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<h1 class='c001'>FOUR MASTERS OF ETCHING</h1></div>
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<div><i>This Edition is limited to</i></div>
<div><i>Two Hundred and Fifty Copies.</i></div>
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<div><span style="color:red;"><span class='c004'><em class='gesperrt'>FOUR MASTERS OF ETCHING</em>.</span></span></div>
<div class='c002'>BY</div>
<div class='c000'><span class='c005'>FREDERICK WEDMORE.</span></div>
<div class='c002'><span style="color:red;"><span class='c006'><i>WITH ORIGINAL ETCHINGS</i></span></span></div>
<div class='c000'><span style="color:red;">BY</span></div>
<div class='c000'><span style="color:red;"><span class='c006'>HADEN, JACQUEMART, WHISTLER, <span class='fss'>AND</span> LEGROS.</span></span></div>
<div class='c002'>LONDON:</div>
<div class='c000'><em class='gesperrt'><span class='c007'>THE FINE ART SOCIETY, LIMITED.</span></em></div>
<div class='c000'>148, NEW BOND STREET.</div>
<div class='c000'>1883.</div>
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<span class='pageno' id='Page_iii'>iii</span>
<h2 class='c009'>PREFACE</h2></div>
<p class='c010'><span class='sc'>It</span> is well to say, in a word or two, what this short book aims at.
Unavoidably inferior to Mr. Hamerton’s in merit, it is voluntarily
much more limited in scheme. Taking only the four artists who
seem to me most worthy of note among the many good etchers of
our day, it seeks to study their work with a degree of detail unnecessary
and even impossible in a volume of wider scope. In trying
to do this, it can hardly help affording, at least incidentally, some
notion of what I hold to be the right principles of etching, nor can
it wholly ignore the relation of etching to other art, or the relation
of Art to Nature and Life. But these points are touched but briefly,
and only by the way.</p>
<p class='c011'>A book of larger aim, on Etching in England and France, might
justifiably have given almost as much importance to Macbeth and
Tissot here, and to Bracquemond there, as has been given in the
annexed pages to Haden, Whistler, Jacquemart, and Legros. But
Macbeth and Tissot belong to a younger generation than do any of
my four masters. Much of what the art of etching could do in modern
days was already in evidence before their work began. My four
masters are four pioneers. Bracquemond may be a pioneer also; but
in his original work, skilled and individual as that is, he has chosen
to be very limited. The place he occupies is honourable, but it is
small.</p>
<p class='c011'>About the four chapters that here follow I need say very little.
<span class='pageno' id='Page_iv'>iv</span>That on Seymour Haden has been passed through the <i>Art Journal</i>,
that on Legros through the <i>Academy</i>, that on Jules Jacquemart through
the <i>Nineteenth Century</i>. All have now been revised. Something of the
chapter on Whistler has also appeared in the <i>Nineteenth Century</i>, but in
quite different form, and I will explain why. In the first place, since
that article appeared, Mr. Whistler has given me cause to modify to
some extent my estimate of his art. Having seen this cause, I have
acted on it. I am not a Mede nor a Persian. And in a system of
criticism which seeks to inquire and understand, rather than to
denounce, there is place for change. Again, much of the article in
the <i>Nineteenth Century</i> was occasioned not by Mr. Whistler’s practice,
but by the attack which he made upon a great teacher and critic,
and, by implication, upon all critics who allow themselves that
abstinence from technical labour which is often essential if their
criticism is to be neither immature for want of time to spend on it nor
prejudiced because of their exclusive association with some special
ways or cliques in art. Whatever dealt with this business I have now
withdrawn. It was written for a particular purpose, and its purpose
was served.</p>
<p class='c011'>A word now on a matter of detail. Two expressions in the body
of this volume—“our <i>Dusty Millers</i>” (page <SPAN href='#Page_10'>10</SPAN>), and “<i>M. Rodin</i>
here” (page <SPAN href='#Page_42'>42</SPAN>)—which only the really careful reader will honour me
by noticing, are due to the fact that after the body of the volume was
finally printed, some change was made in the choice of the illustrations.
For Mr. Haden’s copper of <i>Dusty Millers</i>, I have been happy
to be able to substitute <i>Grim Spain</i>, the only Spanish subject of his
which I thoroughly like. And in place of M. Legros’s learned but
hardly attractive portrait of M. Rodin, it has been still more fortunate
that it has been possible to procure the portrait of Mr. Watts, the
painter, one of the most triumphant instances of Legros’s art.</p>
<div class='c012'>F. W.</div>
<p class='c011'><span class='small'><i>London, 1883.</i></span></p>
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<span class='pageno' id='Page_v'>v</span>
<h2 class='c009'>TABLE OF CONTENTS.</h2></div>
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<td class='c013'> </td>
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<td class='c015'><span class='xsmall'>PAGE</span></td>
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<tr>
<td class='c013'><span class='sc'>Chapter I.</span></td>
<td class='c014'>SEYMOUR HADEN</td>
<td class='c015'><SPAN href='#ch01'>1</SPAN></td>
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<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c013'><span class='sc'>Chapter II.</span></td>
<td class='c014'>JULES JACQUEMART</td>
<td class='c015'><SPAN href='#ch02'>12</SPAN></td>
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<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c013'><span class='sc'>Chapter III.</span></td>
<td class='c014'>J. A. M. WHISTLER</td>
<td class='c015'><SPAN href='#ch03'>28</SPAN></td>
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<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c013'><span class='sc'>Chapter IV.</span></td>
<td class='c014'>ALPHONSE LEGROS</td>
<td class='c015'><SPAN href='#ch04'>40</SPAN></td>
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<span class='pageno' id='Page_vi'>vi</span>
<h2 class='c009'>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.</h2></div>
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<td class='c016'>“GRIM SPAIN”</td>
<td class='c013'>Etched by <span class='sc'>F. Seymour Haden</span></td>
<td class='c015'><SPAN href='#i010'>10</SPAN></td>
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<td class='c016'>ORIENTAL PORCELAIN</td>
<td class='c013'>by <span class='sc'>Jules Jacquemart</span></td>
<td class='c015'><SPAN href='#i016'>16</SPAN></td>
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<td class='c016'>PUTNEY</td>
<td class='c013'>by <span class='sc'>J. A. McN. Whistler</span></td>
<td class='c015'><SPAN href='#i036'>36</SPAN></td>
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<td class='c016'>PORTRAIT OF G. F. WATTS, R.A.</td>
<td class='c013'>by <span class='sc'>Alphonse Legros</span></td>
<td class='c015'><SPAN href='#i042'>42</SPAN></td>
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<span class='pageno' id='Page_1'>1</span>
<h2 id='ch01' class='c009'>CHAPTER I.<br/> <br/><span class='c017'>SEYMOUR HADEN.</span></h2></div>
<p class='c010'><span class='sc'>Perhaps</span> the two qualities which, as one gets a little <i>blasé</i> about
the productions of Art, continue the most to stir and stimulate, and to
quicken the sense of enjoyment, are the quality of vigour and the
quality of exquisiteness. If an artist is so fortunate as to possess both
these virtues in any fulness, he is sure not only to please a chosen
public during several generations, but to please the individual student—if
he be a capable student—at all times and in all moods, and, of
the two, perhaps, that is really the severer test. But to have these
qualities in any fulness, and in equal measure, is given to a man only
here and there over the range of centuries. It is given to a Titian, it
is given to a Rembrandt, and of course to a Turner; it is given in the
days of the Grand Monarch to a Watteau, and in the days of the
Second Empire to a Méryon. But so notable and rare a union is
denied—is it not?—even to a Velasquez; while what we praise most
in Moreau le Jeune is by no means a facility of vigour, and what is
characteristic of David Cox is certainly no charm of exquisiteness. To
unite the two qualities—I mean always, of course, in the fulness and
equality first spoken of—demands not a rich temperament alone. The
full display of either by itself demands that. It demands a temperament
of quite exceptional variety: the presence, it sometimes seems,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_2'>2</span>almost of two personalities—so unlike are the two phases of the gift
which we call genius.</p>
<p class='c011'>With the artists of energy and vigour I class Mr. Seymour Haden.
Theirs is the race to which, indeed, quite obviously, he belongs. Alive,
undoubtedly, to grace of form, fire and vehemence of expression are
yet his dominant qualities. With him, as the artistic problem is first
conceived, so must it be executed, and it must be executed immediately.
His energy is not to be exhausted, but of patience there is a
smaller stock. For him, as a rule, no second thought is the wisest;
there is no fruitful revision, no going back to-day upon yesterday’s
effort; little of careful piecing and patching, to put slowly right what
was wrong to begin with. He is the artist of the first impression.
Probably it was just and justly conveyed; but if not, there the failure
stands, such as it is, to be either remembered or forgotten, but hardly to
be retrieved. Such as it is, it is done with, no more to be recalled
than the player’s last night’s performance of Hamlet or Macbeth.
Other things will be in the future: the player is looking forward to
to-night; but last night—that is altogether in the past.</p>
<p class='c011'>There is no understanding Seymour Haden’s work, its virtues and
deficiencies, unless this note of his temperament, this characteristic
of his productions, is continually borne in mind. It is the secret of
his especial delight in the art of etching; the secret of the particular
uses to which he has so resolutely applied that art. With the admission
of the characteristic, comes necessarily the admission of the limitation
it suggests. Accustomed to labour and patience, not only in the preparation
for the practice of an art, but in the actual practice of it, one
may possibly be suspicious of the art which substantially demands that
its work shall be done in a day if it is to be done at all. Such art, one
<span class='pageno' id='Page_3'>3</span>says, forfeits, at all events, its claim to the rank that is accorded to the
<i>œuvre de longue haleine</i>, when that is carried to a successful issue and
not to an impotent conclusion. To flicker bravely for an hour; to
burn continuously at a white heat—they are very different matters.
The mental powers which the two acts typify must be differently valued.
And the art that asks, as one of its conditions, that it shall be swift,
not only because swiftness is sometimes effective, but because the
steadiness of sustained effort has a difficulty of its own—that art, to use
an illustration from poetry and from music, takes up its place, voluntarily,
with the lyrists, and with Schubert, as we knew him of old—foregoes
voluntarily all comparison with the epic, and with Beethoven.</p>
<p class='c011'>Well, this remark—a remonstrance we can hardly call it—has
undoubtedly to be accepted. Only it must be laid to Mr. Seymour
Haden’s credit that he has shown a rare sagacity in the choice of his
method of expression. The conditions of the art of etching—a special
branch of the engraver’s art, and not to be considered wholly alone—are
fitted precisely to his temperament, and suit his means to perfection.
Etching is qualified especially to give the fullest effect to the
mental impression with the least possible expenditure of merely tedious
work. Etching is for the vigorous sketch—and it is for the exquisite
sketch likewise. It is for the work in which suggestion may be ample
and unstinted, but in which realisation may, if the artist chooses,
hardly be pursued at all. To say that, has become one of the commonplaces
of criticism. We are not all of us so gifted, however, that
commonplaces are to be dispensed with for the remainder of time.</p>
<p class='c011'>Of the great bygone masters of the art, some have pursued it in
Mr. Haden’s way, and others have made it approach more nearly to
the work of the deliberate engraver. Vandyke etched as a speedy
<span class='pageno' id='Page_4'>4</span>and decisive sketcher; the later and elaborate work added to his plates
was added by other hands, and produced only a monotonous completeness
destructive of the first charm, the charm of the vivid impression.
Méryon, whose noble work Mr. Haden has rightly felt and pronounced
to be “not impulsive and spontaneous, but reflective and constructive,
slow and laborious,” used etching evidently in a different method and
for different ends. With something of the patience of a deliberate
line-engraver, he built up his work, piece by piece and stroke by
stroke: touching here, and tinkering there—he says so himself—and
the wonder of it is, that for all his slowness and delay, the work itself
remains simple and broad, and the poetical motive is held fast to.
This Mr. Haden has expressly recognised. Nothing eluded Méryon.
The impressions that with some men come and go, he pertinaciously
retained. Through all mechanical difficulties, his own quality of concentrativeness
preserved to his work the quality of unity. Then, again,
it must be said that the greatest etcher of old time, Rembrandt, and
one of the greatest, Claude, employed the two methods, and found the
art equal to the expression both of the first fancy and of the realised
fact. To see which, one may compare the first state of Rembrandt’s
<i>Clément de Jonghe</i>—with its rapid seizure of the features of a character
of extraordinary subtlety—and the <i>Ephraim Bonus</i>, with its
deliberate record of face and gesture, dress and environment; and in
Claude the exquisite free sketching in the first state of <i>Shepherd
and Shepherdess</i> with the quite final work of the second state of
<i>Le Bouvier</i>. Mr. Haden, then, has full justification for his view of
etching; yet Mr. Haden’s view of etching is not the only one that can
be held with fairness.</p>
<p class='c011'>For all but forty years now Seymour Haden has been an etcher,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_5'>5</span>so that we may naturally see in his work the characteristics of
youth and those of an advanced maturity, in which, nevertheless,
the eye is not dimmed nor the natural fire abated. That is to say,
the mass of his labour—over a hundred and eighty etchings—already
affords the opportunity of comparison between subjects essayed with
the careful and delicate timidity of a student of twenty, and subjects
disposed of with the command and assurance that come of years, of
experience, and—may I add?—of recognition. But in his early time
Mr. Haden did but little on the copper, and then he would have had
no reason to resent the title of “amateur,” now somewhat unreasonably
bestowed on a workman who has given us the <i>Agamemnon</i>, the
<i>Sunset on the Thames</i>, the <i>Sawley</i>, and the <i>Calais Pier</i>. Somewhere,
perhaps, knocking about the world are the six little plates,
chiefly of Roman subjects, which Mr. Haden painfully and delicately
engraved in the years 1843 and 1844. All that remains of them,
known to the curious in such matters, is a tiny group of impressions
cherished in the upper chambers of a house in Hertford Street—a
scanty barrier, indeed, between these first tentative efforts and
oblivion.</p>
<p class='c011'>But in 1858 and 1859 Mr. Haden began to etch seriously; he
began to give up to the practice of this particular way of draughtsmanship
a measure of time that permitted well-addressed efforts and
serious accomplishments. Fine conceptions in all the Arts ask, as
their most essential condition, some leisure of mind, some power
of acquisition of the happy mood in which one sees the world best,
and in which one can labour joyously at passing on the vision. The
best Art may be produced with trouble, but it must be with the
“joyful trouble” of Macduff. Nothing is more marked in the long
<span class='pageno' id='Page_6'>6</span>array of Mr. Haden’s mature work than the sense of pleasure he
has had in doing it. How much, generally, has it been the result
of pleasant impressions! How much the most satisfactory and
sufficient has it been when it has been the most spontaneous! Compare
the absolute unity, the clearly apparent motive, of such an
etching as <i>Sunset on the Thames</i> with the more obscure aim and
more limited achievement of the <i>Windsor</i>. The plates of the fruitful
years 1859, 1860, 1863, 1864, and so onward, were done, it seems,
under happy conditions.</p>
<p class='c011'>Any one who turns over Seymour Haden’s plates in chronological
order, will find that though, as it chanced, a good many years had
passed, yet very little work in etching had been done before the artist
had found his own method and was wholly himself. There were first
the six dainty little efforts of 1843 and 1844; then, when etching was
resumed in 1858—or, rather, when it was for the first time taken
to seriously—there were the plates of <i>Arthur</i>, <i>Dasha</i>, <i>A Lady
Reading</i>, and <i>Amalfi</i>. In these he was finding his way; and
then, with the first plates of the following year, his way was found;
we have the <i>Mytton Hall</i>, the <i>Egham</i>, and the <i>Water Meadow</i>,
perfectly vigorous, perfectly suggestive sketches, still unsurpassed.
In later years we find a later manner, a different phase of his
talent, a different result of his experience; but in 1859 he was
already, I repeat, entirely himself, and doing work that is neither
strikingly better nor strikingly worse than the work which has followed
it a score of years after. In the work of 1859, and in the work of the
last period, there will be found about an equal measure of beautiful
production. In each there will be something to admire warmly, and
something that will leave us indifferent. And in the etchings of 1859,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_7'>7</span>in the very plates that I have mentioned, there is already enough to
attest the range of the artist’s sympathy with nature and with
picturesque effect. <i>Mytton Hall</i>, seen or guessed at through the
gloom of its weird trees, is remarkable for a certain garden stateliness—a
disorder that began in order, a certain dignity of nature in
accord with the curious dignity and quietude of Art. The <i>Egham</i>
subject has the silence of the open country; the <i>Water Meadow</i>
is an artist’s subject quite as peculiarly, for “the eye that sees” is
required most of all when the question is how to find the beautiful in
the apparently commonplace.</p>
<p class='c011'>Next year, amongst other good work, we have the sweet little plate
of <i>Combe Bottom</i>, which, in a fine impression, more than holds its
own against the <i>Kensington Gardens</i>, and gives us at least as
much enjoyment by its excellence of touch as does the more intricate
beauty of the <i>Shore Mill Pond</i>, with its foliage so varied and so rich.
In the next year to which any etchings are assigned in Sir William
Drake’s catalogue—a thoroughly systematic book, and done with the
aid of much information from the author of the plates—we find Mr.
Haden departing from his usual habit of recording his impression of
nature, for the object, sometimes not a whit less worthy, of recording
his impression of some chosen piece of master’s art. This is in the
year 1865, and the subject is a rendering of Turner’s drawing of the
<i>Grande Chartreuse</i>, and it is an instance of the noble and artistic
translation of work to which a translator may hold himself bound to be
faithful. And here is the proper place, I think, to mention the one
such other instance of a subject inspired, not by nature, but by the art
of Turner, which Seymour Haden’s work affords—the large plate of
the <i>Calais Pier</i>, done in 1874. Nothing shows Mr. Haden’s sweep
<span class='pageno' id='Page_8'>8</span>of hand, his masculine command of his means, better than that. Such
an exhibition of spontaneous force is altogether refreshing. One or
two points about it demand to be noted. In the first place, it makes
no pretence, and exhibits no desire, to be a pure copy. Without
throwing any imputation on the admirable craft of the pure interpreter
and simple reproducer who enables us to enjoy so much of an art that
might otherwise never come near to many of us, I may yet safely say
that I feel sure that Mr. Haden had never the faintest intention of
performing for the <i>Calais Pier</i> this copyist’s service. To him the
<i>Calais Pier</i> of Turner—the sombre earlyish work of the master,
now hanging in the National Gallery—was as a real scene. It was not
to be scrupulously imitated; what was to be realised, or what was to
be suggested, was the impression that it made. With a force of
expression peculiar to him, Seymour Haden has succeeded in this aim;
but, I think, he has succeeded best in the rare unpublished state which
he knows as the “first biting,” and next best in the second state—the
first state having some mischief of its own to bear which in the
preparatory proofs had not arisen, and in the second state had ceased.
The plate is arranged now with a ground for mezzotint—it lies awaiting
that work—and if Mr. Haden, having now retraced to the full such
steps as may have been at least partially mistaken, is but master of
the new method—can but apply the mezzotint with anything of that
curious facility and success with which Turner applied it to a few of
his plates in <i>Liber Studiorum</i>, in which the professional engraver had
no part—then we shall have a <i>chef-d’œuvre</i> of masculine suggestion
which will have been worth waiting for.</p>
<p class='c011'>To go back to the somewhat earlier plates. The <i>Penton Hook</i>,
which is one of many wrought in 1864, is another instance—and we
<span class='pageno' id='Page_9'>9</span>have had several already—of the artist’s singular power in the suggestion
of tree form. Of actual leafage, leafage in detail, he is a less
successful interpreter, as is indeed only natural in an etcher devoted on
the whole to broad effects, looking resolutely at the <i>ensemble</i>. Detail
is nothing to him—<i>ensemble</i>, balance, is all. But the features of trees,
as growth of trunk and bend of bough reveal them, he gives to us as
no other contemporary etcher can. And in old Art they are less varied
in Claude and in Ruysdael. Mere leafage counted for more with both
of these. And if it is too much to compare Mr. Haden as a draughtsman
of the tree with a master of painting so approved as Crome—the
painter especially of oak and willow—as an etcher of the tree he
may yet be invited to occupy no second place, for Crome’s rare etchings
are remarkable for draughtsmanship chiefly. Crome knew little of
technical processes in etching, and so no full justice can ever be done
to his etched work, which passed, imperfect, out of his own hands, and
was then spoilt in the hands of others—dull, friendly people, who
fancied they knew more than he did of the trick of the craft, but who
knew nothing of the instinct of the art. Crome himself in etching was
like a soldier unequipped. Mr. Haden has a whole armoury of
weapons.</p>
<p class='c011'>Seymour Haden has been a fisherman; I do not know whether he
has been a sailor. But, at all events, purely rural life and scene, however
varied in kind, are discovered to be insufficient, and the foliage
of the meadow and the waters of the trout stream are often left for the
great sweep of tidal river, the long banks that enclose it, the wide sky
that enlivens every great flat land, and by its infinite mobility and
immeasurable light gives a soul, I always think, to the scenery of the
plain. Then we have <i>Sunset on the Thames</i> (1865), <i>Erith Marshes</i>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_10'>10</span>(1865), and the <i>Breaking Up of the Agamemnon</i> (1870), the last of them
striking a deep poetic note—that of our associations with an England
of the past that has allowed us the England of to-day—a note struck
by Turner in the <i>Fighting Téméraire</i>, and struck so magnificently
by Browning and by Tennyson<SPAN name='r1' /><SPAN href='#f1' class='c018'><sup>[1]</sup></SPAN> in verse for which no Englishman
can ever be too thankful.</p>
<div class='fn'>
<div class='footnote' id='f1'>
<p class='c019'><span class='label'><SPAN href='#r1'>1</SPAN>. </span>I mean, of course, in “Home Thoughts from Abroad,”
and in the “Revenge: a Ballad of the Fleet.”</p>
</div>
</div>
<p class='c011'>In the technique of these later etchings there is, perhaps, no very
noticeable departure from that of the earlier but yet mature work.
But in composition or disposition of form we seem to see an increasing
love of the sense of spaciousness, breadth, potent effect. The work
seems, in these best examples, to become more dramatic and more
moving. The hand demands occasion for the large exercise of its
freedom. These characteristics are very noticeable in the <i>Sawley
Abbey</i> of 1873. Nor are they absent from our <i>Dusty Millers</i>.</p>
<div id='i010' class='figcenter id001'>
<ANTIMG src='images/i010.jpg' alt='' class='ig001' /></div>
<p class='c011'><i>Sawley Abbey</i> is etched on zinc, a substance of which Mr.
Haden has of late become fond. It affords “a fat line”—a line
without rigidity—and so far it is good. But the practical difficulty
with it is that the particles of iron it contains make it uncertain and
tricky, and we may notice that an etching on zinc is apt to be full of
spots and dots. It succeeds admirably, however, where it does not
fail very much. Of course its frequent failure places it out of the
range of the pure copyist who copies or translates as matter of business.
He cannot afford its risk. In 1877—a year in which Mr.
Haden made a number of somewhat undesirable etchings in Spain,
and a more welcome group of sketches in Dorsetshire, on the downs and
the coast—Mr. Haden worked much upon zinc. And it is in this
<span class='pageno' id='Page_11'>11</span>year that a change that might before have been foreseen is clearly
apparent. Dry point before this had been united with etching, but not
till now have we much of what is wholly dry point; and from this date
the dry-point work is almost, though not altogether, continuous, the
artist having rejoiced, he tells me, in its freedom and rapidity.</p>
<p class='c011'>The Dorsetshire etchings, <i>Windmill Hill</i>, <i>Nine Barrow Down</i>,
and the like, are most of them dry points. In them, though the treatment
of delicate distances is not evaded, there is especial opportunity
for strong and broad effects of light and shade. Perhaps it is to these
that a man travels as his work continues, and as, in continuing, it
develops. At least it may be so in landscape.</p>
<p class='c011'>Here, for the present, is arrested the etched work of an artist
thoroughly individual, thoroughly vigorous, but against whom I have
charged, by implication, sometimes a lack of exquisiteness, the only
too frequent but not inevitable drawback of the quality of force. So
much for the work of the hand. For the process of the mind—the
character which sets the hand upon the labour, and pricks it on to the
execution of the aim—the worst has been said also, when I said, at the
beginning, that Mr. Haden lacked that power of extremely prolonged
concentration which produced the epic in literature and the epic in
painting. These two admissions made, there is little of just criticism
of Seymour Haden’s work that must not be admiring and cordial—the
record of enjoyment rather than of dissatisfaction—so much
faithful and free suggestion does the work contain of the impressions
that gave rise to it, so much variety is compassed, so much are we
led into unbroken paths, and so much evidence is there of eager
desire to enlarge the limits of our Art, whether by plunge into a new
theme, or by application of a new process.</p>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c008' /></div>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_12'>12</span>
<h2 id='ch02' class='c009'>CHAPTER II.<br/> <br/><span class='c017'>JULES JACQUEMART.</span></h2></div>
<p class='c010'><span class='sc'>There</span> died, in September, 1880, at his mother’s house in the high
road between the Arc de Triomphe and the Bois, a unique artist
whose death was for the most part unobserved by the frequenters of
picture galleries. He had contributed but little to picture galleries.
There had not been given to Jules Jacquemart the pleasure of a very
wide notoriety, but in many ways he was happy, in many fortunate.
He was fortunate, to begin with, in his birth; for though he was
born in the <i>bourgeoisie</i>, it was in the cultivated <i>bourgeoisie</i>, and it was in
the <i>bourgeoisie</i> of France. His father, Albert Jacquemart, the known
historian of pottery and porcelain, and of ancient and fine furniture, was
of course a faithful and diligent lover of beautiful things, so that Jules
Jacquemart was reared in a house where little was ugly and much
was precious; a house organized, albeit unconsciously, on William
Morris’s admirable plan, “Have nothing in your home that you do
not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Thus his own
natural sensitiveness, which he had inherited, was highly cultivated
from the first. From the first he breathed the liberal and refining air
of Art. He was happy in the fact that adequate fortune gave him the
liberty, in health, of choosing his work, and in sickness, of taking
his rest. With comparatively rare exceptions, he did precisely the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_13'>13</span>things which he was fitted to do, and did them perfectly, and being
ill when he had done them, he betook himself to the exquisite South,
where colour is, and light—the things we long for the most when we
are most tired in cities—and so there came to him towards the end a
surprise of pleasure in so beautiful a world. He was happy in being
surrounded all his life long by passionate affection in the narrow circle
of his home. His mother survives him—the experience of bereavement
being hers, when it would naturally have been his. For himself,
he was happier than she, for he had never suffered any quite irreparable
loss. And in one other way he was probably happy—in that he died
in middle age, his work being entirely done. The years of deterioration
and of decay, in which first the artist does but dully reproduce the
spontaneous work of his youth, and then is sterile altogether—the
years in which he is no longer the fashion at all, but only the landmark
or the finger-post of a fashion that is past—the years when a name
once familiar is uttered at rare intervals and in tones of apology as the
name of one whose performance has never quite equalled the promise
he had aforetime given—these years never came to Jules Jacquemart.
He was spared these years.</p>
<p class='c011'>But few people care, or are likely to care very much, for the things
which chiefly interested him, and which he reproduced in his art; and
even the care for these things, where it does exist, does, unfortunately,
by no means imply the power to appreciate the art by which they are
retained and diffused. “Still-life,” using the expression in its
broadest sense—the pourtrayal of objects, natural or artificial, for the
objects’ sake, and not as background or accessory—has never been
rated very highly or very widely loved. Here and there a professed
connoisseur has had pleasure from some piece of exquisite workmanship;
<span class='pageno' id='Page_14'>14</span>a rich man has looked with idly caressing eye upon the skilful
record of his gold plate or of the grapes of his forcing-house. There
has been praise for the adroit Dutchmen, and for Lance and Blaise
Desgoffe. But the public generally—save perhaps in the case of
William Hunt, his birds’ nests and his primroses—has been indifferent
to these things, and often the public has been right in its indifference,
for often these things are done in a poor spirit, a spirit of servile imitation
or servile flattery, with which Art has nothing to do. But there
are exceptions, and there is a better way of looking at these things.
William Hunt was often one of these exceptions; Chardin was always—save
in a rare instance or so of dull pomposity of rendering—Jules
Jacquemart, take him for all in all, was of these exceptions the most
brilliant and the most peculiar. He, in his best art of etching, and his
fellows and forerunners in the art of painting, have done something to
endow the beholders of their work with a new sense, with the capacity
for new experiences of enjoyment—they have pourtrayed not so much
matter as the very soul of matter. They have put matter in its finest
light: it has got new dignity. Chardin did this with his peaches, his
pears, his big coarse bottles, his copper saucepans, his silk-lined caskets.
Jules Jacquemart did it—we shall see in more of detail presently—very
specially with the finer work of artistic men in household matter
and ornament; with his blue and white porcelain, with his polished
steel of chased armour and sword-blade, with his Renaissance mirrors,
with his precious vessels of crystal and jade and jasper. But when he
was most fully himself, his work most characteristic and individual, he
shut himself off from popularity. Even untrained observers could
accept the agile engraver as an interpreter of other men’s pictures—of
Meissonier’s inventions, or Van der Meer’s, or Greuze’s—but they
<span class='pageno' id='Page_15'>15</span>could not accept him as the interpreter at first hand of the treasures
which were so peculiarly his own that he may almost be said to have
discovered them and their beauty. They were not alive to the
wonders that have been done in the world by the hands of artistic
men. How could they be alive to the wonders of this their reproduction—their
translation, rather, and a very free and personal one—into
the subtle lines, the graduated darks, the soft or sparkling lights,
of the artist in etching?</p>
<p class='c011'>On September 7th, 1837, Jacquemart was born, in Paris, and the
profession of Art, in one or other of its branches, came naturally to a
man of his race. A short period of practice in draughtsmanship, and
only a small experience of the particular business of etching, sufficed
to make him a master. As time proceeded, he of course developed;
he found new methods—ways not previously known to him. But
little of what is obviously tentative and immature is to be noticed even
in his earliest work. He springs into his art an artist fully armed,
like Rembrandt with the wonderful portrait of his mother “lightly
etched.” In 1860, when he is but twenty-three, he is at work upon
the illustrations to his father’s <i>Histoire de la Porcelaine</i>, and though
in that publication the absolute realisation of wonderful matter
is not, perhaps, so noteworthy as in the <i>Gemmes et Joyaux de la
Couronne</i>—the touch is not so large, so energetic, and so free—there
is evident already the hand of the delicate artist and the eye
that can appreciate and render almost unconsidered beauties. Exquisite
matter and the forms that Art has given to common things have
found their new interpreter. The <i>Histoire de la Porcelaine</i> contains
twenty-six plates, most of which are devoted to Oriental china, of
which the elder Jacquemart possessed a magnificent collection at a
<span class='pageno' id='Page_16'>16</span>time when the popular rage for “blue and white” was still unpronounced.
Many of Albert Jacquemart’s pieces figure in the book;
they were pieces the son had lived with and which he knew familiarly.
Their charm, their delicacy, he perfectly represented, and of each
individual piece he appreciated the characteristics, passing too, without
sense of difficulty, from the <i>bizarre</i> ornamentation of the East to
the ordered forms and satisfying symmetry which the high taste of the
Renaissance gave to its products. Thus, in the <i>Histoire de la Porcelaine</i>,
amongst the quaintly naturalistic decorations from China, and
amongst the ornaments of Sèvres, with their pretty boudoir graces
and airs of light luxury fit for the Marquise of Louis Quinze and the
sleek young <i>abbé</i>, her pet and her counsellor, we find, rendered with
just as thorough an appreciation, a <i>Brocca Italienne</i>, the Brocca of the
Medicis, of the sixteenth century, slight and tall, where the lightest
of Renaissance forms, the thin and reed-like lines of the <i>arabesque</i>—no
mass or splash of colour—is patterned with measured exactitude, with
rhythmic completeness, over the smoothish surface. It is wonderful
how little work there is in the etching, and how much is suggested.
The actual touches are almost as few as those which Jacquemart
employed afterwards in some of his light effects of rock-crystal, the
material which he has interpreted perhaps best of all. One counts
the touches, and one sees how soon and how strangely he has got the
power of suggesting all that he does not actually give, of suggesting
all that is in the object by the little that is in the etching. On such
work may be bestowed, amongst much other praise, that particular
praise which, to fashionable French criticism, delighted especially
with the feats of adroitness, and occupied with the evidence of the
artist’s dexterity, seems the highest—<i>Il n’y a rien, et il y a tout.</i></p>
<div id='i016' class='figcenter id001'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_17'>17</span>
<ANTIMG src='images/i016.jpg' alt='' class='ig001' /></div>
<p class='c011'>Execution so brilliant can hardly also be faultless, and without
mentioning many instances among his earlier work, where the defect
is chiefly noticeable, it may be said that the roundness of round
objects is more than once missing in his etchings. Strange that the
very quality first taught to, and first acquired by, the most ordinary
pupil of a Government School of Art should have been wanting to an
artist often as adroit in his methods as he was individual in his vision!
The <i>Vase de Vieux Vincennes</i>, from the collection of M. Léopold
Double, is a case to the point. It has the variety of tone, the seeming
fragility of texture and ornament, the infinity of decoration, the
rendering of the subtle curvature of a flower, and of the transparency
of the wing of a passing insect. It has everything but the roundness—everything
but the quality that is the easiest and the most common.
But so curious a deficiency, occasionally displayed, could not weigh
against the amazing evidence of various cleverness, and Jacquemart
was shortly engaged by the publishers and engaged by the French
Government.</p>
<p class='c011'>The difference in the commissions accorded by those two—the
intelligent service which the one was able to render to the nation in
the act of setting the artist about his appropriate work, and, broadly
speaking, the hindrance which the other opposed to his individual
development—could nowhere go unnoticed, and least of all could go
unnoticed in a land like ours, too full of a dull pride in <i>laissez faire</i>,
in private enterprise, in Government inaction. To the initiative of
the Imperial Government, as Mr. Hamerton well pointed out when
he was appreciating Jacquemart as long as twelve years ago, was due
the undertaking by the artist of the colossal task, by the fulfilment of
which he secured his fame. Moreover, if the Imperial Government
<span class='pageno' id='Page_18'>18</span>had not been there to do this thing, this thing would never have been
done, and some of the noblest and most intricate objects of Art in
the possession of the State would have gone unrecorded—their beauty
unknown and undiffused. Even as it is, though the task definitely
commissioned was brought to its proper end, a desirable sequel that
had been planned remained untouched. The hand that recorded the
ordered grace of Renaissance ornament would have shown as well as
any the intentions of more modern craftsmen—the decoration of the
Eighteenth Century in France, with its light and luxurious elegance.</p>
<p class='c011'>The <i>Histoire de la Porcelaine</i>, then—begun in 1860, and published
in 1862 by Techener, a steady friend of Jacquemart—was
followed in 1864 by the <i>Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne</i>. The
<i>Chalcographie</i> of the Louvre—the department which concerns itself
with the issue of commissioned prints—undertook the publication
of the <i>Gemmes et Joyaux</i>. In the series there were sixty subjects,
or at least sixty plates, for sometimes Jacquemart, seated by his
window in the Louvre (which is reflected over and over again at
every angle in the lustre of the objects he designed), would etch
in one plate the portraits of two treasures, glad to give “value”
to the virtues of the one by juxtaposition with the virtues of the
other; to oppose, say, the brilliant transparency of the rock-crystal
ball to the texture, sombre and velvety, of the vase of ancient
sardonyx. Of all these plates M. Louis Gonse has given an
account, sufficiently detailed for most people’s purposes, in the <i>Gazette
des Beaux-Arts</i> for 1876. The catalogue of Jacquemart’s etchings
there contained was a work of industry and of very genuine interest
on M. Gonse’s part, and its necessary extent, due to the artist’s own
prodigious diligence in work, sufficiently excuses, for the time at least,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_19'>19</span>an occasional incompleteness of description, making absolute identification
sometimes a difficult matter. The critical appreciation was
warm and intelligent, and the student of Jacquemart must always be
indebted to Gonse. But for the quite adequate description of work
like Jacquemart’s, there was needed not only the French tongue—the
tongue of criticism—but a Gautier to use it. Only a critic whose
intelligence gave form and definiteness to the impressions of senses
preternaturally acute, could have given quite adequate expression to
Jacquemart’s dealings with beautiful matter—to his easy revelry
of colour and light over lines and contours of selected beauty. Everything
that Jacquemart could do in the rendering of beautiful matter,
and of its artistic and appropriate ornament, is represented in one or
other of the varied subjects of the <i>Gemmes et Joyaux</i>, save only his
work with delicate china. And the work represents his strength, and
hardly ever betrays his weakness. He was never a thoroughly trained
academical draughtsman. A large and detailed treatment of the nude
figure—any further treatment of it than that required for the beautiful
suggestion of it as it occurs on Renaissance mirror-frames or in
Renaissance porcelains—might have found him deficient. He had
a wonderful feeling for the unbroken flow of its line, for its suppleness,
for the figure’s harmonious movement. Perhaps he was not the master
of its most intricate anatomy; but, on the scale on which he had to
treat it, his suggestion was faultless. By the brief shorthand of his
art in this matter, we are brought back to the old formula of praise.
Here, indeed, if anywhere—<i>Il n’y a rien, et il y a tout.</i></p>
<p class='c011'>And as nothing in his etchings is more adroit than his treatment
of the figure, so nothing is more delightful, and, as it were, unexpected.
He feels the intricate unity of its curve and flow, how it
<span class='pageno' id='Page_20'>20</span>gives value by its happy accidents of line to the fixed and invariable
ornament of Renaissance decoration—an ornament as orderly as well-observed
verse, with its settled form, its repetition, its refrain. I
will mention two or three instances which seem the most notable.
One of them occurs in the drawing of a Renaissance mirror—<i>Miroir
Français du Seizième Siècle</i>—elaborately carved, but its chief grace,
after all, is in its fine proportions; not so much in the perfection of
the ornament as in the perfect disposition of it. The absolutely satisfactory
filling of a given space with the enrichments of design, the
occupation of the space without the crowding of it—for that is what
is meant by the perfect disposition of ornament—has always been the
problem for the decorative artist. Recent fashion has insisted, quite
sufficiently, that it has been best solved by the Japanese; and they
indeed have solved it, and sometimes with a singular economy of
means, suggesting rather than achieving the occupation of the space
they have worked upon. But the best Renaissance design has solved
the problem quite as well, in fashions less arbitrary, with rhythm more
pronounced, and yet more subtle, with a precision more exquisite, with
a complete comprehension of the value of quietude, of the importance
of rest. If it requires “an Athenian tribunal” to understand Ingres
and Flaxman, it needs, at all events, some education in beautiful line
to understand the art of Renaissance ornament. Such art Jacquemart
of course understood absolutely, and against its ordered lines the free
play of the nude figure is indicated with touches dainty, faultless, and
few. Thus it is, I say, in the <i>Miroir Français du Seizième Siècle</i>. And
to the attraction of the figure has been added almost the attraction of
landscape and landscape atmosphere in the plate No. 27 of the <i>Gemmes
et Joyaux</i>, representing scenes from Ovid, as an artist of the Renaissance
<span class='pageno' id='Page_21'>21</span>had pourtrayed them on the delicate liquid surface of <i>cristal de
roche</i>. And, not confining our examination wholly to the <i>Gemmes et
Joyaux</i>—of which obviously the mirror just spoken of cannot form a
part—we observe there or elsewhere in Jacquemart’s work how his
treatment of the figure takes constant note of the material in which the
first artist, his original, was working. Is it raised porcelain, for
instance, or soft ivory, or smooth cold bronze, with its less close and
subtle following of the figure’s curves, its certain measure of angularity
in limb and trunk, its many facets, with somewhat marked transition
from one to the other (instead of the unbroken harmony of the real
figure), its occasional flatnesses? If it is this, this is what Jacquemart
gives us in his etchings—not the figure only, but the figure as it
comes to us through the medium of bronze. See, for instance,
the <i>Vénus Marine</i>, lying half extended, with slender legs, long a
possession of M. Thiers, I believe. You cannot insist too much on
Jacquemart’s mastery over his material—<i>cloisonné</i>, with its many low
tones, its delicate patterning outlined by metal ribs; the coarseness
of rough wood, as in the <i>Salière de Troyes</i>; the sharp clear sword-blade,
as the sword of François Premier, the signet’s flatness and
delicate smoothness—<i>C’est le sinet du Roy Sant Louis</i>—and the red
porphyry, flaked, as it were, and speckled, of an ancient vase, and the
clear soft unctuous green of jade.</p>
<p class='c011'>And as the material is marvellously varied, so are its combinations
curious and wayward. I saw, one autumn, at Lyons, the sombre
little church of Ainay, a Christian edifice built of no Gothic stones,
but placed, already ages ago, on the site of a Roman temple—the
temple used, its dark columns cut across, its black stones rearranged,
and so the church completed—Antiquity pressed into the service of
<span class='pageno' id='Page_22'>22</span>the Middle Age. Jacquemart, dealing with the precious objects he
had to pourtray, came often upon such strange meetings: an antique
vase of sardonyx, say, infinitely precious, mounted and altered in the
twelfth century for the service of the Mass, and so, beset with gold
and jewels, offered by its possessor to the Abbey of Saint Denis.</p>
<p class='c011'>It was not a literal imitation, it must be said again, that Jacquemart
made of these things. These things sat to him for their portraits; he
posed them; he composed them aright. Placed by him in their best
lights, they revealed their finest qualities. He loved an effective
contrast of them, a comely juxtaposition; a legitimate accessory he
could not neglect—that window, by which he sat as he worked, flashed
its light upon a surface that caught its reflection; in so many different
ways the simple expedient helps the task, gives the object roundness,
betrays its lustre. Some people bore hardly on him for the colour,
warmth, and life he introduced into his etchings. They wanted a
colder, a more impersonal, a more precise record. Jacquemart never
sacrificed precision when precision was of the essence of the business,
but he did not care for it for its own sake. And the thing that his
first critics blamed him for doing—the composition of his subject, the
rejection of this, the choice of that, the bestowal of fire and life upon
matter dead to the common eye—is a thing which artists in all Arts
have always done, and will always continue to do, and for this most
simple reason, that the doing of it is Art.</p>
<p class='c011'>Not very long after the <i>Gemmes et Joyaux</i> was issued, as we now
have it, the life of Frenchmen was upset by the war. Schemes of work
waited or were abandoned; at last men began, as a distinguished
Frenchman at that time wrote to me, “to rebuild their existence out
of the ruins of the past.” In 1873, Jacquemart, for his part, was at
<span class='pageno' id='Page_23'>23</span>work again on his own best work of etching. The <i>Histoire de la Céramique</i>,
a companion to the <i>Histoire de la Porcelaine</i>, was published in
that year. To an earlier period (to 1868) belong the two exquisite
plates of the light porcelain of Valenciennes, executed for Dr. Le
Jeal’s monograph on the history of that fabric. And to 1866 belongs
an etching already familiarly known to the readers of the <i>Gazette des
Beaux-Arts</i> and to possessors of the first edition of <i>Etching and Etchers</i>—the
Tripod—a priceless thing of jasper, set in golden carvings by
Gouthière, and now lodged among the best treasures of the great
house in Manchester Square.</p>
<p class='c011'>But it is useless to continue further the chronicle of the triumphs
that Jacquemart won in the translation, in his own free fashion of
black and white, of all sorts of beautiful matter. Moreover, in 1873,
the year of the issue of his last important series of plates, Jules
Jacquemart, stationed at Vienna, as one of the jury of the International
Exhibition there, caught a serious illness, a fever of the
typhoid kind, and this left him a delicacy which he could never overcome;
and thenceforth his work was limited. Where it was not a
weariness, it had to be little but a recreation, a comparative pause.
That was the origin of his performances in water colour, undertaken
in the South, whither he repaired at each approach of winter. There
remains, then, only to speak of these drawings and of such of his
etched work as consisted in the popularisation of painted pictures. As
a copyist of famous canvasses he found remunerative and sometimes
fame-producing labour.</p>
<p class='c011'>As an interpreter of other men’s pictures, it fell to the lot of
Jacquemart, as it generally falls to the lot of professional engravers,
to engrave the most different masters. But with so very personal an
<span class='pageno' id='Page_24'>24</span>artist as he, the interpretation of so many men, and in so many years,
from 1860, or thereabouts, onwards, could not possibly be always of
equal value. Once or twice he was very strong in the reproduction of
the Dutch portrait painters; but as far as Dutch painting is concerned,
he is strongest of all when he interprets, as in one now celebrated
etching, Jan van der Meer of Delft. <i>Der Soldat und das lachende
Mädchen</i> was one of the most noteworthy pieces in the rich cabinet of
M. Léopold Double. The big and somewhat blustering trooper
common in Dutch Art, sits here engaging the attention of that
pointed-faced, subtle, but vivacious maiden peculiar to Van der Meer.
Behind the two, who are occupied in contented gazing and contented
talk, is the bare sunlit wall, spread only with its map or chart—the
Dutchman made his wall as instructive as Joseph Surface made his
screen—and by the side of the couple, throwing its brilliant, yet modulated
light on the woman’s face and on the background, is the intricately
patterned window, the airy lattice. Rarely was a master’s
subject or a master’s method better interpreted than in this print.
Frans Hals once or twice is just as characteristically rendered. But
with these exceptions it is Jacquemart’s own fellow-countrymen whom
he renders the best. Seldom was finish so free from pettiness or the
evidence of effort as it is in the <i>Défilé des populations lorraines devant
l’Impératrice à Nancy</i>. <i>Le Liseur</i> is even finer—Meissonier again;
this time a solitary figure, with bright, soft light from window at the
side, as in the Van der Meer of Delft. The suppleness of Jacquemart’s
talent—the happy speed of it, rather than its patient elaboration—is
shown by his renderings of Greuze, the <i>Rêve d’amour</i>, a single head,
and <i>L’Orage</i>, a sketchy picture of a young and frightened mother
kneeling by her child exposed to the storm. Greuze, with his cajoling
<span class='pageno' id='Page_25'>25</span>art—which, if one likes, one must like without respecting—is entirely
there. So, too, Fragonard, the whole ardent and voluptuous soul of
him, in <i>Le Premier Baiser</i>. Labour it is possible to give in much
greater abundance; but intelligence in interpretation cannot go any
further or do anything more.</p>
<p class='c011'>Between the etchings of Jacquemart and his water-colour drawings
there is little affinity. The subjects of the one hardly ever recall the
subjects of the other. The etchings and the water colours have but
one thing in common—an extraordinary lightness of hand. Once,
however, the theme is the same. Jacquemart etched some compositions
of flowers; M. Gonse has praised them very highly: to me,
elegant as they are, fragile of substance and dainty of arrangement,
they seem inferior to that last-century flower-piece which we
English are fortunate enough to know through the exquisite mezzotint
of Earlom. But in the occasional water-colour painting of flowers—especially
in the decorative disposition of them over a surface for
ornament—Jacquemart is not easily surpassed; the lightness and
suggestiveness of the work are almost equal to Fantin’s. A painted
fan by Jacquemart, which is retained by M. Petit, the dealer, is dexterous,
yet simple in the highest degree. The theme is a bough of the
apple-tree, where the blossom is pink, white, whiter, then whitest
against the air at the branch’s end.</p>
<p class='c011'>But generally his water colour is of landscape, and a record
of the South. Perhaps it is the sunlit and flower-bearing coast,
his own refuge in winter weather. Perhaps, as in a drawing of M.
May’s, it is the mountains behind Mentone—their conformation,
colours, and tones, and their thin wreaths of mist—a drawing which
M. May, himself an habitual mountaineer in those regions, assures
<span class='pageno' id='Page_26'>26</span>me is of the most absolute truth. Or, perhaps, as in another
drawing in the same collection, it is a view of <i>Marseilles</i>; sketchy at
first sight, yet with nothing unachieved that might have helped the
effect; not the Marseilles, sunny and brilliant, parched and southern,
of most men’s observation—the Marseilles even of the great observer,
the Marseilles of <i>Little Dorrit</i>—but the busy port, with its ever-shifting
life, under an effect less known; the Marseilles of an overcast
morning: all its houses, its shipping and its quays, grey or green
and steel-coloured. Such a work is a masterpiece, with the great
quality of a masterpiece, that you cannot quickly exhaust the
restrained wealth of its learned simplicity. To speak about it one
technical word, we may say that while it belongs by its frank
sketchiness to the earlier order of water-colour art, an art of rapid
effect, as practised best by Dewint and David Cox, it belongs to the
later order—to contemporary art—by its unhesitating employment of
body colour.</p>
<p class='c011'>The true source of the diversity of Jacquemart’s efforts, which I
have now made apparent, is perhaps to be found in a vivacity of
intellect, a continual alertness to receive all passing impressions. That
alone makes a variety of interests easy and even necessary. That
pushes men to express themselves in art of every kind, and to be
collectors as well as artists, to possess as well as to create. Jacquemart
inherited the passion of a collector; it was a queer thing that he
set himself to collect. He was a collector of shoe-leather; foot-gear
of every sort and of every time. His father, Albert Jacquemart, had
held that to know the pottery of a nation was to know its history.
Jules saw many histories, of life and travel, and the aims of travel, in
the curious objects of his collection. Their ugliness—what would be
<span class='pageno' id='Page_27'>27</span>to most of us the extreme distastefulness of them—did not repel him.
Nor were his attentions devoted chiefly to the dainty slippers of a
dancer—souvenirs, at all events, of the art of the ballet, very saleable
at fancy fairs of the theatrical profession. He etched his own boots,
tumbled out of the worst cupboard in the house. He looked at them
with affection—<i>souvenirs de voyage</i>. The harmless eccentricity brings
down, for a moment, to very ordinary levels, this watchful and
exquisite artist, so devoted generally to high beauty, so keen to see it.</p>
<p class='c011'>What more would he have done had the forty-three years been
greatly prolonged, a spell of life for further work accorded, Hezekiah-like,
to a busy labourer upon whom Death had laid its first warning
hand? We cannot answer the question, but it must have been much,
so variously active was his talent, so fertile his resource. As it is,
what may he hope to live by, now that the most invariably fatal of all
forms of consumption, the most fatal while the least suspected, <i>la
phthisie laryngée</i>, has arrested his effort? A very gifted, a singularly
agile and supple translator of painters’ work, he may surely be
allowed to be, and a water-colour artist, perfectly individual, yet
hardly actually great; his strange dexterity of hand at the service of
fact, not at the service of imagination. He recorded nature; he did
not exalt or interpret it. But he interpreted Art. He was alive, more
than any one has been alive before, to all the wonders that have been
wrought in the world by the hands of artistic men.</p>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c008' /></div>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_28'>28</span>
<h2 id='ch03' class='c009'>CHAPTER III.<br/> <br/><span class='c017'>J. A. M. WHISTLER</span></h2></div>
<p class='c010'><span class='sc'>Years</span> ago James Whistler was a person of high promise: he has since
been an artist often of agreeable and exquisite, though sometimes of
incomplete and apparently wayward, performance. He has the misfortune
to have been greatly known to a large public as the painter of
his least desirable works, these having reached an easy notoriety,
while the others have thus far too much escaped a general fame.
Much of Mr. Whistler’s art has the interest of originality, and some of
it the charm of beauty; and yet the measure of originality has at times
been over-rated, through the innocent error of the budding amateur,
who, in the earlier stage of his enlightenment, confuses the beginning
with the end, accepts the intention for the adequate fulfilment,
and exalts an adroit sketch into the rank of a permanent picture.
<i>Mr. Irving as Philip of Spain</i>—three years ago at the Grosvenor—was
a murky caricature of Velasquez; the master’s sketchiness
remained, but his decisiveness was wanting. And in some of the
<i>Nocturnes</i> the absence, not only of definition, but of gradation,
would point to the conclusion that they are but engaging sketches.
In them we look in vain for all the delicate differences of light and hue
which the scenes depicted present. Like the landscape art of Japan,
they are harmonious decorations, and a dozen or so of such engaging
<span class='pageno' id='Page_29'>29</span>sketches placed in the upper panels of a lofty apartment would afford
a justifiable and welcome alternative even to noble tapestries or
Morris wall-papers. But, on the large scale on which they are painted—a
scale in which their well-considered sketchiness is carefully
emphasized—it is in vain that we endeavour to receive them as cabinet
pictures. They suffer curiously when placed against work not of
course of petty and mechanical finish, but of patient achievement.
But they have merits of their own; nor are their merits too common.
So short a way have they proceeded into the complications of colour,
that they avoid the incompatible: they avoid it cleverly; they say
little to the mind, but they are restful to the eye, in their agreeable
simplicity and limited suggestiveness. They are the record of impressions.
So far as they go, they are right; nay, in one sense they are
better than right, for they are charming.</p>
<p class='c011'>And, moreover, there is evidence enough elsewhere that Mr.
Whistler, confined to colour alone, can produce more various and
more intricate harmonies than those of a <i>Nocturne</i> in silver and blue,
than those of a <i>scherzo</i> in blue, or than those even in that fascinating
portrait of Mrs. Meux, in which it was not so much the face as the
figure and the movement that came to be deftly suggested, if hardly
elaborately expressed. A great apartment in the house of Mr. Leyland,
which Mr. Whistler has decorated, has shown that a long and
concentrated effort at the solution of the problems of colour is not
beyond the scope of an artist who has rarely mastered the subtleties of
the intricate human form. It has shown, moreover, that his solution
of such problems can be strikingly original. As a decorative painter—as
a painter of large or brilliant sketches—Mr. Whistler has had few
superiors in any time or land. His skill is sometimes genius here.
<span class='pageno' id='Page_30'>30</span>Why, in the Grosvenor Gallery, the very year in which the irrepressible
painter proffered the most unwelcome of his <i>Nocturnes</i>, there
was a quite delightful picture, suggested, indeed, by Japanese Art, but
itself not less subtle than the art which prompted it—<i>A Variation in
Flesh-colour and Green</i>—bare-armed damsels of the farthest East,
lounging in attitudes of agreeable abandonment in some balcony or
court open to the genial sunlight and to the soft air. The damsels—they
were not altogether meritorious. The draughtsmanship displayed
in them was anything but “searching.” But the picture had a quality
of cool refreshment such as the gentle colour and clean-shining material
of Luca della Robbia affords to the beholder of Tuscan Art, as he
comes upon Tuscan Art under Tuscan skies.</p>
<p class='c011'>The interest of life—the interest of humanity—has confessedly
occupied Mr. Whistler but little; yet in spite of his devotion to the art
qualities of the peacock, it has not been given to him to be quite indifferent
to the race to which he belongs. His portraits, sometimes,
whatever may be his theories, have not been very obviously considered
as arrangements of colour only for colour’s sake. They may
even have profited by the adoption of hues such as suited their themes,
and here Mr. Whistler may have delivered, through his language of
colour, a message which some men would have intrusted to line alone.
Anyhow he has been able to paint with admirable expressiveness a
portrait of his mother, and to have recorded on a doleful canvas the
head and figure of Carlyle, and in both, the simplicity and veracity of
effect are things to be noted. Not indeed that the pictures are without
mannerism: the straight and stiffish disposition of the lines in the first
is not so much a merit as a peculiarity. But a certain dignified quietude
and a certain reticent pathos are apparent in the portrait of the lady,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_31'>31</span>and the rugged simplicity of Carlyle—a simplicity which his own
generation received with so naive an admiration—is suggested not
only with skill of hand, but with the mental skill that discovers quickly,
in presence of a subject, wherein lies the best opportunity for high
success in treating it.</p>
<p class='c011'>But I take it to be admitted by those who do not conclude that the
art is necessarily great which has the misfortune to be unacceptable,
that it is not by his paintings so much as by his etchings that Mr.
Whistler’s name may aspire to live. In painting, his success is
infrequent and it is limited—though when it occurs, its very peculiarity
gives us a keen relish for it—in etching, it is neither limited nor rare,
though of course it is not uninterrupted nor unbroken. In painting,
Mr. Whistler is an impressionist—he is an impressionist in etching,
but etching permits the record of the impression only, while painting
demands at all events the occasional capacity to realise with weeks of
labour what a few hours might happily enough suggest. Moreover—and
the circumstance is odd and noteworthy—it is in his etchings
that Mr. Whistler has reached realisation the best, and he has reached
it, in the earlier Thames-side work of twenty years ago, with no
sacrifice whatever of freedom and of frankness in treatment. His
best painting betrays something of that exquisite sensitiveness, that
almost modern sensitiveness, to pleasurable juxtapositions of delicate
colour which we admire in Orchardson, in Linton, and in Albert
Moore; it betrays sometimes, as in a portrait of Miss Alexander, a deftness
of brushwork, in the wave of a feather, in the curve of a hat, that
recalls for a moment even the great names of Velasquez and of Gainsborough;
and of high art qualities it betrays not much besides—though
these, which are very rare, we are properly grateful for. But the etchings—that
<span class='pageno' id='Page_32'>32</span>is indeed another matter. They must be considered in detail.
No criticism is wasted that concerns itself carefully with them, and that
points out from the many, which are fair, and which are exquisite, and
which are flagrantly offensive.</p>
<p class='c011'>In some of his prints, Mr. Whistler makes good a claim to live by
the side of the finest masters of the etching needle, and a familiarity
with Rembrandt and with Méryon increases rather than lessens our
interest in the American of to-day. But Mr. Whistler has etched too
much for his reputation, or at least has published too much. No one
who can look at work of Art fairly, demands that it shall be faultless;
least of all can that be demanded of work of which the very virtue lies
sometimes in its spontaneousness; but one has good reason to demand
that the faults shall not outweigh the merits. Now in some of Mr.
Whistler’s figure-pieces, executed with the etching-needle, and offered
to the public indiscreetly, the commonness and vulgarity of the person
pourtrayed find no apology in perfection of pourtrayal—the design is
uncouth, the drawing is intolerable, the light and shade an affair of a
moment’s impressiveness, with no subtlety of truth to hold the interest
that is at first aroused. See, as one instance, the etching numbered 3
in Mr. Thomas’s published catalogue—notice the size of the hands.
And see again No. 56, in which the figure is one vast black triangle,
in which there is apparently not a single quality which work of Art
should have. The portraits of Becquet, the violoncello player, of one
Mann, and of one Davis, have character, with no mannerism, but with
a good simplicity of treatment. But neither face pourtrayed, nor Art
pourtraying it, is of a kind to command a prolonged enjoyment. On
the other hand, in some of the etchings or dry points, not, it seems,
included in the catalogue, and in the refined and sensitive little etching
<span class='pageno' id='Page_33'>33</span>of <i>Fanny Leyland</i> there is apparent a distinct feeling for grace of contour—for
the undulations of the figure and its softness of modelling.
These are but the briefest sketches—they have a quality of their
own. It is not ungenerous to suggest that carried further they might
have failed. For the true genius of etching is in them as they are.
As they are they have not failed.</p>
<p class='c011'>Many have been the themes which, in the art of the aquafortist,
Mr. Whistler has essayed. He has essayed landscape; he has drawn
a tree in <i>Kensington Gardens</i>, and a tree in the foreground of the <i>Isle
St. Louis, Paris</i>; but that tree at least seems of no known form of
vegetable growth—it has the air of an exploding shell. Here and
there—occupied with those juxtapositions of light and shade which
fascinated the masters of Holland—Mr. Whistler has drawn interiors,
and in one of his interiors we note a success second only to the
very highest these Dutchmen attained. This is the interior described
as <i>The Kitchen</i>. Only the finest, the most carefully printed impressions
possess the full charm; but when such an impression presents
itself to the eye, the Dutch masters, who have followed most keenly
the glow and the gradation of light on chamber-walls, are seen
to be almost rivalled. The kitchen is a long and narrow room, at the
far end of which, away from the window and the keen light, stand
artist and spectator. Farthest of all from them the light vine leaves
are touched in with a grace that Adrian van Ostade—a master in this
matter—would not have excelled. By the embrasure of the window,
just before the great thickness of the wall, stands a woman, angular,
uncomely, of homely build, busied with “household chares.” In front
of her comes the sharp sunlight, striking the thick wall-side, and
lessening as it advances into the shadow and gloom of the humble
<span class='pageno' id='Page_34'>34</span>room; wavering timidly on the plates of the dresser, in creeping half
gleams which reveal and yet conceal the objects they fall upon. The
meaningless scratch and scrawl of the bare floor in the foreground is
the only fault that at all seriously tells against the charm of work
otherwise beautiful and of keen sensitiveness; and the case is one in
which the merit is so much the greater that the fault may well be ignored
or its presence permitted. Again, <i>La Vieille aux Loques</i>—a weary
woman of humblest fortunes and difficult life—shows, I think, that
Mr. Whistler has now and then been inspired by the pathetic masters
of Dutch Art.</p>
<p class='c011'>We have seen already that two things have much occupied Mr.
Whistler—the arrangement of colours in their due proportions, the
arrangement of light and shade. And the best results of the life-long
study which, by his own account, he has given to the arrangement
of colour are seen in the work that is purely, or the work that
is practically, decorative—the work that escapes the responsibility
of a subject. And the best results of the study of the arrangements
of light and shade are seen in a dozen etchings, most of which—but
not <i>The Kitchen</i> and not the <i>Vieille aux Loques</i>—belong to that
series in which the artist has recorded for our curious pleasure the
common features of the shores of the Thames. Here also there
is evident his feeling, not exactly for beauty, but at all events for
quaintness of form, for form that has character. It had occurred to
no one else to draw with realistic fidelity the lines of wharf and warehouse
along the banks of the river; to note down the pleasant oddities
of outline presented by roof and window and crane; to catch the
changes of the grey light as it passed over the front of Wapping. Mr.
Whistler’s figure-drawing, generally defective and always incomplete,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_35'>35</span>has prevented him from seizing every characteristic of the sailor-figures
that people the port. The absence, seemingly, of any power
such as the great marine painters had, of drawing the forms of water,
whether in a broad and wind-swept tidal river or on the high seas, has
narrowed and limited again the means by which Mr. Whistler has
depicted the scenes “below Bridge.” But his treatment of these
scenes is none the less original and interesting. By wise omission,
he has managed often to retain the sense of the flow of water or its
comparative stillness. Its gentle lapping lifts the keels of the now
emptied boats of his <i>Billingsgate</i>. It lies lazy under the dark warehouses
of his <i>Free Trade Wharf</i>. It frets and flickers and divides in
pleasant light against the woodwork of the bridge in the larger <i>Putney</i>.</p>
<p class='c011'>The limitations of Mr. Whistler’s art are very conspicuous in a
more recent experiment than the original Thames-side series—the
series of <i>Venice</i>. So evident, indeed, are they in that set that the set
has been undervalued by many amateurs of taste, who have exacted too
much that Mr. Whistler should give them, not what he was best able
to see in Venice, but what cultivated readers of Art history have been
most accustomed to see there. The Venice series is in the etcher’s
later manner—a style in which ever-increasing reliance is placed on
the faculty of slight and suggestive sketching. Now etching, even
when practised with the greatest possible union of fidelity and
freshness, is hardly the appropriate medium for conveying the charm
of delicate architecture. Of such architecture Méryon himself only
now and then essayed to give the charm, and he essayed it, deliberately,
at the cost of abandoning not a little of the etcher’s freedom—he
became, for the nonce at least, a “great original engraver;” he took
his art beyond its habitual bounds. His triumph justified him.
<span class='pageno' id='Page_36'>36</span>But Mr. Whistler, even in his earlier manhood, when those of the
Thames etchings which are the fullest of detail were wrought with
sureness and precision of hand, never betrayed either the capacity or
the will to reproduce the charm of delicate architecture. Yet in an
art to which colour is denied, the charm of delicate architecture must
be the charm of Venice. It remained, however, for Mr. Whistler
to see whether the place had yet some aspects which his etching
could record—an impression, not a reproduction: that was all that
could be looked for. And Mr. Whistler etched his impressions with
curious uncertainty and curious inequality. He was now adroit, now
wavering. He took from London to Venice his happy fashion of
suggesting lapping water. He looked at Venice as a whole, keenly,
delicately, but never in detail—we had bird’s-eye views of it. It had
been interesting to wonder what would be the vision granted to a
fantastic genius of a fantastic city. Well, little new came of it, in
etching—nothing new that was beautiful. Afterwards, in a series of
pastels, it became clear who it was that had seen Venice. It was
Mr. Whistler the exquisite colourist, not the exquisite etcher.</p>
<div id='i036' class='figcenter id001'>
<ANTIMG src='images/i036.jpg' alt='' class='ig001' /></div>
<p class='c011'>Mr. Whistler’s fame as an aquafortist, then, rests chiefly still on
his Thames-side work; and, even there, less on the faint agreeable
sketches done of later years, though these have their charm, like the
better of his painted <i>Nocturnes</i>, than on the work of his first maturity.
The <i>London Bridge</i> and the <i>Free Trade Wharf</i> and one or two
<i>Putneys</i>—one of them is in this book—may be named, however, among
the happiest examples of the later art that is specially brief in
recording an impression. The spring of the great arch in <i>London
Bridge</i>, as seen from below, from the water-side, is rendered, it seems,
with a suggestion of power in great constructive work, such as is
<span class='pageno' id='Page_37'>37</span>little visible in the tender handling of so many of the prints of the
river. The <i>Free Trade Wharf</i> is a very exquisite study of gradations
of tone and of the receding line of murky buildings that follows the
bend of the stream. It is, in its best printed impressions, a thing of
faultless delicacy. A third river-piece, not lately done, has been
rather lately retouched—the <i>Billingsgate: Boats at a Mooring</i>. In the
retouch is an instance of the successful treatment of a second “state”
or even a later “state” of the plate, and such as should be a warning
to the collector who buys “first states” of everything—the <i>Liber
Studiorum</i> included—and “first states” alone, with dull determination.
Of course the true collector knows better: he knows that the
impression is almost all, and the “state” next to nothing, except as
indicating what is probable as to the condition of the plate, and he
must gradually and painfully acquire the eye to judge of the
impression.</p>
<p class='c011'>A few years ago Mr. Whistler retouched his <i>Billingsgate</i> for the proprietors
of the <i>Portfolio</i>, and the proof impressions of the state issued
by them reach the highest excellence of which the plate has been
capable. Not sheltering itself under the extreme simplicity and singleness
of aim kept so adroitly in the <i>Free Trade Wharf</i> and in the
<i>London Bridge</i>, it falls into faults which these avoid. The ghostliness
of the foreground figures demands an ingenious theory for its
justification, and this theory no one has advanced. But the solidity of
the buildings introduced into this plate—the clock-tower and the houses
upon the quay—are a rare achievement in etching. For once the
houses are not drawn, but built, like the houses and the churches
and the bridges of Méryon. The strength of their realisation lends
delicacy to the thin-masted fishing boats with their yet thinner lines of
<span class='pageno' id='Page_38'>38</span>cordage, and to the distant bridge in the grey mist of London, and to
the faint clouds of the sky. Perhaps yet more delicate than the <i>Billingsgate</i>
is the <i>Hungerford Bridge</i>, so small, yet, in a fine proof, so
spacious and airy. It lacks substance, of course, and solidity—and so
does the impression of landscape in a dream.</p>
<p class='c011'>Finally, there are the <i>Thames Police</i>, the <i>Tyzack Whiteley</i>, and the
<i>Black Lion Wharf</i>. These, which were executed a score of years
since, are the most varied and complete studies of quaint places now
disappearing—nay, many of them already disappeared—of places
with no beauty that is very old or very graceful, but with interest to
the every-day Londoner and interest, too, to the artist. Here are small
warehouses falling to pieces, or poorly propped even when they were
sketched, and vanished now to make room for a vaster and duller
uniformity of storehouse front. Here are narrow dwelling-houses of
our Georgian days, with here a timber facing and there a quaint bow
window, many-paned—narrow houses of sea-captains, or the riverside
tradesfolk, or of custom-house officials, the upper classes of the Docks
and the East-end. These too have been pressed out of the way by the
aggressions of great commerce, and the varied line that they presented
has ceased to be. Of all these riverside features, <i>Thames Police</i> is an
illustration interesting to-day and valuable to-morrow. And <i>Black
Lion Wharf</i> is yet fuller of happy accident of outline and happy gradation
of tone, studied amongst common things which escape the
common eye.</p>
<p class='c011'>It is a pleasure to possess such faithful and spirited records of a
departing quaintness, and it is an achievement to have made them.
It would be a pity to remove the grace from the achievement by
insisting that, as in <i>Nocturne</i> and <i>Arrangement</i>, the art was burdened
<span class='pageno' id='Page_39'>39</span>by a here unnecessary theory; that the study of the “arrangement of line
and form” was all, and the interest of the association nothing. When
Dickens was tracing the fortunes of Quilp on Tower Hill, and on that
dreary night when the little monster fell from the wharf into the river,
he did not think only of the cadence of his sentences, or his work would
never have lived, or lived only with the lovers of curious patchwork of
mere words. Perhaps, without his knowing it, some slight imaginative
interest in the lives of Londoners prompted Mr. Whistler, or strengthened
his hand, as he recorded the shabbiness that has a history, the
slums of the eastern suburb, and the prosaic service of the Thames.
Here, and often elsewhere, his work, if it has shown some faults to be
forgiven, has shown, in excellence, qualities that fascinate. The Future
will forget his failures, to which in the Present there has somehow been
accorded, through the activity of friendship or the activity of enmity, a
publicity rarely bestowed upon failures at all; but it will remember the
success of work that is peculiar and personal. These best things we
have dwelt upon are not to be denied that length of days which is the
portion of exquisite Art.</p>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c008' /></div>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_40'>40</span>
<h2 id='ch04' class='c009'>CHAPTER IV.<br/> <br/><span class='c017'>ALPHONSE LEGROS.</span></h2></div>
<p class='c010'><span class='sc'>Any</span> generation since the brilliant times of Art—since the sixteenth
century in Italy, the seventeenth in Holland, the eighteenth in England
and in France—has had to deem itself fortunate if it has produced
three or four artists of individuality united with large attainment; and
it is much to be surmised that no generation will have greater cause
than our own to think it has done well if it has produced even as many.
Notorieties of the moment may always be counted by the score, but
fame remains so rarely for the most popular, that the serious student of
the work of a master in any art has no reason to question his own
judgment when it points him to admiration, merely because the object
of his admiration is not to be counted among the immediate successes
of the hour. Legros is not an immediate success. He has worked for
five-and-twenty years, and there are intelligent people who see little in
his pictures beyond their first ugliness. Each to his taste—we cannot
always blame them; and Legros has been ugly sometimes gratuitously,
sometimes with wantonness. But Legros is also a very grave and
enduring master, whose work is now full of mistake, and now of
power, and now again is certainly touched with that higher and keener
faculty we call inspiration.</p>
<p class='c011'>The etchings of Legros range already, however, over a period of
<span class='pageno' id='Page_41'>41</span>seven-and-twenty years; and that he began so young, and at a time
when etching was not popular and the art had not become a trade, is a
proof at least of the spontaneity of his pursuit of it. By temperament
and instinct he was as much etcher as painter, perhaps even more. The
process of etching being—always in skilled hands, of course—perhaps
the readiest for the rendering of impressions and the expression of artistic
thought, it is natural that Legros, whose art, whatever it may lack in
immediate attractiveness, is one undoubtedly of impressions and of
thoughts, should have turned to this process. And so well, indeed,
has he increased his command of it—always with reference to his own
particular business, to the order of impressions it is his own task to
convey—that, though there are, indeed, several of his paintings which
have the qualities of a master’s work, we get the best of him in his
etchings. Great is the technical progress he has made in these since
some of the first plates catalogued so well by M. Poulet-Malassis and
Mr. Thibaudeau, but it is not to be imagined that the progress has
been uninterrupted. Incompleteness and uncertainty are still likely
to be visible. His execution, skilful at one time, and entirely
responsive to his desire, is at another time halting, wayward, insufficiently
controlled and directed. Therefore, though, as I say, the
execution is not seldom excellent—economical of means and yet rich
in the possession of various means—it would rarely be in itself the
occasion of attracting notice to his work. With Legros, it is the
conception that dominates. The conception is often such as recalls
the highest achievements of Art.</p>
<div id='i042' class='figcenter id001'>
<ANTIMG src='images/i042.jpg' alt='' class='ig001' /></div>
<p class='c011'>But the imagination of Legros, in virtue of which, quite as much
as by occasional mannerisms of handling, he recalls that older and
more pregnant Art which has well nigh passed from the very ken of
<span class='pageno' id='Page_42'>42</span>the producers of our own day’s trivial array, is not in any sense
derived from this or that past master; it is charged, on the contrary,
in his most considerable pieces with a serious and pathetic poetry
quite his own. Here and there, indeed, as in one early work—<i>Procession
dans les Caveaux de Saint-Médard</i>—it is not imagination at
all, as that is generally understood, but the keen observation of an
artist content to reproduce, that alone is remarkable; and here there
is a certain amount of audacity in the fidelity with which he has
rendered the commonplace, the mean, the narrow faces of a certain
section of the Parisian lower <i>bourgeoisie</i> engaged in devotions which
there is no beauty of form or of thought to make interesting to
the beholder. It is a piece of pure realism—the hideous flounces
and more hideous crinolines, the squat figures, the slop-shop
fashions, the common faces empty of records. And in this pure and
unrelieved realism there is a certain value, if there is no charm.
But the pieces to which Legros will owe such fame as the better-judging
connoisseurs and critics shall eventually accord him are
those in which the artistic instinct and desire of beauty, either of
form or of thought, has found some expression. It will be in
part by such masculine, yet refined and graceful, portraits as
those of M. Dalou and Mr. Poynter, such subtle ones as that of
Cardinal Manning, such pathetic ones as that of M. Rodin here,
that Legros will stand high. It will be in part by the etchings
in which the pourtrayal of actual life has been guided by the
research for beauty, as, for instance, in the <i>Chœur d’une Eglise
Espagnole</i>, where not only is the head firm and dignified and the
lighting more intricate than is usual with this master, but where the
composition of bent figure and curved violoncello is of great repose
<span class='pageno' id='Page_43'>43</span>and refinement of beauty. A more various specimen of the same
type is to be found in a fine impression of <i>Les Chantres Espagnols</i>.
They are eight in the choir of a church—four sit in the stalls, the
others stand, of whom one turns the page of a missal placed on a
lectern. The scene is mostly dark—mostly even very dark—but the
light, by a very skilled treatment of it, falls here and there on lectern,
missal, and hand of the old man sitting in the choir. The observation
of reality in this plate has been at the same time keen and poetical,
for nothing can be truer and nothing more impressive than the study
of old faces out of which so much of the desire of life has gone, and
the study of gestures which are those of hand and will waxing feeble.
Two men, at least, are placed together in a pathetic harmony of
weakness: the drooping hand of one and his drooped head, as he
sits in his long-accustomed place; the open mouth of the other—his
mouth opened with the feebleness of a decayed intelligence, with the
slow understandings of a departing mind. Or, not to insist too much
on a picturesqueness in which pathos predominates, notice, when the
occasion presents itself, the first rendering of the subject known as
the <i>Lutrin</i>, with its acolyte of rare youthful dignity; or as an example
of work in which some little beauty of modelling has been sought to
be united even with every-day realism, see the design of the bare knee
in <i>L’Enfant Prodigue</i>.</p>
<p class='c011'>But where Legros is most apart and alone is, after all, in the subjects
which owe most to the imagination, and of these the very finest
are <i>La Mort du Vagabond</i>, <i>La Mort et le Bûcheron</i>, and <i>Le Savant
endormi</i>. Something of the art that gives interest to these pieces is
contained in the careful persistence with which the etcher brings the
realism of physical ugliness into close contact and contrast with the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_44'>44</span>spiritual and supernatural. A comely and well-to-do youth slumbering
in his chair at the Marlborough could have no dreams an artist of
Legros’s nature would think worthy of recording, but the ugly votary
of science and intellectual speculation, who sleeps, from sheer weariness,
in the armchair before which are still the implements of his study and
research, has the dignity of strained endeavour; and M. Legros,
in pourtraying him and suggesting the subjects of his dream, has
reached an elevation which separates him from most of his contemporaries,
by as much as the <i>Melancholia</i> of Dürer is separated from the
<i>Melancholia</i> of Beham. <i>La Mort du Vagabond</i> is not a whit less suggestive
in its contrast between the feebleness of the worn-out beggar
now stretched out lonely on the pathside—his head raised, gasping,
and his hat knocked away—and the force and fury of the storm that
beats over dead tree and desolate common. The unity of tragic
impression in homely life, preserved in this plate, will give it a permanent
value among the great things of Art. <i>La Mort et le Bûcheron</i> is
more tender, not more nor less poetical, but less weird; and nothing
short of a high and vigorous imagination could have saved from
chance of ridicule, in days in which the symbolical has long ceased to
be an habitual channel of expression, this etching of the veiled skeleton
of Death appearing to the old man still busy with his field-work, and
beckoning him gently, while he, with simple and ignorant yet not
insensitive face, touched with awe and surprise, looks up under a
sudden spell it is vain to hope to cast off, since for him, however unexpectedly,
the hour has plainly come. Of this very fascinating subject,
there exist impressions from two different plates: one of the plates, and
in some respects the better and more pathetic one—the one in which
the figure of Death is gentler and more persuasive, and in which the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_45'>45</span>face of the woodman is the more mildly expressive—having suffered an
accident after only about a dozen impressions had been taken from it.
The second was then executed, with something less at first than the
success of the earlier one, so that the almost unique and very rare
impressions of the plate—whatever may chance to be their money
value—represent it to the least advantage. It was retouched and
retouched, and at length with more of reward for the trouble than
Legros has generally been able to meet with when laboriously modifying
his work in the attempt to realise his conception more fully; until
at last the enterprising management of <i>L’Art</i> was enabled to offer its
readers for about three shillings a work of art not rare, indeed, but of
exquisite beauty. The success of the first plate, which the acid had
covered in a moment of neglect, had been almost refound.</p>
<p class='c011'>A final word about the landscapes. As a painter of landscape
M. Legros is little known, but there exist, I believe, in London one or
two considerable collections of water colours which exhibit almost
exclusively his art in landscape. As far as the etchings show it at all,
it is of the most account when it is called in for the accompaniment of
one of those impressive and doleful ditties I have just been speaking
of. Sometimes, however, it is good without this mission and significance,
as in the <i>Pécheur</i>, where a delicate effect of early morning is
given with exquisite refinement. But at other times, in which the
artist is dealing with landscape charged for him with no especial
meaning, his very observation of it seems to have been lacking in
interest and acuteness, as in the broad slope of grass by the stream-side
in his big print <i>Les Bûcherons</i>—a whole surface of ground that is
treated mechanically and without any worthy apprehension. And yet
this print, despite certain unpleasantness, contains in the heads of the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_46'>46</span>woodcutters some of his finest work. A much more sketchy subject,
<i>Paysage aux Meules</i>, has greater unity of impression. Like a good deal
of Legros’s landscape, it is distinctively French, this particular
glimpse of field and farm and rounded hill reminding one of the
wide-stretching uplands of the Haut Boulognais. Other landscapes
are of England. Others, again, are neither of England nor of France,
nor of any land which may be read of in the guide-book or visited
by the enterprising tourist, but of that land alone that rises in the
imagination of artistic men.</p>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c008' /></div>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_47'>47</span>
<h2 class='c009'>INDEX.</h2></div>
<ul class='index c008'>
<li class='c020'><span class='sc'>Bracquemond.</span> His originality and limitation, p. <SPAN href='#Page_iii'>iii</SPAN>.</li>
<li class='c008'><span class='sc'>Claude.</span> His <i>Bouvier</i> and <i>Shepherd and Shepherdess conversing</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_4'>4</SPAN>.</li>
<li class='c020'><span class='sc'>Crome.</span> His etchings, p. <SPAN href='#Page_9'>9</SPAN>.</li>
<li class='c008'><span class='sc'>Earlom.</span> His flower-pieces in mezzotint, p. <SPAN href='#Page_25'>25</SPAN>.</li>
<li class='c008'><span class='sc'>Gonse.</span> His catalogue of Jacquemart’s etchings, p. <SPAN href='#Page_18'>18</SPAN>.</li>
<li class='c008'><span class='sc'>Haden.</span> His quality of vigour, p. <SPAN href='#Page_2'>2</SPAN>;
<ul>
<li>his judgment of Méryon, p. <SPAN href='#Page_4'>4</SPAN>;</li>
<li>his earliest etchings, p. <SPAN href='#Page_5'>5</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Mytton Hall</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_7'>7</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Egham</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_7'>7</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Water Meadow</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_7'>7</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Calais Pier</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_7'>7</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Penton Hook</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_8'>8</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Sunset on the Thames</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_9'>9</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Erith Marshes</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_9'>9</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Agamemnon</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_10'>10</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Sawley Abbey</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_10'>10</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Dusty Millers</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_10'>10</SPAN>;</li>
<li>his Dorsetshire etchings, p. <SPAN href='#Page_11'>11</SPAN>.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class='c020'><span class='sc'>Hamerton</span>, p. iii. and p. <SPAN href='#Page_17'>17</SPAN>.</li>
<li class='c008'><span class='sc'>Jacquemart.</span> His happy circumstances, p. <SPAN href='#Page_12'>12</SPAN>;
<ul>
<li>he renders the soul of matter, p. <SPAN href='#Page_14'>14</SPAN>;</li>
<li>his etchings of Oriental and <i>Sèvres</i> porcelain, p. <SPAN href='#Page_15'>15</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Brocca Italienne</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_16'>16</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Vase de Vieux Vincennes</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_17'>17</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Miroir Français</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_20'>20</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Vénus Marine</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_21'>21</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Salière de Troyes</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_21'>21</SPAN>;</li>
<li>his etchings after pictures, p. <SPAN href='#Page_23'>23</SPAN>;</li>
<li>his flower-pieces, p. <SPAN href='#Page_25'>25</SPAN>;</li>
<li>his work in water colour, p. <SPAN href='#Page_25'>25</SPAN>;</li>
<li>his concern with Art, not nature, p. <SPAN href='#Page_27'>27</SPAN>.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class='c008'><span class='sc'>Legros.</span> Essentially an etcher, p. <SPAN href='#Page_41'>41</SPAN>;
<ul>
<li>his <i>Procession dans les Caveaux de Saint-Médard</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_42'>42</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Dalou</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_42'>42</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Poynter</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_42'>42</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Manning</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_42'>42</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Rodin</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_42'>42</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Les Chantres Espagnols</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_43'>43</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Le Lutrin</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_43'>43</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>La Mort du Vagabond</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_44'>44</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>La Mort et le Bûcheron</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_44'>44</SPAN>;</li>
<li>his etched landscapes, p. <SPAN href='#Page_45'>45</SPAN>.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class='c008'><span class='sc'>Macbeth</span>, p. iii.</li>
<li class='c020'><span class='sc'>Méryon.</span> His method with architecture, p. <SPAN href='#Page_35'>35</SPAN>.</li>
<li class='c008'><span class='sc'>Rembrandt.</span> His <i>Ephraim Bonus</i> and <i>Clément de Jonghe</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_4'>4</SPAN>;
<ul>
<li>his <i>Portrait of a woman lightly etched</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_15'>15</SPAN>.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class='c008'><span class='sc'>Thibaudeau.</span> His catalogue of Legros’s etchings, p. <SPAN href='#Page_41'>41</SPAN>.</li>
<li class='c020'><span class='sc'>Tissot</span>, p. iii.</li>
<li class='c008'><span class='sc'>Vandyke.</span> A decisive sketcher, p. <SPAN href='#Page_3'>3</SPAN>.</li>
<li class='c008'><span class='sc'>Whistler.</span> His quality of exquisiteness, p. <SPAN href='#Page_28'>28</SPAN>;
<ul>
<li>his decorative arrangements, p. <SPAN href='#Page_29'>29</SPAN>;</li>
<li>painted portraits, p. <SPAN href='#Page_30'>30</SPAN>;</li>
<li>his etched portraits, p. <SPAN href='#Page_32'>32</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Fanny Leyland</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_33'>33</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>The Kitchen</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_33'>33</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>La Vieille aux Loques</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_34'>34</SPAN>;</li>
<li>his <i>Venice</i> series, p. <SPAN href='#Page_35'>35</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Free Trade Wharf</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_37'>37</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Billingsgate</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_37'>37</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Hungerford Bridge</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_38'>38</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Thames Police</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_38'>38</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Tyzack Whiteley</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_38'>38</SPAN>;</li>
<li><i>Black Lion Wharf</i>, p. <SPAN href='#Page_38'>38</SPAN>.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c008' /></div>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c002'>
<div><span class='pageno' id='Page_48'>48</span><span class='small'>LONDON</span></div>
<div><span class='small'>PRINTED BY J. S. VIRTUE AND CO., LIMITED,</span></div>
<div><span class='small'>CITY ROAD.</span></div>
</div></div>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c002' /></div>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c008'>
<div><span class='pageno' id='Page_49'>49</span>OTHER WORKS BY MR. WEDMORE.</div>
<div class='c000'>7<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i> EACH.</div>
<div class='c008'>STUDIES IN ENGLISH ART.</div>
<div class='c000'>GAINSBOROUGH, MORLAND, REYNOLDS, FLAXMAN, STOTHARD,</div>
<div>CROME, COTMAN, TURNER, CONSTABLE, DE WINT, DAVID COX,</div>
<div>CRUIKSHANK.</div>
<div class='c000'><i>Two Volumes.</i> <span class='sc'>Second Edition.</span></div>
<div class='c008'>THE MASTERS OF GENRE PAINTING.</div>
<div class='c000'>REMBRANDT, DE HOOGH, NICHOLAS MAES, METSU, TERBURG,</div>
<div>JAN STEEN, WATTEAU, LANCRET, PATER, CHARDIN, FRAGONARD,</div>
<div>HOGARTH, and WILKIE.</div>
<div class='c000'><i>With Sixteen Illustrations.</i></div>
<div class='c008'>PASTORALS OF FRANCE.</div>
<div class='c000'>“A LAST LOVE AT PORNIC,” “YVONNE OF CROISIC,” “THE FOUR</div>
<div>BELLS OF CHARTRES.”</div>
<div class='c000'><span class='sc'>Second Edition.</span></div>
</div></div>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c008' /></div>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c008'>
<div><span class='pageno' id='Page_50'>50</span><i>ETCHINGS</i></div>
<div class='c000'>ON SALE BY THE FINE ART SOCIETY.</div>
<div class='c000'><span class='sc'>By</span> FRANCIS SEYMOUR HADEN.</div>
</div></div>
<table class='table2' summary=''>
<colgroup>
<col width='76%' />
<col width='7%' />
<col width='7%' />
<col width='7%' />
</colgroup>
<tr>
<td class='c016'> </td>
<td class='c013'>£.</td>
<td class='c013'><i>s.</i></td>
<td class='c015'><i>d.</i></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>A By-road in Tipperary</td>
<td class='c013'>6</td>
<td class='c013'>6</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>A Water Meadow</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Amalfi</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Amstelodam</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>A Cottage Window</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>12</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Battersea</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Breaking up of the Agamemnon. First State £7 7 0 Second State</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Barque Refitting</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Brentford Ferry</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>12</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>By Inveraron</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Brig at Anchor</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Cottages behind Horsley’s House</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Cranbrook</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Cardigan Bridge</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>12</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Combe Bottom</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Calais Pier. Second State</td>
<td class='c013'>21</td>
<td class='c013'>0</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Do. Small</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Dusty Millers</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Evening</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Early Morning—Richmond Park</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>12</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Egham</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Egham Lock</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Erith Marshes</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Fulham</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>12</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Greenwich</td>
<td class='c013'>8</td>
<td class='c013'>8</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Grim Spain—Burgos</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>House of the Smith</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>12</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Hic Terminus Hæret</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Horsley’s House at Willesley</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Kensington Gardens. The Large Plate £2 12 6 Small Plate</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Kew Side</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>12</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'><span class='pageno' id='Page_51'>51</span>Kilgaren Castle</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>12</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Kenarth</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>12</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Kidwelly Town</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Mount’s Bay</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Newcastle in Emlyn</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>12</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>O Laborum!</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Out of Study Window</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>On the Test. First State</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Purfleet</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Penton Hook</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Puff Asleep</td>
<td class='c013'> </td>
<td class='c013'>—</td>
<td class='c015'> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Railway Encroachment</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Ruins in Wales</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Sub Tegmine</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Sonning Almshouses</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Shepperton</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Shere Millpond</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Sunset on the Thames. First State £3 3 0 Second State</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Sketch on Back of Zinc Plate</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Sunset in Ireland</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Sonning</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Study of Stems</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Twickenham Bushes</td>
<td class='c013'>0</td>
<td class='c013'>10</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Mill-Wheel. First State £3 3 0 Second State</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Thomas Haden of Derby</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Thames Fishermen</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Herd</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Two Sheep</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Holly Field</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Twickenham Church</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Towing-Path. First State £4 4 0 Second State</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Three Sisters</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Inn at Sawley. (Unfinished)</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Grande Chartreuse. (From Drawing by Turner)</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Moat House</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Two Asses</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Turkish Bath, with One Figure</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>12</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Turkish Bath, with Two Figures</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Assignation</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Thames Ditton</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Willow Bank</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Windmill Hill</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Windsor</td>
<td class='c013'>8</td>
<td class='c013'>8</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Ye Compleate Angler</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>Yacht Tavern, Erith</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'><span class='sc'>The Volume of “Études”</span></td>
<td class='c013'>36</td>
<td class='c013'>15</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
</table>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c008' /></div>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c008'>
<div><span class='pageno' id='Page_52'>52</span><span class='sc'>By J. A. McN. WHISTLER.</span></div>
</div></div>
<p class='c021'><i>VENICE.</i> <span class='sc'>A Series of Twelve Etchings.</span></p>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center'>
<div>Limited to 100 Sets, 50 Guineas the Set; or separately as follows:—</div>
</div></div>
<table class='table3' summary=''>
<colgroup>
<col width='74%' />
<col width='8%' />
<col width='8%' />
<col width='8%' />
</colgroup>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Little Venice</td>
<td class='c013'>£4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Two Doorways</td>
<td class='c013'>6</td>
<td class='c013'>6</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Beggars</td>
<td class='c013'>8</td>
<td class='c013'>8</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Nocturne</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Doorway</td>
<td class='c013'>8</td>
<td class='c013'>8</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The River</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Little Mast</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Little Lagoon</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Palaces</td>
<td class='c013'>8</td>
<td class='c013'>8</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Mast</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Traghetto</td>
<td class='c013'>8</td>
<td class='c013'>8</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>The Piazzetta</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c013'>4</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr class='c022' />
<p class='c021'><i>SIXTEEN THAMES ETCHINGS.</i></p>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center'>
<div>Price 14 Guineas the Set in Portfolio; or separately as follows—</div>
</div></div>
<table class='table3' summary=''>
<colgroup>
<col width='74%' />
<col width='8%' />
<col width='8%' />
<col width='8%' />
</colgroup>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>1. Black Lion Wharf</td>
<td class='c013'>£1</td>
<td class='c013'>15</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>2. Wapping Wharf</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>3. The Forge</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>4. Old Westminster Bridge</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>5. Wapping</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>12</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>6. Old Hungerford</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>7. The Pool</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>8. The Fiddler</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>9. The Limeburners</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c013'>2</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>10. The Little Pool</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>11. Eagle Wharf</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>15</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>12. Limehouse</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>13. Thames Warehouses</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>14. Millbank</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>5</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>15. Early Morning (Battersea)</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c013'>1</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'>16. Chelsea Bridge and Church</td>
<td class='c013'>0</td>
<td class='c013'>10</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr class='c022' />
<table class='table4' summary=''>
<colgroup>
<col width='74%' />
<col width='8%' />
<col width='8%' />
<col width='8%' />
</colgroup>
<tr>
<td class='c016'><i>THE LITTLE LIMEHOUSE.</i> One Hundred Proofs Only</td>
<td class='c013'>£1</td>
<td class='c013'>11</td>
<td class='c015'>6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'> </td>
<td class='c013'> </td>
<td class='c013'> </td>
<td class='c015'> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'><i>HURLINGHAM.</i> Sixty Artist’s Proofs</td>
<td class='c013'>£3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'> </td>
<td class='c013'> </td>
<td class='c013'> </td>
<td class='c015'> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'><i>FULHAM.</i> Sixty Artist’s Proofs</td>
<td class='c013'>£3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'> </td>
<td class='c013'> </td>
<td class='c013'> </td>
<td class='c015'> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'><i>PUTNEY.</i> Sixty Artist’s Proofs</td>
<td class='c013'>£3</td>
<td class='c013'>3</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'> </td>
<td class='c013'> </td>
<td class='c013'> </td>
<td class='c015'> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'><i>PUTNEY BRIDGE.</i> Proofs</td>
<td class='c013'>£6</td>
<td class='c013'>6</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'> </td>
<td class='c013'> </td>
<td class='c013'> </td>
<td class='c015'> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c016'><i>BATTERSEA BRIDGE.</i> Proofs</td>
<td class='c013'>£6</td>
<td class='c013'>6</td>
<td class='c015'>0</td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr class='c022' />
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c008' /></div>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c008'>
<div><span class='pageno' id='Page_53'>53</span><span class='sc'>By SAMUEL PALMER.</span></div>
</div></div>
<p class='c023'><i>THE LONELY TOWER.</i> From “Il Penseroso.”</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>THE HERDSMAN’S COTTAGE</i> (1850). Plate destroyed.</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>THE BELLMAN.</i> From “Il Penseroso” (1879). Sixty Remarque
Proofs (of which few remain unsold) £4 4 0</p>
<p class='c026'> Plain Impressions 2 2 0</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>THE SKYLARK</i> (1850). Plate destroyed £4 4 0</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>CHRISTMAS; or, Folding the Last Sheep.</i> From Bampfylde’s
“Sonnet” (1850). A few Fine Proofs £3 3 0</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>THE WILLOW</i> (1850). Mr. Palmer’s First Etching £0 10 6</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>THE SLEEPING SHEPHERD.</i> Plate destroyed £4 4 0</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>EARLY MORNING—Opening the Fold.</i> Remarque Proofs all
sold. Artist’s Proofs £2 2 0</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>THE VINE.</i> Two Subjects on one Plate. Plate destroyed £5 5 0</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>THE EARLY PLOUGHMAN</i> £2 2 0</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>THE HERDSMAN.</i> Plate destroyed £6 6 0</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>THE MORNING OF LIFE.</i> Plate destroyed £5 5 0</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>THE RISING MOON.</i> Plate destroyed £5 5 0</p>
<hr class='c027' />
<p class='c028'><i>In addition to these, a large number of examples of Etchings
by J. C. Hook, R.A., Rajon, Flameng, Unger, Gaillard, Waltner,
Brunet-Debaines, F. Bracquemond, Jacquemart, Chifflart, Daubigny,
Le Rat, Veyrassat, Appian, Tissot, Legros, Herkomer, &c., &c.</i></p>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c008' /></div>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c008'>
<div><span class='pageno' id='Page_54'>54</span><i>ART BOOKS</i></div>
<div class='c000'>PUBLISHED BY THE FINE ART SOCIETY.</div>
</div></div>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><span class='sc'>Note.</span>—The rule of the Society in publishing Books is to
make an issue sufficient only to meet the demand at the time of
publication. By so doing they find the subscribers are materially
benefited, as their books quickly increase in value.</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>Mr. Ruskin’s Notes on his Turner Drawings.</i> Exhibited at
The Fine Art Society’s Galleries, 1878. Illustrated Large-paper
Edition, consisting of 750 copies. Published £2 2<i>s.</i>
Edition exhausted. A copy sold at Christie’s, in April, 1881, for
£4 4<i>s.</i></p>
<p class='c026'>The same, small paper, unillustrated, 2<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i><SPAN name='r2' /><SPAN href='#f2' class='c018'><sup>[2]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c026'>The type of these editions has been distributed.</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>Mr. Ruskin’s Notes on Samuel Prout and William Hunt.</i> In
illustration of a Loan Collection of Drawings exhibited at The
Fine Art Society’s Galleries in 1879. Edition nearly exhausted.
Large Paper, Illustrated Edition, consisting of 500 copies, £2
2<i>s.</i></p>
<p class='c026'>The same, small paper, unillustrated, 2<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i><SPAN href='#f2' class='c018'><sup>[2]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c026'>The type of these editions has been distributed.</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>Mr. Seymour Haden’s Notes on Etching.</i> In illustration of
the Art, and of his Collection of Etchings and Engravings of the
Old Masters, exhibited at The Fine Art Society’s Galleries, 1879.
Large Paper, Illustrated Edition, limited to 500 copies, £2
2<i>s.</i></p>
<p class='c026'>The same, small paper, unillustrated, 1<i>s.</i><SPAN href='#f2' class='c018'><sup>[2]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c026'>The type of these editions has been distributed.</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><span class='pageno' id='Page_55'>55</span><i>J. F. Millet—A Biography by W. E. Henley.</i> Illustrated with Twenty
Etchings and Woodcuts, reproduced in facsimile. Large-paper Edition, limited to
500 copies, £1 1<i>s.</i></p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>Samuel Palmer: A Biography by his Son, Mr. A. H. Palmer.</i> Illustrated
with an Original Etching by Samuel Palmer, entitled “Christmas,” and
several Autotypes and Wood Engravings. The Edition will be limited to 500
copies. Price 31<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i></p>
<p class='c026'>[<i>In the Press.</i></p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>The Year’s Art, 1882.</i> A concise Epitome of all matters relating to
Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, which have occurred during the year 1881,
in the United Kingdom, together with Information respecting the events of 1882.
By <span class='sc'>Marcus B. Huish</span>. Price 2<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i></p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>Notes by Mr. F. G. Stephens on a Collection of Drawings and Woodcuts by
Thomas Bewick.</i> Exhibited at the Fine Art Society’s Rooms, 1880. Large Paper,
Illustrated Edition, limited to 300 copies. Published at 21<i>s.</i>; price 31<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i>
Edition exhausted.</p>
<p class='c026'>The same, small paper, unillustrated, 1<i>s.</i><SPAN href='#f2' class='c018'><sup>[2]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c026'>The type of these editions has been distributed.</p>
<hr class='c024' />
<p class='c025'><i>Memoir and Complete Descriptive Catalogue of the Works of Charles
Méryon.</i> By <span class='sc'>Philip Burty</span> and <span class='sc'>Marcus B. Huish</span>. 1879. Limited to 125
copies; type distributed. Published at 16<i>s.</i>; price 21<i>s.</i></p>
<hr class='c024' />
<div class='fn'>
<div class='footnote c002' id='f2'>
<p class='c029'><span class='label'><SPAN href='#r2'>2</SPAN>. </span>These Handbooks, together with “John Everett Millais, R.A.,” by
Andrew Lang; “Samuel Palmer,” by F. G. Stephens; and “The Sea
Painters,” are sold bound in half calf, complete in one Volume,
price 10<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i></p>
</div>
</div>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c008' /></div>
<p class='c026'> </p>
<div class='tnbox'>
<ul class='ul_1 c008'>
<li>Transcriber’s Notes:
<ul class='ul_2'>
<li>Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
</li>
<li>Typographical errors were silently corrected.
</li>
<li>Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant
form was found in this book.
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul></div>
<p class='c026'> </p>
<SPAN name="endofbook"></SPAN>
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To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.