THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT, FAIRMOUNT PARK.
THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT, FAIRMOUNT PARK.
For this reason, but few of the notable names of modern foreigners can be given. However, Hamo Thornycroft, of England, must not be overlooked, whose famous “Mower” is much admired; nor Onslow Ford, more youthful and romantic in style. John Henry Foley, of Dublin, has had a pronounced effect on English sculpture, being a successful teacher, including among his pupils several distinguished women, among them the Princess Louise and the Earl of Elgin’s granddaughter, Miss Grant. George Tinworth’s terra cotta reliefs must conclude the list of English works. A few Russians have reached eminence, mainly by animal studies. Antocolski, a Jew of Wilna, of poorest parentage, has done powerful figure work of a serious, rather melancholy sort, the most important being a “Christ Bound.” What is best in modern Italian and German work is practically French, and of the French themselves the list is too long to complete. A few must suffice, such as Jean Alexandre Falguière, who aspires, like Carpeaux, to give vitality by means of vigorous action to his figures. Emanuel Frémiet has worn with some distinction the mantle descended from Barye’s shoulders. Vidal, another pupil of Barye, was blind for twenty years, yet gained two medals for correct anatomy in his modeling. Carrier Belleuse’s “Hebe Asleep” is an example of the delicate style, and Alfred Boucher shows the other extreme in his rendering of sturdy masculine figures, toiling or racing, striving to present in sculpture the picture of human struggle for existence, as did Millet in his paintings. These materialistic studies represent the fight for the bread and breath of life, while the impressionist contortions of the Rodin school try to suggest the conflict of emotions, good and bad, and the battle of spiritual and physical desires and development.
From time immemorial to the present day men have been fashioning shapes of clay, experimenting with different kinds, different degrees of heat, and different chemical combinations to form glazes and colorings. The fundamental processes of pottery making have changed but little since prehistoric times, and wall pictures of the days of the Ptolemies show the potter’s wheel whirling much as it does at present, although, of course, many modern inventions have been made to facilitate different forms of work. In the famous Sèvres factories in France, established under royal patronage and still remaining government property, a modern device has rendered possible the making of large vases of extremely thin ware. To prevent the delicate paste of which these are made from collapsing by its own weight before it can harden, the vase or jar is moulded in an air-tight chamber, the mouth of the object sealed, and the air exhausted from the chamber, leaving the object in a vacuum. The air contained in itself is sufficient to hold up the sides until they harden and danger of collapse is over, when it can be fired. Attempts were made in vain to equal the delicacy of the Chinese egg-shell ware, when, one day an educated Chinese visitor to the factories observed the method employed, and exclaimed, “This is the way we make those cups,” and, taking a mould, he dipped it into the liquid paste, rinsed it around and emptied it at once. A thin film like a soap bubble remained in the mould, which hardened enough to form the dainty ware the workers had been trying without success to produce; so the Chinese method was at once adopted.About the middle of the last century an impetus of development in ceramic art appeared all over the continent of Europe and in England. This was probably due to the discovery, in different places, of kaolin or the fine clay of which porcelain is made, which stimulated the pottery industry and caused the establishment of many factories which are still working to-day. The Dresden works, founded in 1700, were hidden in an old fortress, and their secrets jealously guarded. After about a century they went into decay, but in 1863 were revived and reëstablished in large new buildings of their own, where dainty flowered ware is produced, which has again come into popular favor. Italian ceramics are apt to be florid and overloaded with decoration, that called “majolica” deriving its name from the island of Majorca, where it was first made. “Fayence” comes from Faenza, and the French form of the name, “faïence,” has been used to designate porcelain in general. The town of Limoges, in France, has been a centre of ceramic art since 1773, when a French firm established a factory for the production of a peculiarly fine ware, made possible by the superior quality of the kaolin found in the neighborhood. In 1839 a lady in New York showed the Haviland firm a cup of delicate ware, asking them to match it for her. It was so much finer than anything they had seen that they desired to import some for their own business. With this end in view, Mr. David Haviland took the cup and went to France trying to find where it had been made. He was directed to Limoges and, in the factories there, he tried to have English shapes and decorations copied in the exquisite ware. The conservatism and slow methods of the place were not equal to his demands, and he therefore established a factory of his own, which, since the middle of the century, has been the most important in the town.
In England, the most celebrated potteries are all over a century old, and the ceramic art has been developed to the highest degree both in technical and artistic directions. The works of the Doulton firm, who own many potteries, are particularly rich in color, and decoration, those from their factory at Lambeth being especially fine. So also are the Coalport wares, celebrated for their rich blue color, the Royal Worcester and the Crown Derby. In these English factories, and also in those on the Continent, artists of great skill are employed as decorators, and in the Wedgwood works the delicate cameo figures in white relief on a tinted ground were originated by the famous sculptor, John Flaxman. In America, the Trenton potteries turn out a vast quantity of wares of varying degrees of artistic excellence, and one factory has the secret of an old Irish ware, the Belleek, of indescribable delicacy, like an iridescent sea shell, long thought to be a lost art. The Rookwood pottery, of most artistic quality in design and color, is made in Cincinnati, and was the invention of a woman who has trained a school of girls as decorators; as has also the Tiffany firm in New York for their marvelous glass work. An adequate description of the work of this firm would fill a book, as they have developed undreamed-of possibilities in the use of glass for decorative purposes. They have revived forgotten arts of coloring and invented new processes of treatment, that give results like fairy work, no two pieces being alike. These and many other forms of industrial art products are brought to a high plane of perfection nowadays, although the word “art” is grievously abused, being applied to everything salable, from writing paper tosoap. The great schools and institutions which teach the arts and industries combined are doing vast good, however, in improving public taste and teaching the world to discriminate between true art and false, and their influence can already be felt in higher standards of decoration in articles of common daily use.
Closely following painting comes black and white art in various forms, either reproductive or original work, and it is difficult to discriminate between fine art and handicraft in the many processes employed. Engraving on metal has long been known, and steel was considered an especially valuable method of reproducing paintings until within a generation. Etching is another old form of black and white work, and is still popular, though less so than formerly. Wood engraving during this century has passed through many stages of development, and in the illustrations of books and magazines has been brought to a high standing as a fine art. It is still used in many ways, but all those processes that require line work by hand are being superseded by the photo-type processes, of which there are many kinds. The making of plates or blocks for printing required skilled hand work, and the engravers and wood-cutters were necessarily artists themselves, so that while they were copying the work of others they were also producing works of art themselves. The plates and prints were, therefore, valuable and expensive, and, as modern haste grew more and more to demand cheap quick work, the old careful style of working gave way to mechanical methods of greater speed. With the development of photography and its application to the engraver’s art, while a certain individual artistic character in the work was lost, the actual copying of painting in all the details of light, shade, and half tones has been carried to a high degree of perfection. By what is known as photogravure, every tiny brush mark and every different tint of color is reproduced with scientific accuracy in black and white. This is accomplished by having a photograph of the painting taken on a gelatine film, which is suspended in a bath of acid in the line of an electric current. This current, playing over a sheet of copper, sets free the molecules of metal that are deposited upon the film, and filling all the little inequalities of the surface, produce what is practically a cast of the photograph in copper. The plate, thus secured, is gone over by hand and finished here and there with engraver’s tools, and from this prints may be duplicated to any extent. In engraved plates the design is cut into the metal, incised lines being either drawn by hand with a sharp point, called “dry point” work, or eaten in by acids, the remaining surface of the plate being protected from the acid by a greasy film. In wood-cutting, the blocks show a reverse process, the design being left standing in fine lines, while the remaining surface is cut away, so that a wood-cut is in reality a carving in low relief. The modern electrotype processes produce a similar result on a metal block by the action of acid, a method capable of most speedy work and therefore in demand among the multitude of daily publications illustrating current events. Of course these hasty results can scarcely be called fine art, but they are developments of artistic industries, calculated to meet certain needs of our busy civilization.
PHOTOGRAPHIC VIEW OF NEW YORK CITY AND HUDSON RIVER, TAKEN FROM 26TH STORY OF PARK ROW BUILDING.
PHOTOGRAPHIC VIEW OF NEW YORK CITY AND HUDSON RIVER, TAKEN FROM 26TH STORY OF PARK ROW BUILDING.
For more artistic effects, various forms of lithography have given beautiful results. This valuable process was accidentally discovered in 1796, by ayoung Bohemian, Aloys Senefelder, of Prague. Desiring to write a list, and having no paper, he scrawled on a fine stone floor tile a few words, and later on, coming to remove them, he bethought him of an experiment with acid on the stone. This he tried, finding the stone eaten away all around his writing, leaving that raised in sufficient relief to print from, the lettering being done with a greasy writing substance that repelled the acid. Later experiments proved that the eating away of the stone was not necessary if the design were made with an oily material and the rest of the surface kept moist with a weak solution of acid. A greasy printing ink being applied would stick only to the oily design and not to the acidulated surface, which process made possible the printing from flat stones, which were not so liable to wear out as the relief designs. Senefelder died in 1824, living long enough to see his invention in use throughout the world, although of course he could not know the improvements that photography would bring. On the centennial anniversary of this great discovery in 1896, exhibitions of lithographic works were held in London and Paris, and the possibilities and developments shown. Mr. James McNeill Whistler has made many very interesting experiments with it, as have also Mr. Joseph Pennell and Mr. Hubert Herkomer. The latter has made innumerable experiments and inventions in his busy artistic career, and has just recently perfected an improvement on lithography which he calls “plate printing,” and which has been dubbed by the irreverent the “Herkotype” process. It is simply painting in a peculiar oily ink on a metal plate, which, while the ink is moist, is dusted over with a fine powder which adheres to every brush mark on the surface. One ingredientof this powder is a metal that is electrically conductible, and, after the excess of powder is brushed off, the plate, with what remains sticking on the oily surface, is placed in an electrotype bath. The copper deposited thereon by the electric current hardens and forms a negative of the original painting, which can be stripped from the plate and used in a printing-press, giving an absolutely faithful reproduction of the artist’s handiwork. A similar process, called “algraphy,” has been invented by Mr. Scholz, of Mayence, who has developed the possibilities of aluminum for plate work, the advantage of this material over stone or other metal being its extreme lightness. These processes are especially valuable to artists who can work in black and white, as their own original conception is perfectly reproduced without the possibility of misconception by some copyist, as exists where a painting is interpreted by an etcher or engraver.
Of the new processes or improvements on the old, that have arisen because of the discovery of photography, it may be said their name is legion. Photography itself is rapidly being developed into a fine art, and has become one of the most important factors of modern existence. It combines science, art, and industry, and is equally necessary to all these occupations. While it is difficult to state what was the first attempt that led to the suggestion of photography, it may be supposed the experiments of the Swedish scientist Scheele were among the first. He found that the action of the sun’s ray blackened silver chloride, and others experimenting after him, at the beginning of the century, had glimmering ideas of the possibility of a new art. As has so often happened with the dawning of some great idea, some new appreciation of a great natural law, the thought was working in many minds, and the discovery seemed to be almost simultaneous in several places. As early as 1802 Wedgwood published in the “Journal of the Royal Institute” an “account of a method of copying paintings on glass and of making profiles by the agency of light on nitrate of silver, with some remarks by Sir Humphry Davy.” These gentlemen were, however, unable to fix the impressions they procured, and a Frenchman, De Niepce, seems to have been the first to succeed in this direction. In 1826, learning that M. Louis Jacques Daguerre was experimenting on the same lines, he conferred with him and they formed a partnership. The latter seems to have been the more businesslike of the two, and the process they evolved became known as the “Daguerreotype.” De Niepce died in 1833, and Daguerre continued the partnership with his son Isidore, making many improvements, and becoming really the pioneer of modern photography. The extent of advance may be calculated from Daguerre’s own remark, that “a landscape requires seven or eight hours to be photographed, but a single statue or monument, if strongly lighted, can be taken in about three hours.” Comparing this with the instantaneous camera work of to-day, that gives us the lifelike moving figures of the kinetoscope, will illustrate the change wrought in two thirds of a century. The earliest portrait work was slow and tedious, the first portrait in New York probably being produced by Dr. Draper, the scientist, although the celebrated Professor Morse was vastly interested in the new science or art, and advanced its cause in this country.
From the beginning of photographic experiments, the greatest desire has been felt to photograph in color, and numberless attempts with more or lesssuccess have been made, but the processes are mainly slow and very expensive. A new method of photo-printing in color, however, has recently developed very artistic possibilities. This is accomplished by means of three plates, one for each of the three primary colors; the negative having been made and the plate prepared for printing in each color, the inks of each color are applied separately. One printing produces a red impression, directly on this comes a yellow impression, and on top of that is put a blue; and as all gradations of color are composed of various proportions of these three primary tints, the “overlaying” of the three inks produces a picture containing all the variety of the original subject. A still more recent discovery makes an impression upon a glass plate that gives all three colors on the same plate; but this process is a secret, and is too new to be classed among the successes of industrial art as yet.
One of the later and more notable uses of photography is found in its application to the purposes of astronomy, an evolution in modern science, which, although still in its infancy, has already produced wonderful results. About the middle of the century photographs of the moon were secured by Warren De la Rue and other astronomers, which greatly facilitated studies of the earth’s satellite, and these were followed by photographs of the sun and the sun’s corona during eclipse. It was not, however, until Professor Henry of the Smithsonian Institute originated the idea of uniting the camera with the telescope that the marvelous possibilities of stellar photography were discovered. It is not too much to say that this discovery has revolutionized the science of astronomy, extending the field of human observation into the realm of the infinite. By the aid of clockwork attachments, the telescope is made to follow the apparent motion of the star to which it may be directed, throughout the night, if desired, and the sensitive photographic plate is exposed to the action of light during a corresponding period. “Each image, however faint, has a comparatively long time on the sensitive surface, and therefore exerts a cumulative action.” The result is that stars are pictured by the camera which no human eye has ever seen. It is estimated that the camera has revealed double the number of stars discovered by the most powerful telescopes. In 1887, at a convention of astronomers held in Paris, it was resolved to photograph the entire skies, with the purpose of making a new stellar atlas to include the latest discoveries among the heavenly hosts. With this object the firmament was charted in squares, and each observatory of importance throughout the world was assigned certain of these squares to work on. This monumental labor is still going on, and it will necessarily be extended well into the first quarter of the twentieth century.
The epoch-marking paper of Dr. Röntgen, in which he announced the discovery of the X-ray, was made public in the latter part of 1895. It immediately attracted the attention of the scientific world, and, since that date, endless successions of experiments have been made with the marvelous ray in all civilized countries. The X-ray produces no noticeable effect on the retina of the eye, and we therefore acquire knowledge of it through indirect agencies. One of these agencies is the photographic plate, on which, under certain conditions, the ray acts somewhat in the same manner as does a ray of light. It is not a ray of light, in the ordinary sense, as it penetratesopaque bodies which light cannot traverse. Just what it is scientists are not yet ready to state, but its discoverer defines it as “a longitudinal vibration of luminiferous ether.” This vibration will traverse many substances opaque to light, as wood, paper, vegetable and animal tissues and fabrics, as wool, cotton, silk, etc.; and, if then directed upon a photographic plate, will produce an image there. The resulting picture is not of the object traversed by the ray, but of any intervening object which it does not pass through. As a consequence, the picture is the image, so to speak, of a shadow, and, hence has been called a “shadowgraph.” To illustrate, if the ray is directed through a human body, it will give a “shadowgraph” of the bones, or of a bullet or piece of metal, if such foreign substance be encountered on its way. Again, the ray will traverse a diamond and cast no shadow, but it will not pass through the finest imitation ever made, the “shadowgraph” showing the manufactured article.