The Papal Nuncio to the Court of Louis XIII
After the painting by Anthony Van Dyck
Size of the original engraving, 11½ × 9⅛ inches
But it is this very freedom which makes his plates so original and gives them such especial charm. Besides, why should etching partake of the character of slow and precise burin work? Morin’s chief preoccupation is the rendering of the face and the preservation of all the character of the original; it is evident that he spares no pains to make his reproduction an absolutely faithful one. As to the rest of the picture, he does not consider it necessary to do more than recall the picturesque effect of the original’s ensemble, but if he treats it with freedom he is careful to make every line serve a definite purpose; he is never careless. It is to his great sympathy and conscientiousness that Morin owed his success as a reproductive engraver, and the fact that his plates had a great influence on his contemporaries. Before him no such delicate tones and deep velvety blacks had been seen, no engraver had been so consistently correct and expressive in his drawing; so much justice had never been done to a painter.
The art of Morin was so personal that the efforts of his pupils Alix, Plattemontagne and Boulanger to follow his technique remained unsuccessful; he was as inimitable in his brilliant effects of chiaroscuro as Mellan with his fiendishly clever but exaggerated simplicity of line.
Nevertheless, the lesson of thorough faithfulness he had given was not lost; the seed fell on fertile ground when Robert Nanteuil, at the outset of his career, studied Morin’s work closely enough to imitate his technique in such portraits as those of Pierre Dupuis, the royal librarian, and the poet Gilles Menage. The engraver from Rheims had doubtless profited by the example of his own master Regnesson, whose work had already shown Morin’s influence. Those clever little portraits as well as a few others done in that style show a marked advance on the previous ones, in which he had followed that of Mellan, and the delicate little dots with which their faces are modeled paved the way for that system of close, short strokes with which he eventually succeeded in imitating to perfection the peculiar texture of skin. Nanteuil was to inherit the best in all who had preceded him and to combine all previous systems into one which would carry the art of Engraved Portraiture to its greatest development; but it was Morin who gave him the most eloquent example and who pointed out to him the last remaining step to technical perfection.
His Work
On looking through a complete collection of Morin’s portraits one is immediately impressed by the small number of plates which denote crude beginnings. As none of them is dated, it is next to impossible to arrange his works chronologically, all the more so as the engraver perfected his technique and found his manner very early in his career. We find only one portrait which is really unsatisfactory, that of Louis XI, copied possibly from an old miniature, and only two which show any hardness of tone, the portraits of Augustin and Christophe de Thou; they are undoubtedly early works, the head of the dreaded hermit of Plessis-les-Tours being probably Morin’s first effort. Then we have that most Gallic of Frenchmen, Henry IV, a quaint head drawn with much character; Marie de Médicis, after Pourbus; and Henry II, after Clouet. These last two are most excellent plates, the first showing us that intriguing Italian princess shortly after her arrival from Florence, in all the glory of her wonderful complexion and golden hair; the second recalling the exquisite art of Clouet in the simplicity and delicacy of the treatment of the face and the superb detail of the costume.[1] We are then brought face to face with the great Philip II of Spain, in one of Morin’s most serenely elegant plates after Titian, and the portraits of the two great saints of the time, Saint François de Sales and San Carlo Borromeo. To the four portraits after Van Dyck we must give special attention, for they contain Morin’s masterpieces, the portrait of N. Chrystin, son of the Spanish plenipotentiary at the Peace of Vervins, and that of Cardinal Bentivoglio, the papal nuncio to the court of Louis XIII. Here we have Morin in his grand manner, transferring all the color of the original canvas to his copperplate and interpreting his models with a boldness, a softness, a clearness of purpose and a strength of sympathy wholly admirable. In awarding the palm, we hesitate between the deep tones, the velvety finish in the head of the somber Spaniard and the subtle modeling of the beautifully illumined, sensitive Italian face. Either of these portraits alone would have established Morin’s fame.
[1] Why such an authority as Robert-Dumesnil should have classed the portrait of Henry IV’s queen among the doubtful plates of Morin is a mystery. It is clearly the work of that master, and although an early plate, it is one of his brilliant ones.
The other two plates after Van Dyck represent women, Margaret Lemon, beloved of the painter, and the Countess of Caernarvon, a remarkable study in high lights, and one of Morin’s most delicate plates.
The remainder of the gallery consists of his interpretation of Philippe de Champaigne’s portraits, and the array of celebrities there represented is a notable one. What would we know of the features of that eccentric monarch, the melancholic Louis XIII, if we did not possess this striking etching of Morin? The father of “le roi soleil” is here posing, ill at ease, and probably wondering what Richelieu is going to make him do next. An unsatisfactory human being was he whose “principal merit was to have done what few mediocre characters ever do, bow down to the superiority of genius.” His queen, Anne of Austria, is here shown both in the quiet garb of a widow (a delightfully simple portrait) and in the more ceremonious court mourning, while his prime minister, Richelieu, is represented in a plate than which there is none more interesting among Morin’s works. A comparison between this impression of the great cardinal’s character and that recorded in the superb engraving by Nanteuil is a most interesting one. In the latter we see the steersman of the ship of state in all his grandeur of noble purpose and responsibility, and we feel the immense will-power with which, in constant danger of his life, he bore long with his enemies, and then, driven to action, “went far, very far and covered everything with his scarlet robe.” But in Morin’s interpretation of the canvas of de Champaigne we see quite another side of the great statesman. It is the Richelieu whom we perceive through some memoirs of the time (and not the least trustworthy ones), and in the literary history of the early seventeenth century. It is a man wholly lacking in a sense of humor, possessing plenty of vanity and constantly yearning for recognition as a literary light and a squire of dames.