Chapter 4

HELLEU.“FEMME À LA TASSE.”

an hour or two the lady or the child of M. Helle choice has found herself recorded on the copper—she and whatever accessories were deemed desirable to indicate hermilieu, to place her amidst the surroundings which assist in the telling of her story. There is not, as far as I am aware, a single piece of M. Helle that is not a figure subject, and among his work, so far as it has yet proceeded, I do not recollect a single portrait of a man. Edmond de Goncourt calls his dry-points “les instantanés de la grace de la femme”—“snap-shots,” shall we translate it, at the charm of modern womanhood—the womanhood of the drawing-room—“snap-shots,” not less often, at the charm of refined childhood. In Helle etched work, the connoisseur will welcome what is practically the complement of the etched work of Vandyck, who, in his score or so of plates (wonderful painter though he was of women), undertook only the portraiture of certain distinguished men.

Helle method of dealing with his subjects is not always, or even very often, the method of direct portraiture. His conception has a certain affinity with that of the artist in Genre, in that the model or models, be they women or children, do not only stand for their portraits, but are discovered inposeswhich suggest an incident thismoment happening—be it only the incident of a woman having her hair brushed, of a girl struggling into her jacket, of a woman stooping forward over the drawing-room fireplace, of a child playing with its toys. Helle models are not long stationary, their attitude is never stereotyped; what he pourtrays mainly is movement now making, or movement only just arrested. Hence, perhaps, the sense of spontaneity in all the work—the sense, when you have looked through his plates, that you have been living in the intimacy of charming people who in their daily ways turn this way and that, stoop, stretch themselves, smile, get suddenly grave, dress themselves, lift their eyes inquiringly, or toss the great long hair upon their shoulders. Their movements, whatever they are, are made with the immediate freedom, the complete absence of self-consciousness, of well-bred, natural folk—the folk whose presence, even when they are not actually handsome, or when no personal affection binds them to you, gives a legitimate charm to the passing hour. The spectacle of the world is pleasanter when it is they who are on its stage.

Helle etchings prove him to be in sympathy with the most alert, which is often also the most dignified and distinguished of modern youthful beauty. I know of no plate of his in which he has realised the

HELLEU.“LE SALON BLANC.

dignity of age as Rembrandt realised it in the etched portrait of his mother smiling, and in that other etched portrait of his mother, with a black veil and folded hands. But several times Helleu has realised what Whistler realised in the dry-point of “Fanny Leyland”—the dignified beauty, the reticent tenderness, the mood, courageous or contemplative, of the better order of young girlhood. Admirable in this way is that “Etude de Jeune Fille,” which shows the quick and earnest, fearless glance—the girl with the lifted elbow and the streaming dark hair. Hardly less admirable, that other study of a child a little younger, the head on a large scale, and the head alone. It may be added, as a detail of both these rare plates, that no others, either by M. Helleu or by any other etcher, show quite so obvious a mastery in the treatment of hair. Dry-point, as M. Helleu handles it, would seem to have been made for the magical suggestion of all that you may notice in hair, except its colour—of its flow and texture, weight and life.

“Femme à la Tasse,” a study of two uplifted hands, holding between them, lightly, in the fingers, a porcelain cup out of which the reclining figure drinks, is a most delicate arrangement of “line,” and of amazing economy of means. And the “Salon Blanc,” or one especially of the severalplates which bear that name, is to be noted not for the figure only, not, perhaps, for the figure even chiefly, but for the brief and dainty suggestions of tasteful furniture, the line of a screen, the mouldings of a mantelpiece, the curve of a girandole.

We have etchers amongst us, and clever ones, too, to whom the presence of character in their living models, and in those models’ backgrounds, has been, above all things, precious; to whom the presence of the eccentric has been valuable, and the presence of beauty, superfluous, not to say burdensome. But, with M. Helleu, beauty—beauty of no conventional order, the rapid charm of movement, of expression, of contour—is the inspiring and satisfactory thing. He lives in its intimacy. And he reveals it—much as Watteau did, yet in ways how fearlessly modern!—to the spectator of his work.

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FOOTNOTES:[1]In nearly every case the illustration is more or less reduced from the original.[2]The editor of “The Magazine of Art” has assured me, in its pages, that Mr. Whistler swore in Court that he was born in St. Petersburg.[3]The wildish sky is to be found only in the First State, it is non-existent in the second, which is yet a charming thing, in its own way.

FOOTNOTES:

[1]In nearly every case the illustration is more or less reduced from the original.

[2]The editor of “The Magazine of Art” has assured me, in its pages, that Mr. Whistler swore in Court that he was born in St. Petersburg.

[3]The wildish sky is to be found only in the First State, it is non-existent in the second, which is yet a charming thing, in its own way.

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