first by other artists, and finally by amateurs who were not very faithful to their models. The work of the Clouets was intelligently continued by several members of the family of Dumonstier, and the vogue of this exquisite form of portraiture lasted until the middle of the following century.
It was these finished miniatures which the first engravers attempted to reproduce on wood and copper; their drawing was in most cases weak, and consequently the resemblance was seldom faithful; their knowledge of line-work was very meager, and therefore the modeling was most primitive; but in spite of this, their work is interesting for its exquisite finish and its consistent effort to express the character of the individual. Such very personal little portraits as those of Philibert Delorme in his treatise on architecture, Orlando di Lasso in a book of motets, and the great Ambroise Paré in his treatise on the fractures of the skull, shared the fame of those of Henry IV by Thomas de Leu, and greatly increased the popularity of engraving.
By the beginning of the seventeenth century it had become extremely fashionable to dabble in engraving, and painters, architects, goldsmiths, noblemen and even ladies were busy gouging wood and cutting copper with an enthusiasm which has bequeathed us a mass of small illustrations, tail-pieces, grotesques, mottos, emblems and other embellishments. Then there appeared during the reign of Louis XIII a peculiar genius in Claude Mellan. He adopted such an original technique that he had practically no followers. Considering cross-hatching rank heresy, Mellan spent a great part of his life making facsimiles on copper of more than four score charming pencil-drawings which he had made from life, using distinct lines which he made broader in the shadows. Although he thereby succeeded in producing a set of very remarkable plates, he was prevented by the exaggerated simplicity of his system from securing all the detail, the refinement of expression necessary to a real psychological study, and he was unable to express any color, texture or chiaroscuro whatever.
The most original artistic genius at that time was Callot, who had introduced etching in France; he delighted everybody with the facility and esprit with which he handled the needle, and he produced a great number of plates full of crisply drawn little figures which possessed so much animation that nothing like them had previously been seen. His two attempts at portraiture, however, are far from being significant; it may be said that he was not serious enough for such work.
By that time portrait-engraving had become extinct in Germany, and it was achieving little of importance in Italy and Spain; in the Low Countries, however, it was producing masterpieces. Even if Rembrandt and Van Dyck had given the world nothing more than their etched portraits, their fame would live forever. In the former, the world found an artist who painted as effectively with the needle as with the brush, and an etcher who reveled in such powerful and correct chiaroscuro that his portraits were a perfect revelation. The glowing light with which he illumined his faces and the boldness and freedom of his line-work amazed the engravers of his time, for in comparison they had worked only in outline, and those who attempted to imitate him achieved very little success. In the plates of Rembrandt the engraved portrait reaches the last degree of warmth of expression and life.
As to Anthony Van Dyck, he had followed the example of Rubens and encouraged the leading engravers of Antwerp to reproduce his portraits on copper. The result was that noble work called his “Iconography,” which contained over a hundred portraits of the leading painters and art patrons of the time, most brilliantly engraved by Soutman, the Bolswerts, Vorstermann and Paul Pontius under the master’s jealous supervision. In directing this work Van Dyck developed such enthusiasm that he himself etched eighteen portraits from life, in which the faces are modeled with small dots; they are charming drawings which exhibit such a wonderful knowledge of physiognomy, and possess so much life and color in spite of the simplicity of their treatment, that they remain masterpieces for all times.
Through the genius of Rubens and Van Dyck the art of engraving had become transformed; at last life and color had come into it. No such brilliancy in the treatment of flesh and varied texture had been attained by pure line-work before the appearance of Pontius’s portrait of Rubens, and with the exception of the etchings of Rembrandt, nothing so human had previously been seen as Van Dyck’s etching of Pontius himself.
But in spite of the best achievements of the Flemish engravers, there was still an important advance to be made before the copperplate could give such a faithful translation of a painting that besides the drawing and the color, it could reproduce all the refinement of detail, all the texture and chiaroscuro, all the painter-like effect of the canvas. That interval could be bridged only by a born draughtsman who had the soul of a portrait-painter and by an artist who would devote himself exclusively to the solution of that one problem. For that final step of its development, reproductive engraving had to go to France and to the unique Jean Morin.
