Haden. A Sunset in Ireland
“This plate, and also A By-road in Tipperary, were done in the park of Viscount Hawarden, in the most beautiful part of Tipperary.” Seymour Haden.
Size of the original dry-point, 5½ × 8½ inches
After his return from Boston, the artist spent several weeks in New York, and while he was there, I arranged for him the first public exhibition of his etchings which was ever made in America. The New York press took up the subject with enthusiasm, and every important newspaper printed a long review of the artist and his work. I collected all of these very laudatory articles, and took them to Mr. Haden at the Hotel Brunswick. Next day he said to me, “Do you know that these reviews of the New York press are distinctly abler and more intelligent than if they had been written in London?” He added, “I wish you would pay my particular compliments to the gentleman who wrote the review in the New York World; that article in particular I found to be admirable.” He was surprised when he saw me begin to laugh, but I explained to him that the “gentleman” in question was a lady, and the article which he so greatly admired was from the pen of Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer.
One very seldom finds that the imaginative and creative artist is also endowed with a logical and judicial cast of mind. It was so with Seymour Haden. He had brought from England a large collection of excellent lantern-slides to illustrate these lectures by means of a stereopticon, and in the lecturer’s zeal to glorify original etching at the expense of prints done by any other method, he had procured one lantern slide of the beautiful little portrait which Rembrandt had etched of himself, the complete print of which is hardly bigger than a postage stamp. It was the Rembrandt à trois moustaches. Alongside of this, Mr. Haden had printed a morsel of the same size, taken from a crude and unimportant part of the foreground of William Sharp’s famous line-engraving of the Holy Family, after the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Thus this special pleader, Haden, displayed an etching in its entirety, and less than one-hundredth part of a line-engraving of very large size. Wherever, during his lectures, this illustration was exhibited by a stereopticon, there was a universal outcry against the unfairness of it. People all, with one accord, declared that if the artist wanted to confront and contrast etching with line-engraving, fairness would require the lecturer to have chosen two prints of the same size; but there was no “budging” Seymour Haden, when he had formed an opinion.
Haden. A Lancashire River.
A well-known salmon pool on the Ribble. In Sir Seymour’s opinion this is one of his very finest plates. It was awarded the Medal of Honor at the Paris Exposition of 1889.
Size of the original etching, 11 × 16 inches