"O! I've seen Etching!" exclaims Cruikshank in 1859; "it's easy enough, you only rub some black stuff over the copper plate, and then take a[n] etching needle, and scratch away a bit—and then clap on some a-ke-ta-ke (otherwise aquafortis)—and there you are!" "Wash the steel," he says in another of his quaint revelations, "with a solution of copper in Nitros acid—to tarnish the tarnation Bright steel before Etching, to save the eyes."
NORNA DESPATCHING THE PROVISIONS. Illustrates "The Pirate," by Sir Walter Scott, in "Landscape-Historical Illustrations of Scotland, and the Waverley Novels," 1838.
In his 77th year he says: "I am working away as hard as ever at water color drawings and paintings in oil, doing as little Etching as possible as that is very slavish work."
As he had etched about 2700 designs when he made this statement, it is impossible not to sympathise with his recreative change of medium. It must be remembered that, except in dry-point etching, the bite of the acid is trusted to engrave the design of the needle and that, when the stronger lines are obtained "by allowing the acid to act for a longer time" on a particular part or parts of the etched plate, the mechanical work, and work of calculation, imposed upon the etcher is formidable. Until, in the late seventies of the nineteenth century, the invasion of the process-block gave manual freedom to the bookseller's artist, that individual was continually sighing over the complexity of the method by which he paid the tribute of his imagination to Mammon. In the hands of the wood-engraver an artist's unengraved work was apparently always liable to the danger of misrepresentation unless the artist engraved it himself. Even the great John Thompson is not free from the suspicion of having unconsciously assisted "demon printers" in transforming into "little dirty scratches" some designs by Daniel Maclise, whose expressions are preserved in this sentence. Cruikshank who, if we add his woodcuts to his etchings, saw upwards of 4000 designs by him given with laborious indirectness to the world, would have been more than human if he had considered his unskilfulness in the art of producing and employing the colours between black and white as a reason for refraining from painting in oils. In 1853 "he entered as a student at the Royal Academy"; but his industry, in the rôle of a pupil of 60, was, it seems, less than his humility, for "he made very few drawings in the Antique," says Mr Charles Landseer, "and never got into the Life." Cruikshank, however, had exhibited in the Royal Academy as early as 1830, and in 1848 he dared to paint for the Prince Consort the picture entitled Disturbing the Congregation. This picture of a boy in church looking passionately unconscious of the fact that his sacrilegious pegtop is lying on the grave of a knight in full view of the beadle, is an anecdote painted more for God to laugh at than for Christians of the "so-called nineteenth century," but a philosophic sightseer like myself rejoices in it. This picture and The Fairy Ring, already praised, reveal Cruikshank's talent sufficiently to prevent one from regretting that he ultimately preferred covering canvases to furrowing plates.
(a) CRUSOE'S FARMHOUSE. (b) CRUSOE IN HIS ISLAND HOME. From "Robinson Crusoe," 1831.
To do him justice he was academically interested in the whole technique of pictorial art as practised in his day. He admitted, for instance, to Charles Hancock, "the sole inventor and producer of blocks by the process known as 'Etching on Glass,'" that if this invention had come earlier before him "it would have altered the whole character" of his drawing, though the designs which he produced by Hancock's process—the first of which was completed in April 1864—include nothing of importance.