“GOOD wine needs no bush,” and these essays need no commendatory word from the Editor. The plan of this book is a simple one. Certain lovers of prints have been asked to write on the engravers, etchers, or periods which chiefly interest them and upon which they are best qualified to speak; and, furthermore, to treat their special subjects in their own way. So far as subject matter is concerned, the essays are grouped approximately in chronological order, and the reader may range from Italian engravers before the time of Raphael and woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer to contemporary etchings by Zorn, Lepère, and Herman A. Webster. Throughout the essays one dominant note will be found—a sincere love of Prints and an interest in their Makers.
FitzRoy Carrington.
New York,
September, 1912.
DÜRER’S WOODCUTS
By CAMPBELL DODGSON, M.A.
Keeper of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum
Author of the Catalogue of German and Flemish Woodcuts in the British
Museum and Honorary Secretary of the Dürer Society
THE first decade of the twentieth century lies not very far behind us, but perhaps it is not too soon to assert that one of its marked features, in the retrospect of a print-lover, is a great revival or extension of interest in every form of engraving among cultivated people who are not specialists. Increased attention has been paid, among other things, to the German woodcuts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which used to be rather despised by the old-fashioned nineteenth-century collector, with a few enlightened exceptions, as rough and ugly old things which were curious as specimens of antiquity or instructive as illustrations of the life and religion of the generations that produced them, but were not to be taken very seriously as works of art. That estimate is being revised. A generation no longer blinded to the merits of primitive art by the worship of Raphael and the antique is ever tapping fresh sources of delight and enriching itself by the perception of beauty where its fathers saw nought but the grotesque and quaint. It is not surprising, indeed, that German art has made slower progress than Italian on the road to popularity. Even the primitives, on the south side of the Alps, shared in the winning grace and suavity of the old Mediterranean culture, while their brethren in the North, the French excepted, were indisputably more rugged and barbarous in draughtsmanship and painting, and few of their engravers, except Schongauer, can vie with the Florentines if their achievements are judged by the test of formal beauty. But it is wonderful how, in the North, now and again, art could suddenly blossom and ripen under the creative impulse of an innovator, whose successors, rather than the pioneer himself, lay themselves open to the charge of angularity and uncouthness. The perfection of the very earliest printed books is a commonplace. Less generally known, perhaps, is the great beauty to which the earliest of all the German engravers known to us at all as a personality, though not by name, was capable of attaining. The “Master of the Playing-Cards,” who was at work about 1430-40, produced work of extraordinary charm, not only in some of the figures, animals and flowers of the playing-cards themselves, but especially in the large engraving of the Virgin Mary with the human-headed serpent, or Lilith, beneath her feet, which is one of the most splendid and mature creations of the fifteenth century. Then, again, the early book illustrators of Augsburg and Ulm, in the seventies, when the use of blocks for such a purpose had only recently come in, produced woodcuts that were never surpassed by any successors in their simple and direct vivacity and strength, with the utmost economy of line. But the real beauty of some of the much earlier single woodcuts, illustrating, chiefly, the legends of Our Lady and the Saints, has been much less generally appreciated. They are very rare, and most of them repose, in a seclusion seldom disturbed, in their boxes in the great European print-rooms or even in monastic libraries. They are only beginning to be reproduced, and they are rarely exhibited. But such an exhibition of the earliest German woodcuts as was held at Berlin in the summer of 1908 was truly a revelation. The soft and rounded features, the flowing lines of the drapery, in the prints of the generation before sharp, broken folds were introduced under the influence of the Netherlands, have something of the charm of Far Eastern art, and the gay coloring with which most of the prints were finished has often a delightfully decorative effect when they are framed and hung at a proper distance from the eye. Such praise is due, of course, only to some of the choicer examples; there are plenty of fifteenth-century woodcuts in which the line is merely clumsy and the coloring merely gaudy, but these are more often products of the last quarter of the century than of its beginning or middle. It would not be true to say that the advance of time brought with it progress and perfection in the woodcutter’s art; on the contrary, the first vital impulse spent itself all too soon, and gave way to thoughtless and unintelligent imitation.
Albrecht Dürer Conterfeyt in seinem alter
Des L V I. Jares.
