MY FEW THINGS

‘Myfew things!’ In the very title there is conveyed, I hope, some apology for writing of them. If I accept the invitation to do so, it is partly because I must needs know more of what they are—they are ‘but poor few,’ in Shakespeare’s phrase—than any one else can know; partly again because, as I am pleasantly informed, it may be interesting to certain readers to be told, for a change, not what can be amassed—amassed and perhaps neglected—by a millionaire who gives several thousand guineas for a modern painting, but what can be got together with merely ‘joyful trouble,’—with pains, and waiting, and love of the things, and only a little money—by a simple man of Letters, who happens to have been concerned, to some extent, with other arts than his own; and partly also because, connected with the few things that one has, there are associations, not few but many.

A little blue-grey drawing—an early drawing ofVarley’s, which has nothing but the lasting virtues of Economy and Style—was the first artistic thing that ever belonged to me. It came to me—like a prized Morland mezzotint, many years later—from the portfolio of my great-grandfather, who was, as I am told, a friend of Turner’s earliest patron, Dr. Munro. But it is prints, not drawings, that, since I began to collect a little, I have chiefly brought together.

In a collection of prints there is something less indefinite, something more systematic, than in a collection of drawings. The things, if they are good, have the advantage of being known, of being more or less recognised—not, indeed, by the large public, but at least by the people with whom, on matters of Art, it is most interesting to come into contact. Prints are classed and catalogued. Each print by a particular master has, in the collector’s mind, a direct bearing on the component parts of that master’s work. Again, fine drawings, although cheap in relation to the prices paid for modern paintings, are dear in comparison with many prints to which the adjective ‘fine’ could scarcely be denied; for, while here and there an ‘Adam and Eve’ of Dürer is sold under the hammer for many hundred pounds, that is the exception absolutely;and while, at Sotheby’s or Christie’s, on eventful sale days, two thousand pounds may be the ransom of a Rembrandt etching, that is not only because it is fine, but because that particular etching—or that particular ‘state’ of it—is excessively rare. It has been chronicled; it has been read of; it has profited by the existence of the accurate catalogue of the work of the Master—it is a certified thing. But, with knowledge gradually acquired, with diligence exercised in the right place, a print extremely fine, extremely desirable, may still be bought for a few pounds. It will be much fuller of Art than any drawing which ordinary good fortune is to enable you to get for the same outlay. And I say this as one who loves drawings—as one who, notwithstanding his theories, even ventures to live with a few of them; but, if I have a preference in the matter of collecting—well, I suppose it is for prints.

About a print, every point is interesting. Apart from subject, apart too from technical treatment of the copper, there is the delightful question, How does your own impression compare with other people’s? And, again, the paper. The true print-lover can talk about different papers—old French, old Dutch, old English, Japanese—as the connoisseur of clarets talks of Pontet Canets and Pichon Longuevilles.

... But my Solander-box is all this time unopened!

I suppose the first print that I ever bought was a ‘Liber’ print of Turner’s. The Burlington Fine Arts Club had held a wonderfully important exhibition of them—there were Mr. J. E. Taylor’s, Mr. Henry Vaughan’s, Mr. Gambier Parry’s finest impressions; illustrative, thoroughly, of that which Turner meant to do; of the means, to some extent, by which he did it. And having by that time discovered what I most cared for in the set, and made, no doubt, the politic compromise—learning to bring my needs within the limits of a lean purse—I got my friend, Stopford Brooke, to choose from amongst several impressions of ‘Hind Head Hill,’ that happened then to be at Colnaghi’s (for it was soon after the great Turner Sale), the one he thought the best; and from amongst an equal number of impressions of ‘Severn and Wye,’ that happened to be at Mrs. Noseda’s, similarly, the best. ‘I chose well that day,’ said Stopford Brooke, many years afterwards, noticing those prints on my wall. No such opportunities of choice, as existed then, are likely again to be afforded.

Those were the days when, if I bought at all, it was—at first at least—‘for the wall’ and not ‘for the folio’—to use a phrase of Halsted’s. Halstedmeant by it to distinguish between the buyer who, from the very nature of things, must promptly be satisfied (since you can neither multiply ‘walls’ nor enlarge them), and the buyer to whom the infinite was open—that infinite in which Solander-box succeeds Solander-box, folio succeeds folio, and drawer succeeds drawer. His, perhaps, is the more dangerous case; but the collector who can display on his walls all his possessions—who can stop buying when the mere purposes of furnishing are answered—is simplynota collector. Halsted scorned him.

The mention of this aged dealer’s name brings back to me recollections. I saw Mr. Halsted in almost the latest of his days, when he was a less prominent but probably a more interesting figure, in the world of Art and Connoisseurship, than he had been in his prime. In his prime, his shop was in Bond Street; but when it was my privilege to go, a humble learner, sitting at the feet of a dealer who had known ‘Mr. Turner,’ and had been for at least one generation surrounded by his work, Halsted, elderly, deliberate of speech, slow and almost halting of movement, large, angular—a craft somewhat difficult to ‘bring round’ or to ‘change the course’ of, within the scanty waters of his back shop—had his abode—his mart at allevents—in Rathbone Place, by the Frenchblanchisseuse de finand a little Swisscafé. He was half retired; and there in the back shop he would cause you to sit down, in a perfect light under the window, and would show you what you had asked for, if he had it—for, in those days, he bought nothing; he was engaged merely in selling, in the most leisurely of manners, and at prices which were never open to any suggestion of abatement, the remains of his old stock. Standing over you—a little away from you—with something of a soldierly sternness, like a sergeant in a barrack-yard, he rolled out, slowly, story after story of Mr. Turner, of Sir John Hippesley, whom he had influenced to admire the ‘Liber,’ by placing before his eyes a ‘Severn and Wye,’ at breakfast-time, and then of Mr. Turner again. You bought something, of course; but the best of it is, you never were sorry for it afterwards, for Halsted’s eye was faultless: his knowledge, though he was old, was in advance of his day. I cherish as impressions which had received hisimprimatur—if one may use the word of things he had thought worthy to buy and to sell—an ‘Oakhampton Castle,’ a ‘Hindoo Worshippers,’ and I forget for the moment what else. These two, I remember, bear the stamp of passage through the collection of the famousMr. Stokes—the first ‘Liber’ collector—and of his niece, Miss Constance Clarke.

One thing amusing about a visit to Halsted’s was the occasional presence of his brother. You went to the shop perhaps once by chance, and Halsted was away. In his place was an inferior sort of person, courteous and good-natured, but humbly conscious of his own inferiority. You could do no business with him. If I remember rightly, he was not even allowed to have the keys. The fine prints were quite inaccessible. Yet this was, after all, but one of the inferior brother’s manifestations. He had another phase—another facet. Chancing, one summer evening, to walk northwards, through Camden Town, I suddenly beheld the brother standing on what proved to be his own doorstep, free of heart and with no one to say him nay. He, too, had a shop, it appeared, and here it was, come upon unexpectedly: a print shop of the third order—you wondered who they were, in Camden Town or anywhere else, who bought the cheap things which alone it contained.

Only one other of the old-fashioned dealers, the dealers of another generation, did I ever see. That was the aged Mr. Tiffin, once busy in the Strand, but, when I called upon him to inspect the remainsof his possessions, living chiefly retired, slow and deaf, in the small bourgeois comfort of a villa at Canonbury. There—not to much practical purpose—I sought him out. He too was a figure of the elder world, and as such he dwells in the memory.

But I have wandered from the prints of the ‘Liber Studiorum,’ of which indeed, though one of the warmest admirers of them, I possess but a handful. Amongst them I greatly cherish one impression—the gift of a friend whose benefactions to the National collections are remarkable, and whose knowledge of Turner is profound. It is an early ‘state’ of the subject known as ‘Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne, Morning’—one of those plates engraved from end to end by Turner’s own hand. This impression was given by the Master to Lupton, the mezzotint engraver of the ‘Solway Moss,’ and, a generation ago, my friend had bought it from him. Another admirable student of Turner’s art sent me once more than one of those etchings which, in Turner’s case, are the interesting preparations for the finished ‘Liber’ plate. The rare ‘Isis’ is amongst them.

Amongst the Turner prints that I have bought, I have always been guided rather by fineness of impression than by priority of ‘state.’ Thus, sideby side with a First State of the ‘London from Greenwich’ I do not fear to place a late one of ‘The Frontispiece, with the Rape of Europa.’ The impression must have been printed the moment the plate had profited by Turner’s retouch. As for the costly curiosities known as ‘engraver’s proofs’—working proofs, in fine, struck off to see how the plate was progressing—speaking broadly and roughly, I do not believe in them. They have their own interest, of course, as illustrating the means by which the effect was obtained; but, in quality, they yield to an impression taken when the effect had just been got, or, in the case of a fine Second or later State, to an impression taken when the effect, lost in the interval by wear, had just been regained.

No one who appreciates Turner can quite confine himself to the ‘Liber,’ though the ‘Liber’ is the most comprehensive expression of that infinite genius. Accordingly, in my drawers there may be found, no doubt, pieces from one or other of his engraved publications: something, it may be, from the ‘Rivers of England’—amongst them the ‘York’ and the ‘Ripon,’ which are not his indeed, but his friend Girtin’s—something from the ‘Southern Coast’; and, from the ‘England and Wales,’ that exquisite ‘Yarmouth,’ which, like the ‘Clovelly’and the ‘Portsmouth’ (both of them in the ‘Southern Coast’) exemplifies old William Miller’s marvellous faculty of rendering the sky effects, the aerial perspective, of Turner’s maturest art. One has heard of Turner’s compliments to John Pye, over ‘Pope’s Villa,’ and they were not undeserved; but how great should his recognition have been of the Scottish Quaker, simple of nature, subtle of gift, for whom no passage of Turner’s brush-work was too intricate or too baffling! But let us turn to earlier Masters.

Only well-to-do people can buy, in any large numbers and in those fine impressions which alone rightly represent their subjects, the etchings of Rembrandt; but it is a wonder, and almost a shame, that so few well-to-do English people take advantage of their opportunities; for, as a result of their not doing so, or doing so at the best in so scanty a measure, a most undue proportion of the fine Rembrandts which have been the ornaments of English collections have within the last few years crossed the seas, and are now lodged—where they are justly appreciated—in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Baltimore, New York. Where, amongst us in England, are the successors of Dr. Wellesley, of Sir Abraham Hume, of Mr. Holford, of my kind,delightful friend, Richard Fisher? We want a new race of collectors of the highest class of ancient prints; the old is dying out; the young is too modest or too timid: it is afraid to spend its money, though its money could hardly be spent more economically. Looked at even from the financial point of view—as the great auctions prove—nothing is better justified than the investment of important sums in the prints by the Masters. Rembrandt is for all Time. Every year—taking the wide world over—there is an increase in the number of people sensible enough to desire and determine to possess themselves of some representation of his work.

Nothing but small means has prevented my buying in abundance Rembrandt’s incomparable landscapes, so well aware am I that Landscape Art reaches its topmost level in the best of Rembrandt’s work—in his ‘Cottage with Dutch Hay-Barn,’ say, and in his ‘Landscape with a Tower.’ His Sacred Subjects, with all their virtues of ‘sincerity and inwardness,’ commend themselves less to us. His Portraiture, upon the other hand, combines every artistic charm with every human interest. A few examples I have—a mere handful, but good impressions they must always be; and the two which, from their subjects, are least unworthy of mention,are, I suppose, a First State of the ‘Clément de Jonghe,’ the Amsterdam print-seller, which has a picturesqueness less obvious, but a character more subtle, than in the plate’s later states; and an early and fortunate impression from that group of studies, executed, I am convinced, in different years, and containing as its chiefest and latest ornament an energetically sketched portrait of Rembrandt himself, in that advanced middle life of his, which gave us, perhaps, the greatest number of the fine fruits of his genius. To certain of the commentators on Rembrandt, this rare little plate—a masterly collection ofcroquis, and nothing besides—is not, I fancy, quite sufficiently known; though our admirable English amateur, Wilson—who wrote in 1836—and the latest deceased of the great French collectors and commentators, Monsieur Dutuit, of Rouen, do it conspicuous justice. My impression belonged, a generation or two ago, to the Arozarena collection. I got it, with some other things, at that fascinating shop in Paris, whose outside is so simple and so unassuming, whose inside is stuffed with treasures—the shop a door or two from the Quai Malaquais, up the dark and narrow ‘Rue des Saint-Pères,’ at which, from the morning to the evening hours, sits placidly at his desk ‘Monsieur Jules’—Clément’ssuccessor, once Clément’s assistant—the learned ‘Marchand d’Estampes de la Bibliothèque Nationale.’

Even the smallest of collectors may have a ‘speciality’—and I suppose my speciality to be the comparatively humble one of Méryon and of Whistler—or, perhaps, of modern etchings generally—but (let me say it for myself as well as for others) it is at one’s peril that one is specialist alone. Things are seen then out of all proportion; bias and prejudice take the place of judgment—a mere fanaticism flourishes, where there ought to be a growing critical capacity, alert and lively. On that account, in my small cabinet, a Whistler or a Méryon is liable to be confronted with an Italian of the Renaissance, a German of the day of Dürer. Zoan Andrea’s ‘Dance of Damsels,’ after a design of Mantegna’s, a Coat of Arms of Beham’s, an ornament of Aldegrever’s, instructively remind me of a delicacy earlier than Whistler’s, and of aburin sobre et mâlethat was wielded three hundred years before Méryon’s. But while, in collecting, I venture to discountenance the exclusive devotion to a particular master, I am almost as strongly against the acquisition of isolated examples of very many men. If a man is worth representing at all, represent him at the least by a little handful of his works. Collect one or twomasters largely, and obtain of others small but characteristic groups.

* * * * *

I am fond of my few French prints of the Eighteenth Century. It is easy to dispose of them (a common way in England)—the works, I mean, of all that Eighteenth Century School—by calling them light, trifling, even indiscreet in certain of their revelations of a life that seldom aimed to be austere; but, in reality, the prints of the ‘Dix-Huitième’ represent all phases of the thoughts and ways of French society—its deeds and its ideals—from the childhood of Louis Quinze to the Revolution; and, if you read Frenchcontesand comedy, memoir and criticism, these things, from Watteau to Chardin, from Chardin to Fragonard, are their true illustrations. For myself, I do but mourn that I have so few of them: not a single Moreau, for instance—not the ‘Sortie de l’Opéra,’ with the love-letter conveyed in the nosegay, nor ‘C’est un Fils, Monsieur!’ in which a well-favoured young woman bounces into the library of the fortunate collector, with the news that he is also, as it seems, a parent. The insular pre-Raphaelite speaks of the French Eighteenth Century as ‘the bad period.’ It is ‘the bad period’ to people who are too rigid tograsp its grace. The narrowly learned, as Walter Savage Landor reminds us—‘the generality of the learned,’ he is even severe enough to say—‘are apt to conceive that in easy movement there is a want of solidity and strength.’ Now, ‘easy movement,’ spontaneous elegance, is the very characteristic of the Art of France, as it is of its delightful people; and not to recognise, not to enjoy that, is merely to be under the sway of pedantry, antiquarian or academic. French Eighteenth Century Art, like Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century, like the Art of Titian and of Velasquez, reflected Life—much of the charm of Life—and unless it be that Life itself and Beauty have no interest for us, we cannot afford to pass that Art superciliously by.

Wonderfully small, however, is the amount of sympathy that I am privileged to expect from English collectors of the older type, in my enjoyment of a sometimes faulty, but an often bewitching, school. A score of French prints, some of them recording the high elegance of Watteau, the pleasant gallantry of Baudouin or Lavreince, the sober homeliness and the grave truth of Chardin (whose lessons were Wordsworthian in their way)—these various things, which I shall still venture to cherish, are wont to be ‘sat upon’ by the antiquary; much as acertain little table-case of Battersea enamels, dainty and aglow with colour, like flowers on a wintry day (puce and gold androse du Barry, that no time and no winter fades), is ‘sat upon’ by some of my friends who behold indescribable virtues in every product of Japanese design. We have all of us got our limits—I remember, though, that in France, two of the men most prominent and influential in their love for the artistic work of their own country in its famous ‘Dix-Huitième,’ had been almost the first to welcome the inventions of the Japanese. These men were Philippe Burty and Edmond de Goncourt—but then it is lamentably true that they ignored Rembrandt and Dürer, as far as any practical interest in them was concerned.

The mention of the Frenchmen brings me once more face to face with two striking personalities. Burty was a critic in journalism, and anInspecteur des Beaux Artsbesides—an enthusiast, a connoisseur, a realcurieux. When I knew him he had already done much in France for the popular recognition of Etching. His flat upon an outer boulevard—the Boulevard des Batignolles—told charmingly of the refinement and variety of his tastes. Somekakemonosandtsubashung on the walls; but here there was an etching, and there an ivory. And he had alittlecoin de tapisserie, as he smilingly said, ‘like Erasmus at the Louvre’—he was thinking of the background of Holbein’s picture. In his deep French bookcases, well-bound volumes were ranged, a second row behind the first, and when the glass doors were opened and a few vacant places discovered, Burty’s favourite cat—the cat of the literary man, moving with quietude, treading with grace—curved about in the bookcase, sleek and smooth, harmless, careful, almost appreciative.

One Sunday afternoon, when, I remember, as the result of an accident, we had failed to see Zola, Philippe Burty drove me down to Auteuil—to the Villa Montmorency, with its wild poetic garden—to spend a couple of hours with Edmond de Goncourt and his treasures. Jules, the beloved brother, was already dead, and Edmond, surrounded by his collections, lived lonely at Auteuil, in the house arranged for both. Stately and distinguished, melancholy, and yet interested, a descendant of the oldnoblesse, with many memories in the dark brown eyes that lay under black eyebrows and silver-grey hair, Edmond de Goncourt moved about amongst his portfolios, saying a word here, and there directing a glance. The history of his life surrounded him—the treasures he and his brother had amassed and studied, before the‘Dix-Huitième’ was fashionable, and very much as a recreation from those ‘noires études de la vie contemporaine’—the words are his own—which had given usGerminie LacerteuxandManette Salomon. No such collection of that fascinating French ‘Dix-Huitième’ as belongs to Edmond de Goncourt has ever been made. HisMaison d’un Artisteis a book which is written for the most part about it, and in comparison with its treasures my humble score of chosen prints—chiefly, after all, by the Eighteenth Century’s more serious masters—becomes absolutely insignificant. Still, they remind me, pleasantly enough, of a delightful period, a delightful people, and of an art that was masterly when it was Watteau’s, more lightly gracious when it was Pater’s, and, when it was Chardin’s, was sedate and simple and almost austere.

Sketches in oil or water-colour by Cotman and James Ward, by Thomas Collier and Charles Green, Edwin Hayes, Alfred East, Shannon, Linton, Fulleylove, Carl Haag, Wyke Bayliss, Francis James—I need not finish the list, and it would be foreign to the present purpose to enlarge on the men—do something, one may hope, to prevent one’s bowing the knee at only a single shrine. But is that indeed my danger?—I, who confess to have felt at times the force ofquite another temptation—the temptation to be busy at last in getting together things with which the pictorial Art that I love has nothing to do. A comely little piece or so of ‘Blue and White’; a bit of Worcester, with the square mark; a Nantgarw plate, with its ‘Billingsley rose’; a plate of Frankenthal, bought in the Corratorie at Geneva, at a shop where, two generations ago, they had sold things of that fabric to none other than Balzac (who declared, through hisCousin Pons, that Frankenthal would one day be as much sought after as Sèvres)—these things, I say, the thin end of the wedge, things that are nothing by themselves, remind me that, in gathering china, Man may be happy. And so a few books—the earliest obtained being theLyrical Balladsof 1798,relieure Janséniste, a green coat by Riviere, and the Rogers with the Turner illustrations, in ‘original boards,’ now, alas! disposed to crack—assure me of the charm that must lurk for my luckier brethren in the seriously gathering together of First Editions or of famous ones.

Let us pass to the examples of the Revival of Etching. About forty Méryons, about seventy Whistlers, are mine. The one artist has been much more prolific than the other, and thus, while, as regards Méryon, the possession of even ‘forty’ printsallows the collector to be fairly well provided for, as regards Whistler, the ‘seventy’ represent scarcely a third part of that etcher’s catalogued work. Mr. H. S. Theobald has more Whistlers than I have; so has Sir John Day; Mr. B. B. Macgeorge, of Glasgow, has, I know, more Méryons; while, of both these masters, distinctly larger collections than my own rest in the hands of Mr. Samuel P. Avery and of Mr. Howard Mansfield, of New York.

Nearly all the finer plates of Méryon—those in which, to use his own phrase, he ‘engraved Paris,’ with a fidelity so affectionate, yet with an imagination so tragic—were wrought between the year 1850 and the year 1854. Bracquemond was the only important figure in the group to whom the Revival of Etching is due, who was working at that time. Whistler, Seymour Haden, Jules Jacquemart, and Legros, were all of them a little later; Whistler’s first dated plate—and he was quite among the earliest of these artists—being of the year 1857.

In looking through my Méryons, it interests me to find that a good many that are in my Solander-box to-day, belonged, long since, to distinguished Frenchmen who were Méryon’s contemporaries. Thus, a First State of the ‘Saint-Etienne-du-Mont’ was given by Méryon to Bracquemond. My impressionsof the ‘Abside’ and the ‘Stryge’ belonged to Aglaüs Bouvenne, who catalogued Bonington, appreciated Méryon, and, in comparatively recent years, wrote some reminiscences of him. A ‘Rue des Toiles, à Bourges’ has on it Méryon’s dedicatory inscription, addressed to Hillemacher the painter. A curious proof of the ‘Partie de la Cité de Paris,’ before the introduction of the towers, which were never really in the actual view, though Méryon chose to see them there, came from the friend of Méryon’s youth, a friend who spoke over his grave—M. de Salicis. Some others of the prints have been Philippe Burty’s. The final trial proof of the ‘Tourelle, dite “de Marat,”’ and one or two other subjects, of which I spare the reader the details, were originally bought of Méryon by M. Wasset, a man the public wots not of, but a collector full of character: the ‘Cousin Pons,’ I dare to call him, of my own earlier day.

Let me, in a paragraph devoted to himself alone, recall M. Wasset to my memory. An employé—secrétaire, it may be—at the Ministry of War, he lived, when I mounted to his flat, one winter’s night (how many years ago!) in a dark, winding, narrow street, of the Rive Gauche, between the Seine and St. Sulpice—the Rue Jacob. The Cousin Pons, did I say, this gentleman resembled? But Pons wasgourmetas well as connoisseur—M. Wasset knew no passion but the collector’s. He dined modestly—by subscription, it was understood—at the Café Procope, in the Quarter—wasabonnéfor repasts taken there, in a haunt once classic, now dull and cheap. His rooms in the Rue Jacob, low and small, were stuffed full with his collections.Bric-à-brache had, even more than prints. Strange beings who dredged in the River, brought him ancient jewellery, and seventeenth-century watches, that had slept their Rip Van Winkle sleep in the mud of the Seine. I see the venerable collector now, his sombre and crowded rooms lit with a single lamp, and he, passing about, spare, eager, and trembling, with bowed figure; garrulous, excited as with wine, by the mere sight and handling of his accumulated possessions. A few years afterwards—urged thereto by the greatest of Parisian printsellers, Clément, who is now no more—he had a sale, in the Rue Drouot, of his hundreds of prints, of which the Méryons, of course, formed but a small part. Other treasures—then ardently desired—he was to purchase with the proceeds. Is his heart, one wonders, with those treasures now—in the dark Paris street? Or, the hands that trembled so, fifteen years since—have they relaxed their hold, for ever, of the things thatwere meat and drink, that were wife and child, to him?

Méryon, I remember, took me by storm as a great artistic personality, and, since he conquered me immediately, I have always been faithful to him. In that there is no sort of virtue; for has he not now become, thus early, almost everywhere, where prints are loved, an accepted classic? To appreciate Whistler—even at all to enjoy him—requires a longer education. There are even some things that at first one resents. A touch of charlatanry lurks, one at first supposes, in the Bond Street ‘arrangement in yellow and white,’ and in thevelariumunder which we were invited to gather when the master held sway in Suffolk Street. But, in time, that impression passes. Then, one accepts the man whole—takes him as he is—genius like his has a certain licence to be abnormal. And though it pleases Mr. Whistler, in sundry catalogues and joyous little books about the ‘art of making enemies,’ to represent from time to time that I, among a hundred others, do not appreciate him, that is only because he would have us believe he is a victim to the interesting monomania of persecution, and I, forsooth, when this is his mood, am called upon to figure as one of those who would pursue and vex him. Peace!peace! Now that he has ‘done battering at England’ (I will not vouch precisely for the phrase), I am, it seems, an ‘enemy’ no more. So much the better!

I take it, he and Méryon are quite the greatest of the etchers this century has seen, and if so (since of great true etchers the Eighteenth Century was barren), they are the greatest since the days of Claude and Rembrandt. To no one who has studied any group of their plates for a single quarter of an hour, can it be necessary to insist upon the essential unlikeness of these two remarkable men. Unity of impression—almost a test of excellence, the one note dominant, the rest subordinated—that is found, I know, and found almost equally, in the work of both. But by what different measures has it been maintained! Whistler, in so much of his work, has shown himself the flexible, vivacious, and consummate sketcher, the artist whose choice of economical and telling ‘line’ is faultless and perhaps well-nigh immediate. Méryon, upon the other hand, has been remarkable for building up, with learned patience worthy of Albert Dürer, little by little, his effects; so that when the thing is done, and that sombre vision of his has become a realised performance, he has not so much made a drawing upon a plate, as erected a monument (for so it strikes one) frombase to coping-stone. Such work has at least the permanence of the very monuments it records. Anœuvre de longue haleine—a task severe and protracted—is each one of Méryon’s important coppers. Yet all the length of Méryon’s labour witnesses to no relaxing hold of his first thought, and in the great complexity of ordered line there is revealed no superfluous, no insignificant stroke.

Each man is discovered in his work. In Méryon’s ‘Abside’ say, in the ‘Pont Neuf,’ in the ‘Saint-Etienne-du Mont,’ is his brooding spirit, his patient craftsmanship, his temperament intense and profound. He was poor; he was often weary; he spent himself on his work. In Whistler’s ‘Garden,’ in his ‘Piazzetta,’ in his ‘Florence Leyland,’ in the ‘Large Pool,’ in that wonderful tiny thing, ‘The Fruit Shop,’ there is the boyish freshness, the spirit of enjoyment, which he has known how to preserve till the present time. Whistler has never been tired, or, if he has, he and his work have parted company at that moment. Wonderful as is his gift of observation and handling, his plates are a lark’s song. As you see the man before you, elastic, joyous, slim, anddébonnair, having never known the heavy and sad wisdom of our modern youth, nor the cares of our middle age, his appearance almostpersuades you that all his exquisite craftsmanship, practised now for forty years, is but the blameless recreation of an hour snatched from life’s severer tasks—the task of sipping duly,à l’heure de l’absinthe, one’sapéritif, on the Boulevard; of pulling on the River, in the long June days; of condensing every rule of life into perhaps three epigrams, effective at a dinner-party. Who would not envy this possessor of a craft fantastic, airy, and immortal! Though Mr. Whistler may entertainingly insinuate that long life has been denied to his friendships, he will agree with me, I know, when I assert that it is secured to his etchings.

That my print-drawers contain but four or five etchings by Seymour Haden is at once my misfortune and my reproach. As one looks at them one conjures up visions of bygone sales at Sotheby’s, when as yet Mr. Wilkinson, benign and aged, sat in the chair, to wield the ivory hammer—what opportunities neglected, of which the more diligent have availed themselves! For I cannot accept Seymour Haden’s too modest estimate of the value of his own work. Labour so energetic and decisive is not destined to be prized by one generation alone, and in esteeming it comparatively lightly, his connoisseurship, accurate enough when it is concernedwith Claude and Rembrandt, Méryon and Whistler—all of whom, in his time, he has loved and collected—is for once at fault.

I am somewhat poor again in those etchings which are the creation of the austere genius of Legros. Popular they will never be, for Legros is almost alone among men of genius in not belonging to his own day—in receiving well-nigh no influence from the actual hour. He is a belated Old Master—but a ‘master’ always: never an affected copyist, who pranks ‘in faded antique dress.’ Had he but humoured the affectations of the time, it is quite possible that the time would at all events have talked about him, and, denied actual popularity, he might yet have been solaced by an æsthetic coterie’s hysterical admiration. But that has not been for Legros. As it is, with his gravely whispered message, his general reticence, his overmastering sense of Style, his indifference to attractive truths of detail, his scorn of the merely clever, he is placed at a disadvantage. But his work remains; not only the etchings, of which Messieurs Thibaudeau and Poulet-Malassis catalogued a hundred and sixty-eight as long ago as 1877, but the grave pictures in which the peasant of the Boulognais devoutly worships, or in which the painted landscape is as the landscapeof a dream, and the vigorous oil portraits—not one of which, perhaps, reaches the nobility of his etched portrait of Watts—and the pencil drawings of the nude, several of which Legros has given to the Museum of his birthplace, Dijon, where the stray Englishman who stays to look at them finds that they are as finely severe as are the pencil drawings of Ingres. I have his one big etching, ‘La Mort du Vagabond’—the scale too large to be effective generally, but,paceMr. Whistler, I do not, in this case, find it ‘an offence,’4—and amongst others, two that have, it may be, no particular rarity, but that are worthily, and I think even exceptionally, characteristic. The one is ‘La Communion dans l’Eglise Saint-Médard’: in line and in feeling an instance of the most dignified treatment of ecclesiastical function or religious office. And the other is ‘Les Chantres Espagnols,’ the singing-men, aged and decayed, eight of them, in a darkened choir—was ever a vision of narrow and of saddened lives more serious or more penetrating!

4‘The huge plate,’ writes Mr. Whistler—on the whole truthfully—‘the huge plate is an offence: its undertaking an unbecoming display of determination and ignorance, its accomplishment a triumph of unthinking earnestness and uncontrolled energy.’

From these grave things it is sometimes a relief to turn to Jacquemart’s etchings of still-life. The manhimself had troubles: not difficulties about money, nor, like Méryon, the knowledge that he was little appreciated—for appreciation came to him early—but lack of health during years that should have been vigorous, and a compulsory flight towards the sunshine, which yet did not appreciably lessen the distance that divided him from Death. But his work, from end to end, in its serene, deliberate accomplishment, suggests no chances and changes, no personal emotion, and even no actual experience of human life. One says at first, it might have been done at any period; then one recognises perhaps what one may call a modern feeling for the object portrayed; then one thinks of Hollar’s ‘Five Muffs,’ and of Rembrandt’s ‘Shell,’ and remembers that both have a freedom, a delicate skill, akin, after all, to the skill and the freedom in the etchings of Jacquemart. Of Jacquemart’s two great series, the prints for his father’sHistoire de la Porcelaineand those of the ‘Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne,’ I possess only the first, and these in book form, as they were sent me by Madame Techener, the widow of Jacquemart’s publisher and friend. In a simple, russet-coloured half-binding, done afterwards by Zaehnsdorf, they stand on a shelf I go to. Elsewhere are such proofs of Jacquemart etchings as the occasionalgood fortune of auction rooms—snatched in a spare half-hour—has brought to a life-long lover of engravings. There is a certain plate of sword-handles and daggers—things, some of them, that ‘rend andrip’—

‘Gash rough, slash smooth, help Hate so many ways,Yet ever keep a beauty that betraysLove still at work with the artificer, through all his quaint devising—’

‘Gash rough, slash smooth, help Hate so many ways,

Yet ever keep a beauty that betrays

Love still at work with the artificer, through all his quaint devising—’

as Robert Browning wrote, describing weapons that lay, as I remember, at peace at last, on his own drawing-room table. How Jacquemart etched such blades! By this print of his there is one of a seventeenth-century watch—just such a watch as I said used to be fished up from the bed of the Seine, for quaint old Monsieur Wasset—and with it the presentment of Renaissance jewel; and, perhaps, of a carved mirror, or a bit of Valenciennes porcelain.

Allow me a reflection! The cheapest way of enjoyingobjets d’artis to enjoy them in etchings; and it is often the easiest way, since you have but to sit in your chair and look; and it is often not the least true, since the etcher himself has seen with trained eye before his trained hand came to draw. Well, to enjoyobjets d’artin that fashion, with tolerable completeness and extreme satisfaction, theintelligent poor man has really but to get the two chief series of Jacquemarts (those that are still lacking to me, the ‘Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne,’ are, I know Seymour Haden would tell me, the bigger, broader, richer, more spontaneous of the two), and those fifty plates by different etchers, of whom Courtry, Greux, and Le Rat were among the principal, which Holloway published about a score of years since—‘Works of Art in the Collections of England.’ In that excellent folio, the men who have just been mentioned, and several others, followed hard on Jacquemart’s heels. What a treatment of jade, in some of those plates! Mr. Addington’s vase in particular—absolutely unctuous. What a treatment ofcristal de roche! Desgoffe’s painted panel at the Luxembourg is only a little finer. What a treatment of ivory!—that extraordinary Moorish casket, that was Malcolm of Poltalloch’s.

But this is only copyist’s etching, some people may say. ‘Copyists’—No! You would not enjoy it so much, were it merely servile imitation. It is interpretation, significant and spirited, alert and vivid.

Of the original etchers of the younger school in England, Frank Short and William Strang have long seemed to me the most interesting, notwithstandingthe as yet somewhat marked limitations of theme of the one, and that possessing ‘devil’ of the love of ugliness which I have now almost ceased to hope may be exorcised from the other. Strang, for all the presence of that which is repulsive to many, is a man of great qualities. A Celt to the depths of him, he is wildly imaginative. He is dramatic, and his prints are dramatic, however much he may profess to be busy with line and tone. Besides, there are moments in which he confesses to being a poet. He has the instinct of tragedy. Technically, his etchings are almost always good; nor is it, to my mind, a sin in them that so many of them set you thinking. I have but a few of Mr. Strang’s prints; of Frank Short’s I have more, and when he can interpret a Dewint like that ‘Road in Yorkshire,’ and a Constable like that sketch of Mr. Vaughan’s, I see no reason for not putting those mezzotints—interpretations so brilliant, translations so faithful yet so free—by the side of his work in Etching, inspired not by familiarity with the art of another, but by the presence of charming line or charming vista in Nature. Frank Short, in his original work, is a most delicate draughtsman of form in landscape. ‘Evening, Bosham,’ and ‘Sleeping till the Flood,’ sufficiently show it.

Of another good man, Mr. C. J. Watson, I have not enough to judge him at my ease; but he is a sterling etcher, distinctly gifted, and without artifice and trick. An actually imaginative vision one must not perhaps ask of him, but mental flexibility—can he but cultivate it—may enable him to go far.

‘Profil de Jeune Fille,’ a rare dry-point by Paul Helleu, has, it seems to me, like much of the work by that most modern of Parisian pastellists and etchers, a delightful spontaneity and force and freedom. It is an inevitablechef-d’œuvre—the greatest, perhaps, of a facile and exquisite master.

My gossip stops. Grant me only the grace of one more line, to avow the satisfaction with which, even after having enjoyed the companionship of at least some little work that is admittedly classic, I can look upon the prints of Mr. Charles Holroyd, a young etcher of our latest day. In them so much of what is generally, and often even rightly, seductive, is frankly abandoned, that they may keep unimpaired at least the distinction and reticence which are the very soul of Style.

(Art Journal, January and March 1894.)

Back to Index Next