Fine Prints Frederick Wedmore Ex Libris C.K. OGDEN A circular seal with a Latin inscription "UNIVERSITAS CALIFORNIA" around the edge, and "LIBRARIUM" at the top center. THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES The Collector Series M R. GEORGE REDWAY begs to announce the publication of this series of books, each volume of which will discuss some one of the subjects which are of interest to Collectors. Coins and Medals, Engravings, Pictures and Drawings, Postage Stamps, Bank Plates, Autographs, Armour and Weapons, Plate, Porcelain and Pottery, Old Violins, Japanese Curios, and Bric-a-brac of all sorts, will be dealt with, each in a separate volume, and by a writer specially conversant with his subject. The instance for collecting, however, is not so much cheap ridicule by those who confound it with the mere aimless bringing together of objects which have no other merit than their rarity. But it has repeatedly been proved that skill and patience are more helpful to success in col- lecting than length of purse, and it is especially for those who desire to pursue their amusement with intelligent economy that this series has been planned. The great prizes in the older forms of col- lecting have long since been won, and though it may be needful in these handbooks to refer occasionally to a book, a coin, a postage stamp, or a particular specimen, the vast bulk of savings, of which only a single example exists, the object of the series will mainly be to describe those specimens which are still attainable by the amateurs who will take the pains to hunt them down. For this reason, though the series will be written by experts, it will be written by experts who have in view, not the visitors to the great Museums of Europe, but the amateur and col- lector of any one museum. The author wishes to specialise in some one or two departments of his favourite studies, and to whom it is still open by care and judgment to bring together, at a moderate expense, small yet perfect collec- tions which any museum would be glad to possess. 2 Arrangements have been made with many well-known writers and specialists for their assistance as authors or editors of volumes of the series. Each volume will contain from 250 to 300 octave pages, from twelve to twenty plates, and a title-page designed by Mr. Laurence Housman. The series will be printed, from new type, on specially-prepared paper, by Messrs. Ballantyne, Hansen & Co. The price of each volume of the series will be $7. 6d. net. The Publisher reserves the right to issue a limited number of copies of any volume of the series either on Japanese vellum, or Whatman or India paper, or with the illustrations in a "proof" state, according as the subject of the book may suggest. The number of these will be announced in each case, and they will be strictly reserved for Subscribers before publication. The Series will be published in America by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co., Fifth Avenue, New York. 3 Uniform with this Volume The Coin Collector By W. Carew Hazlitt With 12 Colloquy Plates depicting 129 rare Pieces CONTENTS: Introduction—Coins and Coin Collections—Value of Coins—Unique or Remarkable Coins—Greek Coins—Roman—Continent of Europe—United Kingdom—the Coin Book Terminology—Bibliography—Description of Plates—Index— Mr. Hazlitt—as expert is engaged to coins; his book from the prehistoric period to the present day. "We may say at once that we have a very interesting and instructive work before us. It is not a work of mere fact, only lightly touched upon, but an attempt at dealing with any section of the subject which is it is desirable to be a book on coins in general."—Antiquary. "His writings as excellent as is intended by the author of a diligent and accurate work on the subject."—Daily Tele- graph. "An array of the latest discoveries and theories, and is sure of a welcome from the general reader as well as from the col- lectors." "This admirable volume gives a brief and sane view of the whole, in a short compass, and is full of information. In other subjects of Mr. Hazlitt's has also a student whose knowledge is at once simplicity wide and remarkably accurate."—Publishers' Chronicle. 4 Image of a white background with faint, vertical lines and some indistinct shapes. --- Collector Series FINE PRINTS Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from Microsoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/fineprints00wedm A decorative border with intricate designs and figures, including a central figure holding a scroll, flanked by smaller figures and ornate elements. AUTOGRAHS AND MANUSCRIPTS C.C. Collector Series English Water- Colours STAMPS Tapestry Lace and Embroidery MINIATURES FINE PRINTS by FREDERICK WEDMORE CONES LONDON GEORGE REDWAY VIGNETS ENGLISH Bottles & Jars PICTURES PORCELAIN Old Bibles ANCIENT GLASS A central figure holding a scroll, surrounded by smaller figures and ornate elements. A central figure holding a scroll, surrounded by smaller figures and ornate elements. [API_EMPTY_RESPONSE]
CONTENTS 748E
NO. PAGE
INTRODUCTION 2
I. THE TASK OF THE COLLECTOR 23
IL CLAUDE, VANDYKE, OSTADE, HOLLAR 37
II. REMBRANDT 48
IV. FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING 66
V. WHISTLER AND HADEN 100
Vl. LATEE ENGLISH ETCHERS 122
VII. DÜRER: THE “LITTLE MASTERS” 139
VIII. ITALIAN LINE ENGRAVINGS 158
X. FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PRINTS 169
X. TULIPEE PRINTS 188
Xl. MEZZOTINTS 209
XII. LITHOGRAPHIES 221
APPENDIX : CERTAIN WOODCUTS 241
BIBLIOGRAPHY 245
INDEX 250
N.E. 385 West A small image of a person's face with a mustache and goatee, possibly a caricature or cartoon character. A blank white page. ILLUSTRATIONS The Landscape with a Tower From REMBRANDT'S Etching. To face page 54 Clémente de Jonghe From REMBRANDT'S Etching. 62 Le Strype. From MERCYON'S Etching. 80 The Little Horse. From the engraving by DUCER. 140 Cost of Arms with the Cock. From the engraving by DUCER. 146 Fusils of the Crescent. From the Engraving by LUCAS VAN LEYDEN. 156 Dance of Devils. From ZOAN ANNEKE'S Print after MAN. TRENDA's design. 164 Saint Cecilia. From MARC ANTONIO'S Engraving after RAPHAEL. 167 Le Jeu de l'Orgue From BURGUESE'S Engraving after CHARDIN. 178 Scènes and Wigs From the Print by TURNER. 198 Esther Jocosa. From SELFRIDGE'S Mezzotint after REYNOLDS. 212 Interior of Country Ale-house. From WILLIAM WARD'S Mezzotint after MORGAN. vii A blank white page. F I N E P R I N T S INTRODUCTION In the collecting of prints—of prints which must be fine and may most probably be rare—there is an ample recompense for the labour of the diligent, and room for the exercise of the most various tastes. Certain of the objects on which the modern collector sets his hands have, it may be, hardly any other virtue than the doubtful one of scarcity; but fine prints, whatever School they may belong to, and whatever may be the money value that happens to be affixed to them by the fashion of the time, have always the fascination of beauty and the interest of historical association. Then, considered as collections of works of art, there is the practical convenience of their compactness. The print-collector carries a museum in a portfolio, or packs away a picture gallery, neatly, within the compass of one slender-box. Again, fine prints are not only valuable but occupy him self with intelligent industry, may, even to-day, have a collection of fine things without paying overmuch, or even very much, for them. All will depend upon the School or master that he particularly affects. Has he 9 FINE PRINTS at his disposal only a few bank-notes, or only a few sovereigns even, every year?—he may yet surround himself with excellent possessions, of which he will not speedily exhaust the charm. Has he the fortune of an Astor or a Vanderbilt?—he may instruct the greatest dealers in the trade to struggle in the auction-room, on his behalf, with the representatives of the Berlin Museum. And it may be his triumph, then, to have paid the precisely sum of the very smallest part of that interest Reimbursed by the world, whether he be rich non or poor—but especially, I think, if he be poor—he will have been educating himself to the finer perception of a masculine yet lovely art, and, over and above indulging the "fail" of the collector, he will find that his possessions reuse within him an especial interest in some period of Art History, teach him a real and delicate discrimination of an artist's qualities, and so, indeed, enlarge his vista that his enjoyment of life itself, and his appreciation of it, is quickened and sustained. For great Art of any kind, whether it be the painter's, the engraver's, the sculptor's, or the writer's, is not—it cannot be too often insisted—a mere craft or sleight-of-hand, to be practised from the wrist downwards. It is the expression of the man himself. It is, therefore, with great and new personalities that the study of an art, the contemporary study of that long-begotten amateur performance of it—brings you into contact. And there is no way of studying an art that is so complete and satisfactory as the collecting of examples of it. And then again, to go back to the material part of 10 INTRODUCTION the business, how economical it is to be a collector, if only you are wise and prudent! Of pleasant vices this is surely the least costly. Nay, more; the bank-note cast upon the waters may come back after many days. The study of engravings, ancient and modern—of woodcuts, line engravings, etchings, mezzotints—has become by this time extremely elaborate and immensely complicated. Most people know nothing of it, and do not even realise that behind all their ignorance there is a world of learning and pleasure, some part of which at least belongs to them. They would but wander on the land and seek to possess it. Few men, even of those who address themselves to the task, acquire swiftly any substantial knowledge of more than one or two depart- ments of the study; though the ideal collector, and I would even say the reasonable one, whatever he may actually own, is able, sooner or later, to take a survey of the larger ground—his eye may range intelligently over fields he has no thought of annexing. From this it will be concluded—and concluded rightly—that the print-collector must be a specialist, more or less. More or less, at least at the beginning, must he address himself with particular care to one branch of the study. And which is it to be? The number of fine Schools of Etching and Engraving is really so considerable that there cannot well be his own. But let us see what means this that person pursues or that method, however select with freedom, and will scarcely go wrong. But the mention of it brings one, naturally, to the divisions of the subject, and the 11 FINE PRINTS collector, we shall find, is face to face, first of all, with this question: “Are the prints I am to bring together to be the work of an artist who originates, or of an artist who mainly translates?” Well, of course, in a discussion of the matter, the great original Schools must have the first place, whatever it may be eventually decided shall be the subject of your collection. You may buy, by all means, the noble monuments which the engravers of the Eighteenth Century wrought after Rubens, Romney, and George Morland; but suffer us to say, that it is not that the great creative artists, and then, when the possible collector has read about them—and has made himself familiar at the British Museum Print-room say, with some portion of their work—it may be that though he finds that they are nearly all, however different in themselves, less decorative on a wall than the great masters of rich mezzotint, he will find a charm and spell he cannot wish to banish in the evidence of their originality, in the fact that they are the creations of an individual impulse, whether they are slight or whether they are elaborate. The Schools of early line-engravers, Italian, Flemish, German, are almost entirely Schools of original production. I say—almost for as early as the days of Raphael, the interpreter, the translator, the copyist; if you will, carry into the matter the whole doctrine of the Urbinate were multiplied by the burin of Marc Antonio and his followers. And charming prints they are, these Marc Antonios, so little bought to-day. Economical of 12 INTRODUCTION line they are, and exquisite of contour, and likely, one would suppose, to be valued in the Future more than they are valued just now, when the rhyme of Mr. Browning, about the collector of his early period, is true no longer— "The debt of wonder my crony owes Is paid to my Mare Antonius." That in the main the earlier work is original, is not a thing to be surprised at, any more than it is a thing to lament. The narrow world of buyers in that primitive day was not likely to afford scope for the business of the translator; the time had not yet come when there was any need for the creations of an artist to be largely multiplied. That time came first, perhaps, in the Seventeenth Century, when the immediately accepted genius of Rubens gave ground for the employment of the interpreting talent of Bolswert, Pontius, and Vos- terman. Again, there was Edelinc, Nanteuil, and the Drevets. It need scarcely be said that extreme rarity is a characteristic of the early Schools. The prints of two of the masters of the Italian School, Giacomo, Antico Mascgata and Jacopo de' Barbari, are not to be got by ordering them. They have, of course, to be watched for, and waited for, and the opportunity taken at the moment at which it arises. In some measure there will be experienced the same engaging and pre- ventive difficulty in possessing yourself of the prints of the great Germans and of the one great Flemish master, 13 FINE PRINTS Lucas van Leyden. And if these, in certain states at least, in certain conditions, are not quite as hard to come upon as the works of those masters who have been mentioned just before them, and of their compatriots of the same period, that is but an extra inducement for the search, since there is, of course, a degree of difficulty that is actually discouraging—a sensible man does not long aim at the practically impossible. Not in regard to the early works of Lucas van Leyden. Dürer himself not unwillingly—very, very graciously—exchanged productions, there are yet no insuperable obstacles to the collector gathering together a representative array of his work; it is possible upon occasion even to add one or two of his scarce and beautiful and spirited ornaments to the group, such as it may be, of subjects based on scriptural or on classic themes. To be a specialist in Lucas van Leyden would be to be unusual, but not perhaps to be unwise; yet a greater sagacity would, no doubt, be manifested by concentration upon that which is upon the whole the finer work of Albert Dürer. Of late years, Martin Schongauer too, with the delicacy of his burin, his tenderness of sentiment, and his scarcely less pronounced qualities, has been a favourite, greatly sought for; but, amongst the Germans, the work that best upon the whole repays the trouble undertaken in assimilating it is that of Albert himself, and that of the latter the Little Masters. And who then were the Little Masters? A beginner wants to know. They were seven artists, some of them Dürer's direct pupils, all of them his direct successors; 14 INTRODUCTION getting the name that is common to them not from any insignificance in their themes, but from the scale on which it pleased them to execute their always deliberate, always highly-worked work. There is not one who has not about his labour some measure of individual interest, but the three greatest of the seven are the two brothers Beham—Barthel and Sebald—and that Prince of little ornamentation, Hans Holbein. Neither was the German Renaissance greater than in its ornament and the Behams, along with subjects of Allegory, History, and Genre, addressed themselves not seldom to subjects of pure and self-contained design. Rich and fine in their fancy, their characteristic yet not too obvious symmetry has an attraction that lasts. Barthel was the less prolific of the twin, but perhaps the more vigorous in invention. Sebald, certainly not at a loss himself for motives for design, yet chose to fall back on occasion—as in the exquisite little print of the *Adam and Eve*—upon the inventions of his brother. There is not now, there never has been, very much collecting here in England of the German Little Masters. Three pounds or four souses, now and again, to buy at saleships, or at dealers', a good Beham, a good Akgem. In their own land they are rated a little more highly—are rated more highly—than they deserve; but with research and pains (and remembering resolutely in this, as in every other case, to reject a bad impression), it is possible, for a most moderate sum, to have quite a substantial sum of these treasures; and though large indeed in their design, their real art quality, they 15 FINE PRINTS are, in a material sense, as small almost as gems. Mr. Loftie, who made a specialty of Schalb Behans, was able, I believe, to carry a collection of them safely housed in his waistcoat-pocket. If we turn from the Sixteenth to the Seventeenth Century, we have the opportunity, if we so choose, of leaving Line Eugene's road of studying and acquiring here and there examples of the noblest Etching that has been done in the world. For the Seventeenth Century is the period of Rembrandt—the period, too, of that manner but yet most skilful craftsman, Adrian van Ostade, and the period of the serene artist of classic Landscape and Architecture, who wrought some twenty plates in aquatints—I mean Claude. In an introductory chapter to a volume like the present, there is time and space to consider only Rembrandt. And it cannot be asserted too decisively that in the study and collection of Rembrandt, les, as a rule—and must, one thinks, for ever lie—the print-collector's highest and most legitimate pleasure. And even a poor man may have a few good Rembrandts, though only quite a rich man can have these great masterpieces. But much more Rembrandt is a superb tool for people who have courted too much the infection of a weakly and a morbid art. Not occupied indeed in his representations of humanity with visions of formal beauty, his variety is unsurpassed, his vigour unequalled ; he has the great traditions of Style, yet is as modern and as unconventional as Mr. Whistler. Of the different classes of Rembrandt's compositions, the sacred subjects perhaps—at least some minor 16 INTRODUCTION examples of them—are the least uncommon; and in their intimate and homely study, of humanity, and often too in their technique, the sacred subjects prove themselves desirable. Never, however, should they be collected to the exclusion of the rarest Portraiture or of the rarest Landscape. A Latona, a De Jonghe, in a fine state and fine condition, a Cottage with a Dutch Hag-barn, a Landscape with a Tucer, attain the summit of the etcher's art, and both in their conception and magical execution are almost perfect. While such imitations as the Romantic landscapes as were dispensed but two or three years since, when the cabinet of Mr. Holford passed under the hammer, appaled to the trained eye with a potency not a whit less great than can any masterpiece of Painting; and, to speak in very soberest English, no sum of money that it could ever enter into the heart of the enthusiast to pay for them would be, in truth, a too extravagant, or too unreason- able ransom. In the Eighteenth Century original Etching falls into the background, and the skill of the engraver, in those lands where, in the Eighteenth Century, it was chiefly exercised—in France, that is, and England—is devoted in the main to no spontaneous creation, but to the translation of the work of painters. In two mediums, thoroughly opposed or thoroughly contrasted, yet each with its own value, the engraver's labour is executed; there flourished, at first, the School of Line Engraving and then the public School of Mezzotint. Repro- ductive or interpretative Line Engraving had done great 17 **FINE PRINTS** things a generation or so earlier, and even Mezzotint was not the invention of the Eighteenth Century, though it was then that the art discovered by Von Siegen, and practised with a singular directness by Prince Rupert, was brought to its perfection. But the Eighteenth Century—even the latter half of it—was certainly the period at which both arts were busiest; and not so much the professed collector as the enlightened bourgeois of the time gathered these things together—in France chiefly Mezzotints, in France chiefly Line Engravings—and a very few shillings paid for the M'Avrell or the Watson after Reynolds, and later for the Raphael Smith or the William Ward after George Morland. Often the engraver was a publisher of his own and other people's prints. That was the case in Paris as much as in London; and in Paris, in the third quarter of the Eighteenth Century, the line engravers issued for a couple of francs or so—and the Mercure de France was apt, like newspapers in our own day, to notice the publication—those admirable, and still in England, too little known prints which record the dignified observation, the sober, just suggested comedy of Chardin. There were exceptions, of course, to the common rule that in the period of our first Georges, and of Louis the Fifteenth, engraver's work was translation. Hogarth, in the first half of the century—about 1730—when the French line engravers were occupied with their exquisite translations of the grace of Watteau, Lacroix, and Pater—wrought out on copper with rough vigour his original conceptions of the Rake's 18 INTRODUCTION and of the Harlot's Progress, and not a few of his minor themes ; but when it came to the rendering into black and white of those unasterly canvases of Marriage à la Mode, professional engravers, such as Ravenet and Scotin, were employed to admirable purpose, and a little later the very colours of the canvas seemed to live, the painter's very touch seemed to be reproduced, in the noble mezzotints of Earlean. And the immense successes of this reproductive engraving, with the art of Hogarth, brings us back to the truth of our earlier proposition : the period was a period of imitation, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that, not of originality, with the exception of that. The School is not invariably discreet in subject : Lavreince has his suggestiveness; though rarely does he go beyond legitimate comedy; and Baudouin François Boucher's son-in-law has his audacity; but against these is to be set the dignified idylt great master Valenciennes; the work Wattuon's pupils too; the works Boucher; Massard's consummate rendering; in finest or most finished line; or this or that seductive vision Grenze; then satyric comedy de Moreau le Jeune; and as I have said already; the excellent interpretations homely natural so desirable art Charlin. Mezzotint really did for all English painters importance Eighteenth Century and in measure certain earlier Dutchmen all that Line Engraving accomplished French. *By these men I shall 19 FINE PRINTS be immortalised," Sir Joshua said, when the work of M'Arrell and his fellows came under his view. Gainsborough, it is true, was not interpreted quite so much or quite so successfully. But Romney has as much justice done to him in later English Mezzotint as the luxurious art of Leyl and Kneller obtained from one of the earlier practitioners of the craft—John Smith. Morland's continued and justified popularity in our own time is due to nothing half as much as to the mezzotints by Raphael Smith, Mr. Ward, and Young, and others, that they have breathed into us. And it was mezzotint, in combination with the bitten line for leading features of the composition, that Turner, early in our own century—in 1807—decided to employ in the production of those seventy plates of *Liber Studiorum* upon which, already even, so much of his fame rests. *Liber Studiorum* occupies a interesting and a peculiar position between work upon the copper wholly original and work wholly reproductive. Turner etched the leading lines himself. In several cases he completed, with his own hand, in mezzotint, the whole of the engraved picture; but generally he gave the "scraping" to a professional engraver, whose efforts he minutely supervised and most elaborately corrected. In recent years, almost as much, though not quite as much sought for as the *Liber* plates of Turner, are certain rather smaller mezzotints which record the art of Constable. Constable himself did nothing on these plates, though he supervised the production by David Lucas. Turner's connection with professional 20 INTRODUCTION engravers was not confined to the priceless and admirable prints of the *Liber*. He trained a school of lime engravers, welcoming at first the assistance of John Pye and of George and William Cooke. These two brothers were the engravers mainly of his *Southern Coast*, and nothing has been more nearly than that; but the work of William Miller, in the *Civility* of that *Southern Coast*, and in a subsequent series, interpreted with quite peculiar excellences those refinements of light which in Turner's middle and later time so much engaged his effort. With Turner's death, or with the death of the artists who translated him, fine Line Engraving almost vanished. It had all but disappeared when, nearly fifty years ago, there began in France and England that Revival of Etching with which the amateur of to-day is so rightly concerned. A few etchings by Braquemond—of still-life chiefly—a larger number by Jules Jacquetan, of fine objects in porcelain, jewellery, bronze, and noble stones, are amongst the more precious products of the earlier part of the Revival of Etching, and they are so treated that they are inventions indeed, and of an originality that is exquisite. But the greatest event of the earlier years of the Revival was the appearance, as long ago as 1850, of the genius of Mérion, who, during but a few years, wrought a series of chef-d'oeuvres—inspired visions of Paris—and died, neglected and ignored, in the great city to which it is he who has raised, in those few prints of his, the nobility of all monuments. 21 FINE PRINTS Two other men of very different genius and of unsurpassed energy we associate with this revival of Etching. Both are yet with us in the fulness of their years; and both will occupy the collector who is wise in his generation, and will be, one may make bold to say, the delight of the far Future as well as of the Present. I mean Sir Seymour Haden and Mr. James Whistler. The prints of Seymour Haden shame no cabinet; the best of Whistler's scarcely suffer at all when placed beside the master-work of Rembrandt. But it is dangerous treating much of contemporaries when one's task is chiefly with the dead; and though I might mention many who are not unworthy men, of whom some subsequent historians may take cognizance, who may even be referred to at a later stage of this volume—I will confine myself here, in this introductory chapter, to just the intimation that Legros and Helleu are, next after the etchers I have already named, those probably who should engage attention. 93 CHAPTER I The use and object of this book, and necessary limitations of its service—Monographs for the specialist—The point of view of the individual—the vastness of the Practical side of the subject—the silly duty—Burlesque best in "Tickets"—The value of the coloured print—Its general triviality—The task of the Collector—The fine impression—Brilliance—Condition—The conservation of prints. A LITTLE Guide to Print Collecting such as the present one, even if written on very personal lines, not in the least concealing the writer's own prepossessions, and giving therefore, quite possibly, what may seem disproportionate notice of certain matters, cannot, of course, hope to entirely suffice for the special student of any particular man. The special student will not, if he is reasonable, find that the little book falls short of its aim, and fails to do its proper work, because it does not and cannot possibly supply within its limited volume all the information of which the accomplished student is himself possessed, and which he feels to be more or less indispensable even to the beginner who desires to be thorough. He will remember and will readily see that I should have been a blind man—had I written one book, nor even a hundred books—can make an expert, can turn the tyro into a practical connoisseur. What the tyro wants is 93 FINE PRINTS experience, all that is learnt by loss and gain, and by brushing shoulder to shoulder with dealers and brother-collectors and the auctioneer in the auction-room. He wants that, to become a practical collector at all, and to become a specialist he wants that and something more. He wants access to and acquaintance with a large and considerable branch of what is now unquestionably an immense literature. There are large books than this of which one on the general theory of Print Collecting, and many have been written at different times, with different prepositions, with different prejudices, from different points of view. But over and above these larger books there is a library of monographs on particular masters, works which are nearly always Catalogues raisonnés, and often treatises to boot; and while no one of these monographs can be altogether neglected by the would-be student of the artist with whom it is concerned, some of them must be among the most cherished of his companions, among the voiceless but instructive friends whose society is education. No little book then, like the present one, can take the place of experience and of the study of many books; and least of all perhaps can a book which does not affect to be the abstract and brief chronicle of what has been done before, but which prefers rather to approach its human subject from the point of view of an individual collector, who knows it must be said, while cultivating specialization has not been inaccessible to the charm of much that lies beyond the limits of any fields of his own. 24 THE TASK OF THE COLLECTOR So much by way of explanation—by way, too, of disarming the kind of criticism which would judge a general endeavour only by the success with which it seemed to meet the needs of a particular case. A Bibliography of the subject, which will be found on later pages, and which must itself be a selection, comparatively brief, from the mass of material that bears upon the theme, will suffice to set forth the special interest which underlies the desire to turn land; meanwhile one thing may be done now, as I hope, that one thing only: the would-be tiller of the particular plot may be reminded of the vastness of the land. Even of print collecting it is true, sometimes, that the trees prevent you from seeing the forest. I have said just now, in the print-collector's world, how vast is the land! Time, of course, tends to extend it—would extend it inevitably, by reason of new production, did not Fashion sometimes intervene, and, while opening to the explorer some new tract, taboo a district over which he had aforetime been accustomed to wander. The fashions of the wise are not wholly without reason, but the fashions of the foolish have also to be reckoned with. As an instance, the very generation that has seen the most just apprehension of original Echtling has witnessed too the exaltation of Holbeinism; and in his nursery Schools a decade of interest in Marc Anciennes even took its extension in Albert Dürer, and a silly rage for coloured prints which fifty years since was the appropriate ornament of scrap-book and nursery. 25 FINE PRINTS I have spoken harshly of two classes of things which within the last few years have found eager purchasers, and it is incumbent upon me that I justify my harshness and warn the beginner all the more effectually thereby. The Bartolozzi, then, which have been puffed so absurdly—what is their real place? To begin with, they are—and in this one respect they resemble Marc Antonius indeed, and the justly extolled mezzotints which translate Sir Joshua—they are the work of an engraver who interpreted the theme of another, and not of an engraver who invented his own. But this it is clear that they are not, for by no means are criminals. Wherein, it may be asked fairly, lies their greater offence? It lies in this. That the Humanity they depict is generally without character—that in no astere and in no captivating, overwhelming beauty, but in its feeble grace, lies its chief virtue. Bartolozzi was a good draughtsman. He was no doubt correct habitually, and he was habitually elegant. Academic he was, though competent. But again, how terribly monotonous was the order of his beauty, and how weakly sentimental the design of those—Cipriani and Angelica Kaufmann principal amongst them—to whose conceptions he lent at least a measure of support! Of Bartolozzi's works, the best for the collector are the "Tickets." They are on a small scale—dainty little engraved invitations or announcements to the public of their day, giving the opportunity to hear Giardini or Madame Ranalli, or some other singer of songs or maker of excellent music. 26 THE TASK OF THE COLLECTOR Delightful little compositions they undoubtedly are, with the rude drawn charmingly. Half-a-dozen of them I would possess with satisfaction. But all the rest—I all those Bartolozzi which, as they increase in size, get (just as photographs do) increasingly meaningless! The reasonable collector, if his instinct be fine or his taste educated, will not desire these, even at prices that may be comparatively insignificant, whilst Rembrandt's, Dürer's, Hogarth's, Watteau's, Mérôn's, Whistler's, and Delacroix's are. The coloured print—for it is time to make some brief allusion to it—is often very "taking." To the novice who does not think, it may even appear to be entirely desirable. But, like the average Bartolozzi, it is trivial at best. A pretty enough decoration for the wall of a room in which artistic taste is neither accomplished nor severe, it has at least to be recognised that its art is hybrid. The weight and value of the light and shade of the engraving are apt to be minimised or discounted by the application of colour; and the colour, though put on with ingenuity, has little of the gradation and the subtle blending, and nothing whatever of the "tonal," in which the art of the painter in some measure consists. That is why a sheet of Wheatley's "Cries of London," printed in bistre, is far better than a sheet which includes the superior society of many hands in coloured Morland's "Moorland Shepherdesses." More tolerable we be of the coloured prints of France; the lighter art of a Tannay or of a Debucourt according not so ill with the application of a process which boasts no other charm. 27 FINE PRINTS than the charm of the à peu près. But even where the coloured print is least offensive or least inadequate, no one can affect to discover in it the more serious qualities of Art. Often, experts inform us, the colour was only applied when the original work upon the plate was half worn out—when the plate could yield no longer an impression that was satisfactory. Then it was, at least in some cases, that the aid of colour—or some approximation to the colour that a painter might have sought to realise—was called in, and so the opportunity prepared for the foolish rich of our period to pay great prices for these engaging pictures. Uninstructed connoisseurs, ill-judging dealers, and the habit of an isolated world to regard old prints as humble examples of decorative furniture—all these combine to make it possible for the beginner, and even for the man of many winters who is outside Art, to spend his time in accumulating objects no one of which is of the first order. Even certain print-sellers, who ought to do much better, but who possess, we must suppose, more of technical knowledge than of sure and well-established taste, lend themselves to the diffusion of the love of the second-rate. There are several high-class dealers now in London, people of probity and of accomplishment, some of them young men, too—a circumstance which bodes well for the future. But those were safer days when the world of the collector lay within narrower limits, and when the close contact that there was wont to be between a few learned salesmen and a few scarcely less learned purchasers, who bought, 28 THE TASK OF THE COLLECTOR of course, gradually, who never bought things en bloc— who studied and enjoyed, in fine, instead of merely possessed—made it an unlikely matter that any quarter would be shown to the unworthy productions of a vague and indifferent art. But the beginner of to-day must take things as he finds them. If the root of the matter be in him, his mistakes need not be serious. The opportunities for sagacious choice in collecting yet remain frequent. If he collects things, he will not, of course, find acquiring so extensive a collection as that which rejoiced the heart of the old collector when prices were much lower—when a Rembrandt, now worth a hundred guineas, was sold for a ten-pound note. He must recognise, too, that a very large number of the finest impressions—and it is upon fine impressions only that his mind should be set—have come to be cloistered in National, in University, even in some cases in Muni- cipal institutions. But yet the field that is open to him is a wide one, and, as was said in the Introduction, it is possible for diligence and intelligence to accomplish much, even if unaccompanied by a purse that is big and deep. It has been customary in books on Collecting to say something about the qualities that are desirable in a print—the qualities I mean, that, in their combination constitute, not a fine subject—that is a different matter altogether—but a fine impression, an impression such as the collector should wish to possess. And though, no doubt, for certain readers, the treatise of Mablyer, and the later and ample treatise of Dr. Willshire, 29 FINE PRINTS may be without difficulty accessible, the expert will hold me blameless for not forgetting here the interests of the beginner, and for therefore going, though it shall be rapidly, over ground that, to the connoisseur, must needs be familiar. The first and most indispensable requisite, then, for a fine impression of a print, ancient or modern, is that the plate betray no signs of wear, so that the scheme of the artist in line and light and shade shall be presented still with virgin intactness. It may be a high ideal to aim at, but it is not unattainable; and practically it is as necessary in a Dürer three hundred years old as in a Whistler which has been in circulation only one or two years ago. No different qualities of surface are of course sought for in prints of different kinds, devoted to different effects. The perfection of one plate may be attained when it is "brilliant," the perfection of another when it is "rich." But in all, the signs of wear, and, in nearly all, the signs of re-touching, are to be avoided. Wear is indicated perhaps most easily by the absence of clearness in lines designed to be distinct, and by an acquired evenness and monotony in passages which obviously were never meant to be monotonous and even. Re-touching is a more subtle matter. It is generally resorted to repair the wear; and sometimes the re-touching is the work of the original artist, and sometimes it is the work of a later craftsman, concerned in the interests of publisher or dealer, or it may be in his own, if it is he who has become the possessor of the plate. 30 THE TASK OF THE COLLECTOR But an impression originally rich or brilliant, or brilliant and rich at once, may, by ill-usage, or even by the absence of a delicate care, have lost the qualities that commended it to its first possessor. The beginner in print collecting must assure himself not only that the work is still good, but that the surface is clean and fair. Then he must look at the back of the print, must assure himself, by careful examination there, that it has not been "baked" or patched or mended at all except that necessary; it has been laid with both slight and neatly executed. Damp is a deadly enemy of prints. They pine for dry warm air as much as a soldier sent from out of Provence into the chilli- ness of French Flanders. "Il paraît que ça gredolait là-bas," said a Provencal once to me at Cannes. Many a print is as sensitive to dampish cold as an American consumptive. The collector then must diagnose well--must satisfy himself as far as possible that the seeds of disease are not in the print already--and if he buys the print, he must see to its health carefully. Let me here hasten, though, to assure him nothing more than reasonable care is required, and I will tell him at once in what it consists. If he frames his print, he had better order that the thickness of some moderate mount--an eighth or twelfth of an inch is fully enough for the purpose--intervene between the surface of the print and the glass. The glass may "swell" from time to time, and obviously moisture must not be deposited upon the very object it exists to guard. If a print has great money value, or if from 31 FINE PRINTS any cause the collector sets much store by it, it should not remain in any frame for more than a few years without at least a careful re-examination. Fresh air will do it good; and, moreover, it is good for the collector's own eye (whose delicacy ought to be cultivated by all possible means) that account be taken of a print's appearance not only when it is under glass. If the collector, instead of framing his print, puts it in a portfolio, he must see at least that it is so handled and managed that its surface is not rubbed by the backs of other prints, or the backs of their mounts. Where one print follows another in a portfolio or solander-box, the moments of all show themselves. The solander-box will keep dust out as well as a can. The solander-box will keep dust out much better. And whether the print is in folio or box, or laid naked in the drawer or shelf of a cabinet, it should be from time to time looked at, given, so to put it, "a bath of air" on a sunny and dry day. A country-house, unless the walls are very thick and the rooms kept very carefully, is not the best place for a collection of prints, which (in England at least) flourish most in the atmosphere of cities. It is in cities that they require the least solicitude. I know very well, when I say this, that it will be news to some people that prints require any solicitude at all. I have pointed out that they do, but also that their possession does not involve any overwhelming responsibility. There is one other point as to the condition of a print—as to that which it is desirable to find in it 38 THE TASK OF THE COLLECTOR before we purchase it—that should be touched upon before this chapter ends. That is the question of margin. It may be that some worthy people are almost as sharply divided upon the question of margin as are New York gourmet upon the question of how many minutes it takes to roast perfection a canvas-back duck. But the majority of collectors are advocates of margins—they take "enjoyous pleasure" in them, Mr. Whistler remarks. A margin is worth nothing much to recommend it. While a print is mounted, and even after it is mounted—on those occasions, I mean, when, under examination, it passes from hand to hand—the margin helps to protect it. Yet it is evident that a margin has no artistic merit, and that therefore to establish a very great difference in money value between the print with a margin and the print with none, is to be rather absurd. Of course a print three hundred years old, which has conserved its margin to some extent, is a yet greater rarity than a print which has not ; and as rarity—rarity of condition even—is paid for as well as beauty, there is some just market-value in margin, no doubt. But, but, but line condition of surface on which I have so much insisted, the possession of margin is by no means strictly necessary for a sound appreciation of art; but never, at least in the case of a print that is ancient, and that has been subjected probably to many vicissitudes—never in such a case is it an indispensable virtue. Rarely does the ample margin go back beyond the Eighteenth Century. In your etching by Meryon or 33 c FINE PRINTS Haden—done fifty or thirty years ago—you may expect some margin, fairly. In your noble line-engraving after Chardin or Watteau, you may be glad of some, and may be grateful and surprised if you find much. In your Rembrandt, a little enhances the value. In your Dürer, an eighth of an inch, how precious and how rare! In regard to the loss of a margin, while in the case of a very old print it is due probably to gradual ravages and various little accidents, in the case of engravings which (mezzotints, for instance) have always been the most delectable, for they are always the most beautiful, a wall, it is due mainly to the process of framing. When the mezzotint—or whatever it is—was prepared for the frame, the knife removed the margin at a stroke, and with it there perished, for the future collector, some chance of exultation and not inhuman boasting. 34 CHAPTER II The old-world Etchings, and their due place in the Collector's estimation—Claude—Dürer's list of his etched work—Principal pieces—The money value of Claude's etchings — Landé's etched portraits — Ostadé — Richard Fisker's Ostadés — Their prices — Wenckebach-Haller—The immense volume of his work — Its characteristic features — The price of Leybovich and Seymour Haden—Prices of Hollars in the print-market. As I think that, speaking generally, the wisest collector is the collector who devotes himself to original work, we will begin the study of some various departments of the collector's pursuit by a group of chapters on work that is wholly original. And among work that is wholly original, what is there—that—since chronological order cannot require to be strictly observed—deserves to take precedence of the art of Etching? Not only is the art up to a certain point popular to-day—that is a consideration which need not affect the wise collector very much—but it is, of all the arts of Black and White, the one which lends itself most readily to the expression of a mood—therefore to the expression of a personality. In Line-Engraving, of which the finest examples cannot, on many grounds, be esteemed too highly, the chef-d'œuvre is a show of accomplishment. 35 FINE PRINTS In Etching, the hour may produce the masterpiece, though indeed many a masterpiece has involved something more than the labour of a day. Of old-world etchers whose plates should occupy the collector seriously—of old-world etchers between whom he may take his choice, or, if he prefer it, divide his attention—they are, after all, but a few. To have named Claude, Vandyke, Rembrandt, Ostade, and Hollar, is to have named the chief. Other Dutch genre painters than Ostade of course etched cleverly, but none with his perfection—his perfection, I mean, when he was at his best. And behind Rembrandt was a group of men, some of whom simply imitated, others of whom followed in ways more nearly their own. Other Dutchmen, again, like Backhuysen and Adrian van de Velde and Zeeman—who, nearly two centuries afterwards, Meryon worshipped—did work that was not their own. Latterly it has not been put aside for in recent *Portfolio* Mr. Binney made it the subject of special study. But still the greater men are the few who were named first. Of these great men, it was Claude, Vandyke, and Ostade who wrought the fewest plates. As for Vandyke, not only was his work not vast in quantity—his labour upon each particular plate stopped at an early stage. To the copper's detriment, as many think, others continued it, and Vandyke's etchings are only entirely his own in that first State which is the stage of the sketch. Yet are they far indeed from being 88 CLAUDE, VANDYKE, OSTATE, HOLLAR worthless afterwards. A background is added. The record of character remains pretty much the same. It was not quite thus with Claude. He, like other great masters, and like some small ones, suffers by the mischief of "re-touching;" but nothing done upon his plates, or upon any imitations of them, carries the work much further than Claude himself had carried it. With all the free and easy handling of the point, there is an absence of completeness. The atmosphere is only for the initiated—in some of the very best of his work. In tone, in delicacy of chiaroscuro, the plate of the *Bourcier*—the masterpiece for atmospheric effect—is carried as far as it could have been carried by line-engraving. It has indeed quite as much atmosphere, though not quite as much delicacy of contour, as the marvellous plates done on about the same scale by the translators of Turner, whom Turner in a measure trained—I mean especially the men who wrought upon the Southern Coast series: George Cooke with *Margate*, Horsburgh with *Whitstable*, the incomparable William Miller with Portsmouth and Clevedy. Claude's Campo Vaccino, again, is equally finished to the corners; and so, of course, in its perhaps slender fashion, is the famous *Sunset* (Dumais, No. 15). *Cattle Going Home in Snowy Weather* has the appearance of more summary labour; freedom from detail is there, and no more appropriate to that effect of atmosphere, which, together with the movement of beasts and herdsmen, the plate is devoted to recording. Again, complete tonality is not sought for—at all events is not obtained—in *Shepherd* 37 FINE PRINTS and Shepherded Conversing, which yet, in the rare First State of it, which alone is entirely worthy, is full from end to end of Claude's happiest and freest, and— dare one say ?—most playful work in the draughtsmen- ship of foliage. In the Second State one tall tree is deprived of its height and grace. The picture is spoilt; or, if no spoil, marred. It is now four-and-twenty years since, at the Burling- ton Fine Arts Club, there was held a well-chosen and perhaps the first and last important exhibition of the etchings of Claude. Dumesnil's list of all Claude's work in aquatintes includes but two prints—one of them unimportant; and of the forty-two at the Burlington Club, with access to the best collections everywhere (whatever modest things may have been said on this occasion to the contrary), managed to show twenty-six. Besides the plates mentioned in the preceding para- graph, the Dance by the Waterside, the Dance under the Trees, and the Wooden Bridge are amongst the things one would covet. In the Wooden Bridge there is the whole spirit of the broad Italian land. A fine Second State, from the cabinet of some good collector— my own is from John Barnard's—represents the plate perfectly. Of the Bowyer you are lucky if you can get a Second State. Sir Seymour Haden, who would never tolerate a bad impression, long contented himself with a Third, though some years before he parted with his things he managed to acquire a First. That delightful collector, Richard Fisher, had a First State of the Cattle Going Home in Stormy Weather, and a noble 38 CLAUDE, VANDYKE, OSTATE, HOLLAR little print it was. Mr. Julian Marshall, who bought rare things in his youth, and keenly appreciates them (though, while in his youth still, he sold many), had, and doubtless retains, a First State of the *Rape of Europa*, which, in an impression like his own—early, guessed before the plate was closed, says the Burlington Club Catalogue—is indeed most desirable. As to the money value of Claude's etchings, in the *Statesman* catalogue, all but two of his are alone desirable, the prices that they were reached at the Seymour Haden sale in 1891 are as good an indication as one can well obtain. Sir Seymour's beautiful and silvery First State of *Le Bonheur* was knocked down at £42; his *Dance under the Trees—a Fourth State too—at £10; his *Sunrise* (but it was a Fourth State) at £5, 1s. 6d.; his *Shepherd and Shepherdess Conversing*, in the First State, at 47 (and this was cheap); his *Campo Vaccino*, in the First State, at £6. 6s. He had no *Wooden Bridge*. At Richard Fisher's sale, in 1892, the *Borrier*, in a Second or Third State, fetched £15, and a good impression of the *Dance under the Trees*, £12. It will be seen that, rare though Claude's etchings are, in good condition, they do not, in England at least, when they appear in the auction-room, command prices that can be called excessive. The etchings of Vandyke, at all events the best of them, have fetched more. It must be that their rarity, in the most desired condition, is even greater. Sir Seymour Haden had a few superb ones. Vandyke's own 39 FINE PRINTS portrait (Dutuit, No. 3) sold in the Haden sale for £60; the pure etching of the Snyder's for £44; the Sutter- mans for £30; the Lucas Vosterman, £50; the masterly De Wael—which, even in an early, well-chosen im- pression of a later State, one finds an enviable posses- sion—£17, 10s. The touch of Van Dyke has nothing that is comparable with Rembrandt's subtlety, yet is it decisive and immediate, and so far excellent. And Van Dyke, however inclined he may have been to undue elegance—an elegance trop vacuo—in certain painted portraits, seized firmly and nobly in his etched por- traits of men (and practically his etchings are only portraits of men) the masculine character and the marked individuality. Of the etchings of Adrian van Ostade, Mr. Fisher had what was practically a complete collection—he had fifty plates—and as he was a great admirer of this unquestioned master of technique, this penetrating even if pessimistic observer of Life, he had taken care to have impressions of good character: in some cases, as good as it is ever possible to get. Inequality of course there was ; and whilst here and there an indifferent impression fell for a few shillings, sums as important as have been paid for Ostades were realised for the rarest and the best chosen things. We will consider the prices of the most desirable. For a First State of the Man and Woman Conversing, £13 was the ransom. £14 was paid for even the Fourth State of that rarity, The Empty Pitcher. Herr Meder gave £63 for the Second State of a piece which some call spirited and some call 48 CLAUDE, VANDYKE, OSTATE, HOLLAR savage, *The Quarrel with Drawn Knives*, and £25, 10s. for the First State of *A Woman Sitting on a Doorstep*. £80 was paid by the same buyer for the First State of the *Woman Singing*, and Mr. Gutenkust gave £37 for a Fourth State of *The Painter*. Could I become the owner of this picture? I am sure that, the picture which I should think worthy to be dignified with that name, and which I should consequently prefer to possess, would be *The Family and the Peasant Paying his Reckoning*. The first—not less excellent than any other in technique—is full of homely piety and truth to common things. It is one of Ostate's larger pieces; and at the Fisher sale, the First State, which had been in the Hawkins collection, passed into the hands of Mr. Deprez for £23. The Peasant Paying his Reckoning is one of the smaller plates. As the title goes far to imply, it represents a tavern visitor making ready to leave the cosy interior; the landlady looking out with keenness for the sum that is due. The piece teems with delicate observation, not only of character, but of picturesque detail, and with light and airy touch. It was a wonderful Fourth State that was in the Fisher collection. Mr. W. H. Wadsworth, the most enterprising buyer of Octades that day, had to pay to call it his. An excellent connoisseur tells us that the earliest impressions of Octades are generally light in tone—that good impressions are also often printed in a brownish ink, and that they are with- out the thick line which invariably surrounds the later ones. 41 FINE PRINTS Wenceslaus Hollar, born at Prague in 1607, and working a long while in London, under the patronage of Charles the First's Lord Arundel, and dying here amongst us, in Gardiner Street, Westminster, in 1677, was a far more prolific etcher than either Claude, Van-dyke, or Adrian van Ostade. In fact, that is not the way to put it at all; for whilst the plates of each of these are to be counted at the most by scores, the plates of Hollar mount to the number of two thousand seven hundred. He was a craftsman of great variety and ingenuity of method. But he has, of course, to be remembered also that in certain figures and mythological subjects at least, he was interpreter and populariser of the inventions of another, and that in most of his interesting little views he was a daintily but unmovable chronicler of pure fact. An individual note—a wholly individual note—surely belongs to his rendering of landscape or to his vision of the town. Yet he is a most sterling artist—not a mere monument of industry—and his quaintness, only a part of which he derives from his theme, is undoubtedly attractive. The collector who collects his work has what is a faith- ful record of some of the individuals and of many of the types of Hollar's time, and a fair vision of the ordinary aspect of the outward world of Hollar's day. The man's industry was, as we have seen, colossal, and even at the best he was but ill-rewarded. Fourpence per hour was, says Mr. Heywood, the price paid to him by the bookbellers. At present it may be that there is keener relish for 48 CLAUDE, VANDYKE, OSTATE, HOLLAR his work in Germany than here with us in England; but one great connoisseur, as well as fine practitioner of Etching, of a generation not yet wholly vanished, has extolled and collected him, praising him lately, it is true, in terms more measured than those he had at first employed; and another connoisseur, not born in earlier years than Sir Seymour Haden, but earlier cut off, has hinted indeed that he was among the Riches of Heywood, who have been mauled already—was a devoted student of Hollar's endless labours. He prepared in great degree the Burlington Club's Exhibition of a large fine representative collection of Hollar's works, in 1875, and wrote the sympathetic preface to the Catalogue. On Hollar, Parthey has long been the chief German authority; and with Parthey Mr. Heywood was familiar. But his own loving observation of the unrivalling work of the great Bohemian engraver of the Seventeenth Century—a wanderer in Antwerp and in Strasburg, as well as a long resident in London—furnished him with some material of his own, and the Burlington Club Catalogue of such portion as was exhibited of Hollar's great volume of production, should be, wherever it is possible, in the hands of the Hollar collector. It will acquaint him with very many of the most desirable pieces, and will tell him, in a form which comparatively few sensible thitherby, much about the recent resting-places of the rarer Hollar prints. There are a few of these, of course, which cannot pass into the hands of any private person. Of the large plate of Edinburgh, for example, 43 **FINE PRINTS** thing Parthey had never seen, and which was wrought in Hollar's later time (in 1670), there exist in all the world but two impressions. One is at Windsor, the other at the British Museum. When, however, the collector has got more than two thousand plates to choose from, and to watch and wait for, he need not, save in sheer "cesseness," and because Humanity is built that way, trouble very much about what he will ever inscribe. I do not think that even a colonial millionaire will set himself the task of collecting Hollar en masse. Life is not long enough. The task would fall more properly to a German student, since patience would be wanted, yet more than money; but, after half a century of work, the student would pass from us with his self-set task still uncompleted. No: the sensible collector wants of Hollar a compact selection. Such a group as Sir Seymour Haden exhibited at the Fine Art Society—along with many other plates, representing the masters of original etching—would form a nucleus, at all events. Divided into classes in the following way—Topography, Portraiture, Costume, Natural History, and History, that small ex- hibited group included the Antwerp Cathedral, the Royal Exchange, the nave of St. George's Chapel, Charles the First, Charles the Second, one of the plates of the Medici—I trust it was the wonderful state of five muffs and a pair of shoes's—no arms just lightly indicated—and two of the rare set of Shells, which are as wonderful as the muffs for texture, but somewhat a little drier. Of the plate of the Nave of St. 44 CLAUDE, VANDYKE, OSTATE, HOLLAR George's Chapel, Sir Seymour says that it is the most amazing piece of *biting* that he knows, as to gradation and finesse. Along with these plates—if he is fortunate enough to get them—or even in place of some of them, as his taste prompts him, let the collector appropriate the sets of the Seasons and the Butterflies, the little Islington set, known sometimes as Six Views in the North of London, and the exquisite single plate (those topographical plates that I am recommending are all small ones known as London from the Top of Arnold's House). Of the *single profit* of Hollar's work, and of its rightful esteem, there will then be ample evidence. The prices of good Hollars have not of late years risen much: certainly not much in comparison with those of other prints holding positions of about the like honour. Much of his work, therefore, is quite within the reach of modest and intelligent buyers. The latest really remarkable collection sold was that of Seymour Haden, who had long possessed many more of Hollar's prints than he found room to exhibit, with other men's work, in Bond Street. His greatest virtues—perhaps even his best impressions—fetched good prices, but they were never sensational: indeed, in several instances they did not substantially exceed those realised twenty-three years ago (at 1868), at Julian Marshall's sale. Thus at the Julian Marshall sale, the Long View of Greenwich passed under the hammer at £1, 15s., and at the Haden sale it sold for £2, 5s. London from the Top of Arnold's House, 45 FINE PRINTS impression of singular excellence, fetched £6 in the Marshall sale; it fetched at the Seymour Haden £9, 1s.; but in this case there is reason to suppose that Sir Seymour's impression, though certainly good, was not equal to Mr. Marshall's. Sir Thomas Chaloner (after Hobden) fetched £31, 10s. at the Marshall sale, and I am not sure that it was not the very same impression that afterwards, at Sir Seymour's, fetched only £20. Each is described as a "First State," and each had belonged to the late Mr. B., to one of the greatest collectors of his time John Boulton, whose initials, written in a slow round hand, "J. B.", delight the collector, often at the back of a fine print. The two impressions of Sir Thomas Chaloner were surely really one. The portrait of Hollar, holding his portrait of St Catherine, reached £6 at the Marshall sale; only £5 at the Haden. On the other hand, the Chalice, which is said, generally, to be from a design by Man-tegna, was sold for £23, 10s. with Mr. Marshall's things; for £25, 5s. with Sir Seymour's. We need not make further comparisons; but it will be well to end these comments upon Hollar's money value by some little additional quotation from the priced catalogues of the later and larger sale of his prints. The Rake's Lament fetched in 1891 £22; the Antwerp Cathedral, in the First State, £4; that neat little set of Views about Islington, £2, 10s. (which, if the impression was not all good, was unquestionably one of the most Royal Exchanges, in the First State, £16); The Winter Landscape of an English Gentleman, 4s., 10s.; the set of Sea Shells, or rather 46 CLAUDE, VANDYKE, OSTATE, HOLLAR thirty-four out of the thirty-eight numbers that the set contains, £67. Hollar, with such a mass of work to choose from, and with the interest and excellence of much of it, appeals to the collector who can dispense, at times, with vehemence and passion, and who finds in qualitiveness and exactness, in steady technical achievement, some compensation for the absence of a vision of exalted beauty. 47 CHAPTER III Roubaud's Catalogues—The extent of Rembrandt's etched work—The careful buyer: how may he repre- sent the artist's worth?—Amusing landscape etchings—the indubitable proof that Rembrandt's landscapes—Their influence on the most modern Art— The landscapes' rarity—The most desirable and attain- able—Prices—The landscapes in the Holford Sale— Rembrandt's portraits—The Northern School—The best portraits of others—Reasons prices of the portraits —Those fine ones that are cheap essentially—Sacred subjects just touched on—The Nude—The methods of Rembrandt—Etching and dry-point—Simplicity of the means Rembrandt employed. That great old connoisseur of Rouen, Eugène Dutuit, in his two portly tomes, the *Oeuvre Complet de Rem- brandt* (produced in 1883), catalogues for the conveni- ence of the collector three hundred and sixty-three pieces, though, from his long and careful Introduction, it is evident that he is not altogether uninfluenced by modern views, and is willing to discard some few out of that great army of prints. Wilson, the first important English cataloguer, working in 1866, had catalogued only hundred and sixty-three. But Jules Blanc, about a score of years later, had reduced the number to three hundred and fifty-three. Again, 48 REMBRANDT in 1879, the Rev. C. H. Middleton-Wake had brought the number down to three hundred and twenty-nine. It is hardly likely that before the present chapter is completed—a chapter that must be devoted mainly to the more fascinating works of the greatest mind that ever expressed itself in Etching—I shall have said anything of value on what is, for the student, an important question—the question of how much of Rembrandt’s long-accepted work the master really executed. For not in a part only of a single chapter of a volume on Fine Prints could it be possible to deal with all the arguments for and against his own clothing, the authenticity of his modern Criticism disputes or doubts about. The matter would require not paragraphs, but a volume. Furthermore, for anything approaching a final settlement, it would need such opportunities for comparison as absolutely no one has yet been able to possess. Sir Seymour Haden, whose views upon the subject are more defined than most people’s—if likewise it happens that they are more revolutionary—has been pleading for a large Exhibition and a committee of experts to settle the matter, and, at this time of writing, the Exhibition has not been held nor the committee formed. In regard to its decision, I anticipate as likely to be delivered somewhat earlier, and perhaps with more of unanimity, the utterance of Rome upon that question of “Anglican Orders,” which now either vexes or sympathetically engages us. But if the moment of connoisseurs’ agreement upon the question of the precise number of Rembrandt’s true 49 D FINE PRINTS etchings seem yet remote, the beginner in the study of the prints of Rembrandt may note with benefit two things : first, that there does exist the reasonable and long-sustained doubt in regard principally to the "Beggar" and a few of the Sacred Subjects (for certain landscapes were discarded long ago), and that thus a question has arisen into which the student may inquire cautiously, and, after much preliminary study, exercise his own mind upon ; and, second (and here comes in immediate comfort for the collector), that the doubts thrown on two or three score of prints still leave untouched the plates in which intelligent Criticism has recognised masterpieces. Again, and for his further joy, if the collector be but a beginner, or will at least not keep, he may now see that the interpretations of Rembrandt are of the most various degrees of rarity that accordingly they differ inexpressibly as to the money value that attaches to them ; and that therefore, even now-a-days, though the complete or comprehensive collector of Rembrandt will have to be a rich man, a poor man may yet buy, two or three times in every year, some Rembrandt etching, noble in conception, exquisite in workmanship. A volume like the present is not concerned primarily with the acquisitions of the millionaire, though it has, of course, to take account of them. Let us therefore, just at this stage, ask ourselves what the careful, modestly-equipped buyer does well to do, so that in his portfolios so great a master as Rembrandt shall not be altogether unrepresented, and shall not be repre- 50 REMBRANDT sented uncearthly? Ought the beginner to confine himself at first to making a selection from one or two groups only, out of the number of groups into which, unless chronological order is to over-ride everything, the prints of Rembrandt not unnaturally divide themselves? Or ought he to be guided in his choice by some ascertained facts of Rembrandt's history, and by the help of dated plates—or by accepting as fixed and final the conjectures as to date which have proceeded from the newer connoisseurship—seek some representa- tion of the art of Rembrandt at different times of his career? Or ought he, instead of either confining him- self to one or two groups or classes of subject, or seek- ing to trace at all, by the few prints of which he may possess himself, the course of Rembrandt's progress, the changes in his method, see rather that in his port- folios all classes of subjects have something to represent them, so that at least in this manner the range of the master—which is one of the most marked of his characteristics—shall be suggested? The chronological plan, though it has reason on its side and great advantages, and naturally commends itself to the advanced student who is far already on the road to be himself an expert, is scarcely good for the beginner; and this not only because the proper basis of knowledge—the date that is not a shrewd guess, but a quite certain fact—is often wanting; but also because the master's methods in etching, as in painting, were so many, and in a measure at least (even the most varied of them) were contemporaneously exercised, that the 81 **FINE PRINTS** attempt to represent periods and manners in a collection numerically insignificant becomes Quixotic or Academic. Perhaps, then, the wisest thing is to take one or two great typical groups. For my own part, I should like to see "Portraits of Men" and "Portraits of Women"—as if the two, save for convenience of reference, should not invariably be considered together. I have said, for one of my two groups, Landscape. I justify it by the indisputable pre-eminence which Rembrandt's etched landscapes enjoy. Even in the dignified and tasteful work of Claude there are only two or three pieces which hold their own in fascination when the memory is charged with the achievements of the Dutchman—magical effect won out of material intractable, or at the best simple; for that, at most, was Rembrandt's scenery. The landscape etchings of Rembrandt's contemporaries, when they come to be measured against his, show only a geographical accuracy, or faithful perservering study, or may be, a little manual dexterity, or their possession of a sense of prettiness which they share even with the work of the amateur. Most of the finest landscape etching of later days not only bears some signs of Rembrandt's influence, but would have been essentially other than it now is if Rembrandt's had not existed. The Dutchman's mark is laid, strong and indelible, even upon individualities so potent and distinguished as Seymour Haden and Andrew Goldes. Whistler, exquisite and 32 REMBRANDT peculiar as his genius is, with the figure, and with Thames-side London subjects and subjects of Venice, would, had he treated landscape proper, have either reminded us of Rembrandt, or have etched in some wrong way. He would not have etched in some wrong way—we may take that for granted; he would have reminded us of Rembrandt, with a little of himself besides. I have shown, I think, how clearly, from the artistic point of view, the new collector is led to love and seek for Rembrandt landscapes. But there is one objection, though it is perhaps not a fatal one, to concentrating his attention on these. Little of Rembrandt's work, except a few oddities of crazy value, like the First State of the Hundred Guilders, is rarer or more costly than his landscapes. Or, to be more explicit, more absolutely and literally correct, it is rather in this way : that, while for a good example of Rembrandt in any other department of his labours, it is possible of course to be obliged to give much, but likewise (Heaven be praised!) quite possible not to be obliged to give much, you will never without an outlay of a certain importance be possessed of any one of his landscapes in desirable condition. An outlay of £30 may conceivably endow you with a good impression of one of the two most desirable, and, as it happens, least rare, of the minor landscapes. That sum may get you, and without your having to wait a quite indefinite time for the acquisition. A View of Amsterdam or a Cottage with White Palinge. It may ever get you a 53 FINE PRINTS rarer but much slighter landscape piece—that sum- mary, though of course in its own way very learned, little performance known as Sir's Bridge; the plate which tradition says (probably not untrue) was etched by Rembrandt while the servant of his friend, Jan Six, who had forgotten the mustard, went (somewhere beyond the pantry, however; I should even think that it was outside the house), in rapid search of that con- diment. But there, as far as landscape is concerned, if £50 or thereabouts is to be the limit of your disburse- ment upon a single piece, there your collecting stops. If you want a Cottage with Dutch Hay-Barn— very fine indeed, but not of extreme rarity—sixty, eighty, or a hundred pounds or more will be the reason why you cannot want a Landscape with a Ruined Tower—the print which, for well-considered breadth and maintained unity of effect (not so much for dainty finish) is the "last word" of landscape art, the perfect splendid phrase which nothing can appropriately follow, after which there is of necessity declension, if not col- lapse—it will be a mere accident if fifty guineas gets it for you. It may cost you a couple of hundred. And when? Why, only when a fine collection comes into the market: such a collection as Mr. Holford's, three or four years ago, or one at least not at all points inferior to it. And that happens not many times in the life of any one of us. Again, there is the Goldschmidt's Field, a bird's-eye view of a place near the Zuyder Zee; a summary, learned memorandum of the estate and 54 A black and white etching of a tree trunk with a small opening at the top, revealing a dark interior space. 03-18-2023 15:56:07 REMBRANDT country-house, with all its appurtenances, of Uyten- bogwart, the Receiver-General, of whom there is a representation amongst the Rembrandt portraits. If you can afford it, and if fortune smiles upon you by bestowing opportunity of acquisition, you will want not only the less costly portrait of the Goldschilder, but the landscape of the Goldschilder's Field. There are rarer things than that in Rembrandt's work—not much that is more desirable. £244 was paid for an impression, probably not quite of the first order, at the Firmen-Ditler sale, £34 at the Liphart, 277 at the Hollstein. The latter is not easy to find, command, of course, even higher prices, and this some- what indipendently of their artistic interest, which only in a very few cases—and then with very excep- tional impressions—equals that of the prints I have already named. Of these yet rarer landscapes, as well as the other ones, Mr. Hollstein's collection was certainly the finest dispersed in recent times. His sale took place at Christie's in July 1893; and at it, for the View of Omval—an exceptionally splendid impression of a some- what favourite yet not extraordinarily rare subject— £280 was paid by M. Bouillon. The subject, though in impressions of very different quality, had been sold in the Sir Abraham Hume sale for £47, and in the Duke of Barcenski's for £44. £2170 was paid for the Three Trees, the one Rembrandt landscape which has a touch of the sensational which adds to its real merit the obvious and immediate attractiveness of 55 FINE PRINTS dramatic effect. Herr Meler, the dealer of Berlin, bought the First State of *The Three Cottages* for £275. The sum of £210 was the ransom of the First State of the slightly arched print *A Village with the Square Tower*. The impression, which was from the Aylesford collection, was of unparalleled brilliancy, and the State is of extraordinary rarity, though M. Dutuit notes its presence at Amsterdam and at the British Museum. To M. Bouillon was knocked down for £290 a faultless impression of *The Canal*, a print which at the Galichon sale had passed under the hammer for £80, and even at the Brinculech for £20. Messrs. Colnaghi bought in 1745 a most sparkling impression of the Second State of *The Barn* with a *Raised Tower*, more properly called by the French cataloguers *Pagaye à la Tour*, for in this First State there is no sign of "ruin." Doubtless when the title by which it is known in England was first applied to it, the amateur was unfamiliar with this rarest State, in which the dome of the tower is intact. In the Second State it has disappeared, and in the Third there are other minor changes. The reader will remember that already, two or three pages back, I have referred to this print as a masterpiece, than which none is more desirable or more representative. A perfect impression of the Landscape with a *Flock of Sheep* (from the John Barnard collection) sold for £915; the First State of the Landscape with an Orchard for £185; an Orchard with a Barn (the only state, before the plate was cut at either end) for £270; and the First State of the 56 REMBRANDT Landscape with a Boat—an impression extraordinarily full of "bar"—for £200. Altogether, the Rembrandts in the Holford sale—and I shall have to refer to some of them again before I finish the chapter—sold for £16,000. Richard Fisher's Rembrandts had fetched about £1500; Sir Abraham Hume's, £4000; Sir Seymour Haden's, £4700; the Duke of Buccleuch's, something over £10,000. The last is a figure which was never expected to be surpassed—humbly, perhaps, to be equalled. Yet it was surpassed very much. But now it is high time to say a little about the desirableness of Rembrandt portraits—about their money value. No engraved portraiture in all the world, not even the mezzotints after Sir Joshua, present with so much power so great a range of varied character. For an artistic treatment of Humanity equally sterling and austere, you must go back to Holbein's drawings. For a variety as engaging, a vividness and flexibility as sure of their effect, only the pastels by La Tour in the Museum of St. Quentin rival these Rembrandt records of Jew and Gentile, old and young, and rich and poor in Amsterdam. As in painting, so in etching, Rembrandt was himself one of his best models. In no less than thirty-four of his prints—according to the Catalogue of Wilson—he do we find he has portrayed, at different ages, his homely, striking, penetrating face. Sometimes he is youth; sometimes the burden of experience is visibly laid on him; sometimes he is engrossed with work, as in the superb *Rembrandt Drawing*; some- 57 FINE PRINTS times, as in the Rembrandt with a Sabre, masquerading; sometimes he is depicted with great fulness of record; sometimes, as in the admirable little rarity, Wilson 364 (not catalogued amongst the Rembrandt portraits, because the plate has other heads as well), a few lines, chosen with the alacrity and certainty of genius, bring him before us, stately, sagacious, and with mind bent upon a problem he is sure to solve. The Rembrandt with a Sabre, at the Holford sale—a thing almost unique—fell to the bid of M. Deprez of £2000, and has joined now the other extraordinary possessions of Baron Edmond De Rothschild. At the Holford sale, the Rembrandt "The Turner's Hat and Embroidered Mantle," abused under First State, was bought by Rembrandt, but none the better on that account—fetched £40. Of the Rembrandt Drawing there were two impressions. One of them, which Mr. Middleton-Wake assures us is the First, and which Wilson justly describes as at all events "the finest," sold for £290 to Herr Moler. The impression was of unmitigated brilliancy and vigour, the whole thing as spontaneous and impulsive as anything in Rembrandt's work. The second impression sold—an impression to which the honours of a true Second State are now assigned—fetched £80, and was borne away by Mr. Guttekunst of Stuttgart. That famous Holford sale, in which, as I have said already, the Rembrandt with the Sabre sold for a couple of thousand, and in which the "Hundred Gulder" (Christ Healing the Sick) beat at least its own record, and was sold for £1750, contained among the portraits 58 REMBRANDT an impression of the elaborate Ephraim Bonas, "with the black ring," the only one with this singular and somewhat petty distinction which could ever come into the market ; the remaining impressions being tied up permanently at the British Museum and the Bibliotheque Nationale. M. Dunlos took it across the Channel, having paid £1950 for the opportunity of doing so. The Burgomaster Sixx, an almost mezotint-like portrait in general effect—highly wrought, and with an obvious deficiency—always fetches a high price. At the Holford sale an impression called "Second State" fell to Cohagen's bid of £2880. At the Seymour-Haden, one called "Third State" a very exquisite impression sold for £390. It came from the collection of Sir Abraham Hume, and Sir Seymour, in the Preface to his sale catalogue, properly pointed out that with the Sixx, as with the Ephraim Bonas, what are practically trial-proofs have been erected into "States." The Third State of the Old Hearing, a portrait of a venerable, kindly, perhaps ceremonious gentleman, who practised the profession of an auctioneer, is scarcely less rare than the rest. When found among the Holford treasures, it sold for £190. For nearly the same price the benign portrait of John Latma, the goldsmith—an impression in the First State, however, "before the window and the bottle"—passed into the hands of the same buyer. That plate—one of the most admirable in the work of Rembrandt—affords, in its First State, an instance of the artificial advantage of mere rarity. Because certain 59 FINE PRINTS collectors are accustomed to see it more or less worn, with the window and the bottle behind the seated figure, they will never give for it, even when it is not worn—if the window and the bottle happen to be there—one-third the sum that they pay willingly when those objects are absent, which Rembrandt knew were wanted to complete the composition. Now, in the case of The Great Jewish Bride—a portrait really of Rembrandt's wife, Saskia, with flowing hair—the background is a loss, clearly, the earlier State being invariably the finer and the more spontaneous. With the Latina it is not so. There is no doubt that the addition of colour held back the effect to the general effect; but the fine eye is wanted, the eye of the real expert, to see to it that the impression which contains these is yet an impression in which deterioration is not visible—that it is, in fact, one of the very earliest impressions after the additions had been made. To make an end of the record of great prices fetched by the portraits in the Holford sale, let it be said that the Coriolus Syphilis—the impression Wilson pronounced to be the finest—sold for £350 ; that a Second State of the rare, and on that account, as I suppose, the favourite portrait of the Advocate Van Telling, fetched £350; whilst an exceedingly effective impression of the big portrait of Coppens, the writing-master, realised no less than £1350. But let us not forget any one of these great rarities, modest collectors, whose modesty yet does not go the length of making them satisfied with second-rate Art, 60 REMBRANDT may still have noble portraits. Six or seven guineas— I mean, of course, when opportunity arises—seems you the quite exquisite and delicately modelled croquis (but is it not, after all, something more than a croquis?) called Portrait of a Woman, lightly etched. Rem- brandt was very young when he did that, yet his art was mature, his point unappeably vivacious. It is a portrait of his mother. So again, the Mère de Rem- brandt au voile noir—the lady sitting, somewhat austere this time, with set mouth, and the old full-veined hands folded in rest—never, I think, in its happiest impression costs more than £20—very may likely cost you a good deal less. Ten guineas will very likely be the ransom of that charming portrait of a boy-child in profile, which was once thought to record the features of Titus, Rembrandt's son, and then those of the little Prince of Orange. It is a delightful vision of youth, demonstrative chubby, with eyes in the midst of light and silky hair, does even Whistler's Fanny Le Grand rival it? Are you disposed to venture £30, £40, £50? Then may you, in due time, add to your group a First State of the most subtle portrait that medita- tive print-seller, Clouet de Jonghe. It is treated with singular breadth and luminosity, and of character it is a profound revelation. By the time the Third State is reached—and a good Third State may be worth fifteen or twenty pounds—the thing has changed. Indeed, it has changed already a little in the Second. But in the Third, further work has endowed the personage with the air of a more visible 61 FINE PRINTS romance; and in the two succeeding States this is preserved, though the wear of course becomes perceptible. It is well, by way of contrast, to possess yourself of this more sentimental record—the Third, if possible, in preference to the Fourth or Fifth state—besides, of course, that subtler and far finer vision of the personage which is ensured by the First State alone. The time may soon be upon us when a First State of Clément de Jonghe will be worth, not thirty or forty, but sixty or eighty guineas. It has always been appreciated, but it has not yet been appreciated at its true worth. Nothing in all the great etched work of Rembrandt is in craftsmanship more unobtrusively magnificent, and in its suggestion of complex character nothing is more subtle. It was well, perhaps, to insist particularly on the desirability for many who possess, of these two great branches of the etched work of Rembrandt, the Landscapes and the Portraits. It would be ridiculous to attack the authenticity of any piece that I have mentioned. No one, so far as I am aware, has ever thought of doing so; so that with these, at all events, as well as with many others, the collector is safe. But my insistence on the things I have selected will not deter explorers from adventures that interest them. The unction, the vividness, and the essential dignity even of those Sacred Subjects from which he is at first repelled by the presence there so abundantly of the ungainly and the common, will in the end attract the collector. He will recognize that there was pathos in 68 A black-and-white drawing of a man sitting in a chair. He wears a wide-brimmed hat, a long coat, and has his hands clasped together in front of him. The background is plain. [API_EMPTY_RESPONSE] REMBRANDT the life Rembrandt imagined, as well as in the life that he observed. And in the Academical studies, the representations of the Nude, he will recognise that there is Style constantly, and beauty now and then. One or two of these, at least, he will like to have, if he can. Two of them seem to me better and more desirable than the rest. One is that study of a re- cumbent woman—Naked Woman seen from behind— which the French sometimes call Nègresse couchée; but she is not “Negress” at all, but only a stripped woman beheld in deepish shadow. This is one of the least rare. Five or six pounds will often buy it. The other is the Woman with the Arrow. A slimmer, lighter figure than those used with A Rembrandt, sit, with figure turned prettily, on the edge of a bed. The drawing is not academically perfect, but the picture is at least living flesh, graceful of pose, and seen in an admirable arrangement of shadow and of light. This Woman with the Arrow fetched, in the Kalle sale, £26; in the Knowles sale, £32. The so-called “Free Subjects” are few, and the rudest of them, Ledlukat, which has yet a touch of comedy in it (for Rembrandt was an observer always), is fortunately of extreme rarity. With not a single one of these ought the collector to be concerned. Some French artists have known how to make their choice of such subjects pardonable by treating them with grace; but the criticat of Rembrandt—happily most occasional—is, in the very grossness of its obvious comedy, recking with offence. 63 FINE PRINTS In regard to the arrangement of the prints by the master who is the head and front of the Dutch school, and the consummate practitioner of Etching—I mean, the arrangement in the student's mind, and not only the arrangement in the solander box—the question of the artist's method of execution plays a not unimportant part. Are you to classify your possessions in order of date, or in accordance with subject, or with reference to style and manner of work? That third method, however, would be found in its result not very different from the arrangement by date. Broadly speaking, it would have affinity with that. For, as Sir Seymour Haden tells us in an interesting Lecture called "Rembrandt True and False," which the Macmillians issued in 1893, the Burlington Club Exhibition was itself sufficient "to disclose the interesting fact that, dividing the thirty years of Rembrandt's etching career into those parts or decades, his place during the first of these decades was for him more part-bitten in" that is, by a mordant—than the second, that after having been so bitten in, their effect was enhanced by the addition of "dry-point;" and in the third, that, discarding altogether the colder chemical process, the artist had generally depended on the more painter-like employment of "dry-point alone." And in regard to methods of work, Sir Seymour in this Lecture discredited the statement that Rembrandt was full of mysterious contrivances, and that his success as an etcher owed much to these. "All the great painter-engravers, in common with all great artists, worked 84 REMBRANDT simply and with the simplest tools. It is only the mechanical engraver and copyist who depends for what he calls his 'quality' on a multiplicity of instrumental aids which, in fact, do the work for him—the object of the whole of them being to make that work as easy to an assistant as to the engraver himself, and its inevitable effect, to reduce that which was once an art to the level of a *métier.* 65 6 CHAPTER IV Geldes, a link between Rembrandt and the French Revival—The Etchings of Miller—Charles Merton's work—the best, accomplished in but few years—His Paris—The Etchings of Degas—The process of some masterpieces—Papers—Merton Collec- tors—Bracquemond's few noble things—Jules Jacque- mart's Etchings—His still-life pieces practically original —Jacquemart interpreter, not copyist, of his subject— The Vase of Flowers by Gérôme of Seguin—The dry-points of Paul Helleu. Between the period of the work of Rembrandt and the middle of the Eighteenth Century very little fine work was done in Etching. The practitioners of the art, such as they were, seemed to lose sight of its greater principles. What they lacked in learning and in mastery, they made up for by the probably thought-by elaboration and prettiness. Only once did there doth such a man as our English Geldes—our Scottish Geldes, if the word is liked better—and he not later than the second and third decades of our own century —produce either portrait or landscape in the true method, with seeming spontaneity, with means econom- ised. It was in landscape chiefly—not particularly in On Pekham Rye and Halliford-on-Thames—that Geldes most successfully asserted himself, as, in his 66 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING smaller way, Roubrandt's true follower, though in his few portraits (his mother's, perhaps, most notably) the right decisiveness, simplicity, and energy of manner may not be overrated. In some manner it may be supposed that Grébels influenced David Wilkie, who was his friend, and Wilkie, amongst several etchings which were inferior at least to the dry-points of his fellow-workman (for his small portfolio is not, on the whole, worth much), produced one or two menomable things; a perfect little genre piece, called The Receipt—an old-world gentleman searching in a bureau, while a messenger waits respectfully at his side—being by far the best, and obviously a desirable possession. But the middle of our century had to be reached before the true revival of the art of Etching, anywhere. Before it, Ingres, in a single plate, practised the art in the spirit of the line-crafter. Just as it approached, Delaroche and Paul Huet and Théodore Rousseau showed, in a few plates, some appreciation of the fact that etching is a valuable medium chiefly for the album for a sketch. But the middle of the century had actually to arrive before the world was in possession of the best performances of Millet, Mérion, Brascoupeaud, and Jules Jacquesmard. Jean François Millet executed but one-and-twenty etchings, according to the Catalogue of Monsieur Lebrun, the friend and relative of Millet's biographer. Of L. Lebrun's Catalogue—originally issued as an Appendix to the Paris edition of Sensier's 67 A black and white illustration of a man searching through a bureau while a messenger waits respectfully. FINE PRINTS Life of the artist—Mr. Frederick Keppel, of New York, has published a translation, with some additional facts which are of interest to the precise student. The etchings of Millet are, at the very least, masterly notes of motives for his painting pictures. They are often much more than that. Often they are entirely satisfactory and final and elucidating dealings with the themes they choose to tackle. They are then, quite as much as the pictures themselves, records of peasant life, as the artist observed it intimately, and at the same time vivid and expressive suggestions of atmosphere and light and shade. In effect they are large and simple. In Etching, Millet was scarcely concerned to display a skill that was very obvious, a slight-of-hand, an acrobatic triumph over technical difficulties. Etching was to him a vehicle for the expression of exactly the same things as those to which he addressed himself in meccanum more habitual. And so we have his Glaciers and his Bichesurs, his Départ pour le Trauval—perhaps worths, each one of them, in good state, a very few pounds each. In America Millet has of late years been much appreciated, but one should dare to say even that he has been overrated, owing to a skilfully-worked craze about his painted pictures, ending with the immense, ridiculous sensation of the sale of the Anglais. But in France—which, in the appreciation of all work of art, is certainly not less enlightened, but is cooler and more questioning—Millet is also appreciated ; nor, in England, in 1891, was there substantial difficulty in borrowing for the Burlington 68 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING Club Exhibition of the French Revival of Etching, the eleven prints, lent by Mr. Justice Day, Sir Hickman Bacon, Mr. H. S. Theobald, and Mr. Alfred Higgins, which were deemed a sufficient representation of Millet's work with the needle. In that Exhibition the representation of the great work of Mérçon was confined to twenty-five prints. It practically included all his masterpieces; but it would have been made more extensive had not the Burlington Club, soon after I published the first edition of my little book upon this matter—and when Burtly's Memoir was yet fresh—organised a splendid gathering of the prints we owe to Mérçon's high imagination, keen sensitiveness, and unstinted labour. I am not concerned to deal here at any length with the story of Mérçon's life, or with the analysis of his poetic temperament. The question asked about him by the author of this present book is a comparatively simple one; he is a man who has lived immersed with fulness while he possesses the " sombre quies," and lovely lyrics, wrought during the time in which his spirit was most brilliant and his hand firmest? Mérçon's fame rests on the achievements of a very few years. The period comprised between 1850 and 1854 saw the production, not indeed of everything he did which may deserve to live, but of all that is sufficient to ensure life for the rest. Many of his pretty and carefully planned drawings were made earlier than 1850, and several of the more engaging of his etchings were made after 1854; but the four years between 69 FINE PRINTS these dates were the years in which he conceived and executed his "Paris," which was something more than a collection of etched views—it was a poem and a satirical commentary on the life he recorded. Moreover, no man is quite so great as he who has one great thought. Among richly endowed artists who have looked at Life briefly, it is rare and difficult to discover one whose work has evidenced such faithful concentration. It is rare enough to find that concentration even in the labour of such artists as are comparatively unimaginative, of such as are content to confine themselves to the patient record of the thing that actually is—of such an engraver, say, as Hollar. It is doubly rare to find an imaginative artist of wide outlook and of deep experience so much the recorder of one set of facts, one series of visions. He will generally have been anxious to give form to very different impressions that cause him at various times and under changing circumstances. Now it may have been Landscape that interested him, and now Portraiture, and now again ideal composition, or some other aim. And each he may have fairly succeeded. But Mercury through stress of circumstance obliged him to do work beyond the limits of his choice, did such work, generally speaking, with only too little of promptings from within, to lighten the dulness of the task. There are, of course, exceptions—one or two in his Landscapes, if there are none in his Portraiture. But the beginning and the end of his art, as far as the world can be asked to be seriously concerned with it, lay in the imaginative 70 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING record, now faithfully simple, now transfigured and nobly visionary, of the city which required him but ill for his devotion to its most poetic and its most prosaic features. It is the etchings of Paris, then, that the collector will naturally first seek. Nearly all the etchings of Paris are included in what is sometimes known as “the published set.” Not that the twelve major and the eleven minor pieces comprised in that were ever really published by fashionable print-sellers to an inquiring and eager public. But they were at least so arranged and put together that this might have happened had Meryon’s been a lucky one. In Meryon’s own words he instituted this work,“to which he added other Parisian subjects afterwards”—as a not unsuitable addition. Like the plates of “Liber Studiorum,” they were to be looked at “together.” Together, the plates of “Liber” represented, as we shall see better in another chapter, the range of Turner’s art. Together, the etchings “sur Paris”—“on” and not “of” Paris, let it be noted—represented Meryon’s vision of the town, and of its deeper life. In beginning a collection of Meryon’s I imagine it to be important not only to begin with one of the “Paris,” but with a very significant example of it—a typical, important etching. The twelve views—the twelve “pictures,” I should prefer to call them—Meryon himself numbered, when, rather late in life, he issued the last impressions of them. These numbered impressions, being, as I see the very first states, are not the imprints-on-cherish; but these are the 71 **PRINTS** subjects of them (and the subjects, in finer impressions, will all be wanted)—the Struyg, the Petit Pont, the Arche du Pont Notre-Dame, the Galerie de Notre-Dame, the Tour de l'Horloge, the Tourelle, Rue de la Tisseranderie, the St. Etienne-du-Mont, the Pompe Notre-Dame, the Pont Neuf, the Pont-au-Change, the Morgue, and, lastly, the Abbe de Notre-Dame. Before these, between them, and again at the end of them, are certain minor designs, not to be confused with that "Minor Work," chiefly copies and dull Portraiture, described but briefly in my little book on Meryon, which is devoted more particularly to the work of genius with which it is worth while to be concerned. Those minor designs which are associated with the "Paris" are an essential part of it, doing humble, but, as I am certain Meryon thought, most necessary service. In a sense they may be called head-pieces and tail-pieces to great works; subjects of which the list is long. Sometimes they are ornament, but always significant, symbolic ornament; sometimes they are direct, written commentary. Either way, they bear upon the whole, but yet are less important than those twelve pieces already named. So it was, at all events, in Meryon's mind; but of one or two of them it is true also that they have a beauty and perfection within their limited scheme, lacking to one or two of the more important, to which they serve humbly as page or out-rider. The one lyric note of the Rue des Maisons Gargous, for instance, is in its own way as complete a thing as is the magnificent epic of Abbe or Morgue— 73 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING it is greater far than the Pompe Nôtre-Dame, or, it may be, than the Petit Pont. The late Mr. P. G. Hamerton—an admirable specialist in Etching, but a writer making no claim to the narrower speciality of minute acquaintance with Mérçon—has praised the Pompe Nôtre-Dame. He has praised it for merits which exist, and it is only relatively that the praise is, as it seems to me, undeserved. The plate is really a wonderful victory over technical difficulties; but, in the ugly lines of it, its realism is realism of too bold an order. The Petit Pont is a fine piece of architectural draughtsmanship, and an impressive conception to boot; but, like Rembrandt's wonderfully wrought Mill, it is one-sided. The Abbe is accounted the masterpiece of Mérçon, in right of its solemn and austere beauty. A rich and delicate impression of this print is, then, the crown of any Mérçon collection. It must be obtained in a State before the dainty detail of the apse of the cathedral, and the yet daintier and more magically delicate workmanship of its roof, in soft and radiant light, have suffered deterioration through wear. It must be richly printed. The First State is practically not to be found. I suppose that there are scarcely in existence seven or eight impressions of it. It is at the British Museum, and in the collections of Mr. B. B. Macgeorge, Mr. Avery, Mr. Mansfield, Mr. R. C. Fisher, and Mr. Pyke Thompson. For the last that changed hands, fully 125 guineas was paid. Mérçon had received for it—and gratefully—in his depression FINE PRINTS and poverty—one shilling and threepence. I have seen his receipt. But money now will not acquire it. A Second State is therefore the one to aim at; and, just because there were so very few impressions taken of the First, that I ought, in my Catalogue, to have described them as proofs—more especially as there was no change whatever in the work, but only in the lettering—it staid to reason that the earliest and best impressions of the Second (I mean these only) are, in their exquisite quality, all that good judges can desire. These are on thin and wiry paper—old Dutch or French—often a little cocked. The green, or greenish, paper Meryon was fond of, he never used for the *Abbe*. The poorer impressions of the Second State are on thick modern paper. After the Second State, which, when carefully chosen, is apt to be so beautiful as to be worth twenty, forty, or fifty guineas—there comes a Third, a Fourth, a Fifth, etc., for- tunately common; and deteriorations, all of them ; downward steps in the passage from noble Art to the miserable issue of a thing which can rejoice the soul no longer, nor evidence the triumph of the hand. Not much more need be said in detail here as to the larger prints of the great "Paris," but there is still a little. In the shape and size of the plate, and by its breadth of distant view, the *Pont-au-Change* is the companion to the *Abbe*. There are some impres- sions on the greenish paper, and some on the thin Dutch that yields the best of the *Abbeis*. The-im- 74 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING pression of the First State in the De Salcis Sale sold for £38. The Pont-au-Change is one of those prints which have submitted to the most serious alterations. A wild flight of giant birds against the rolling sky is the first innovation—it occurs in the Second State—and though it removes from the picture all its early calm and half its sanity, it has, as many think, a charm of its own, a weird suggestiveness. A good impression, in this State, is worth, it may be, £6 or £7. The next change—when the flight of birds gives place to a flight of small balloons (unlike the large balloon which, in the First State, sails nobly through the sky, before ever the dark birds get there)—the next change, I say, is a more pronounced mistake. The Trous de Magdeburg, of which a First State fetched in the Wassell Sale £10, and in the De Salcis £22–25, was also submitted to changes but scarcely in a State in which it need occupy the careful collector. In certain late impressions, Méryon, convinced, in the restlessness of mental ill-health, that one side of the tall Palais du Justice was left in his picture monotonous and dull, shot great shafts of light across it, and these became the things that caught the eye. He had forgotten, then, the earlier wisdom and more consummate art by which, when first he wrought the plate, he had placed the quiet space of shadowed building as a foil to the many-paned window by the side of it. The change is an instructive and pathetic commentary on the case with which artistic conceptions slip away; they themselves forgotten, and the excellence that they 14 FINE PRINTS had beautifully achieved ignored even by the mind that gave them birth. The St. Étienne-du-Mont is one of those etchings which possess the abiding charm of perfect things. In it a subject entirely beautiful and dignified is treated with force and with refinement of spirit, and with faultless exactitude of hand. It shows—nothing can better show—the characteristic of Mérion, the union of the courage of realism and the sentiment of poetry; in other words, its realism, like the realism of the finest Fiction, has to be poetic. You have the builder's scaffolding, the workmen's figures, for modern life and labour; the Gothic statues of the Collegé de Montaigu, the shadow of the narrow street, the closely-draped women hurrying on their way, for old-world senti- ment and the mystery of the town. But I suppose a chapter might be written upon this excellent beauty. I mention it because it changes, because it is subject to change, though change less important than that in the Pont-au-Change, and less destructive than that in the Tour de l'Horloge. Not to speak of sundry inscriptions, sundry "posters," which Mérion, in mere restlessness, was minded to alter, he could never quite satisfy himself about the attitude of one of the work- men on the scaffolding. Three States represent as many changes in this figure, and all these—as a matter, at all events, of minor interest—it is pleasant to collect. Here, in the St. Étienne, as so often in the etchings of Mérion, the First State (£76 in the De Salcis Sale) is the one of which the impressions are the most 78 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING numerous, though even in this piece of writing, which does not take the place of a catalogue, I have had occasion to note one instance out of some in which it is not so. But generally it is so. And so the Méryon collector has to be even more careful than the collector of “Libert” about the impression which he buys. He must have an early State, but it is not enough to have an early State. He must most diligently teach himself to perceive what is really a fine example of it. He must not fall into the commonest vice of the unintelligent purchaser—he be captivated by the mere word, forego his own judgment, and buy First States with dull determination. Presently the collector of the “Paris” will legitimately want the smaller pieces, some of which I have called “tail-pieces,” i.e., are commentaries and connotations. Some are beautiful, curious, and significant, as has already been said, but generally the significance is more remarkable than the beauty. They bind together, almost as an appropriate text itself might bind together, what might otherwise be detached pictures. They complete the thought of Méryon in regard to his “Paris,” and make its expression clear. Thus, the etched cover for the Paris Set bears the title, “Eaux Fortes sur Paris,” on a representation of a slab of fossiliferous limestone, suggesting the material which made it possible to build the city on the spot where it stands. Then, there is a set of etched verses wholly without other ornament than may be found in their prettily-fantastic form, verses that bewail the life of 71 FINE PRINTS Paris. Again, lines to accompany the *Pont-au-Change* and its great balloon. These things recall William Blake—the method by which the "Songs of Innocence" first found their limited public. Again, the *Tombau de Mélire—Méryon thinks there must be place in Paris for the one representative French writer of imaginative Literature, the cynic, analyst, comedian. And to name one other little print, but not to exhaust the list, there is a graceful embodiment of wayward fancy to accompany the *Pompe Nôtre-Dame*. It is called the *Petite Pompe—* represents the Pompe in small ; gives us verses regretting half playfully, half affectionately, the removal of so familiar a landmark, and surrounds all with a flowing border of rare elegance and simple invention. But a few other brilliant and poetical records of Paris lie, it has been said already, outside the published list, claim a place almost with the greatest illustrations I have spoken of before. They are rarely to be sought. The *Tombau dit-le Marot* is one of them; it is Méryon's record of the place where Charlotte Corday did the deed by which we remember her. Except for the interest of observing a change, due, I may suppose, to the dulled imagination of a fairly shrewd tradesman—a change by which all symbolism and significance passed out of this wonderful little print—it is useless to have this little etching in any State after the First published one. For, after the First published one, the picture and the poem became merely a view: there is nothing to connect the place with Maret's tragedy. 45 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING and Mérion has been permitted to represent, not the Tourelle, dite "de Marot," but "No. 22, Street of the School of Medicine." And the First State is already rare. There were very few impressions of it. It was too imaginative for the public. But here is an instance in which Trial Proofs, generally to be avoided, may fairly be sought for, along with the First State. Distributed among different collectors is a little succession of Trial Proofs with different dates of May and June written by Mérion in pencil on the margin. The first and second belong to Mr. Mac-George; the third was Seymour Haden's; the fourth belongs to Mr. James Knowles ; the eighth—which is the last—belongs to me (I got it, if I recollect, for £8, 10s., and a commission, at the Wasted Sale). Even at the beginning of this little sequence of proofs the work is not ineffectual, and at the end it is complete. Also outside the published sale of "Paris" are two little etchings by Mérion, both admirablely worthy, and which, because of the extreme, even astounding, delicacy of some of their work, it is, I think, well to secure in the early state of Trial Proof—when one can get the chance. These are the Pont-au-Change vers 1784—which no one can possibly confuse with the larger Pont-au-Change—and Le Pont Neuf et la Samaritaine. Unlike most of Mérion's Parisian work, both are not indeed transcripts from, but idealisations of, drawings by another. The first dry draught-sman, in the present case, was one Nicolle. As far as the practical presentation of all the subject is concerned, the Trial Proofs of 73 FINE PRINTS these prints, which have been sold under the hammer for about £10 each, are all that can be wanted, and they possess, moreover, an exquisite refinement of light, of which the published, and especially the later publications, are deficient. The impressions of these two little plates are worthy of respect, for these plates were never worked down to the wrecks and skeletons of some of the others; but, nevertheless, it is only in the earliest impressions that we can fully see the lovely lines and light and shade of the background in the *Pont-au-Change* vers 1784—it must be had "before the great dark rope"—and the sunlit house-fronts (Van der Heyden-like, almost) of the *Pont Neuf et la Samaritaine*. Of the Bourges etchings, which are good, though none are of the first importance—and they are but few in all—the best is the *Rue des Toiles*. It is a varied picture, admirably finished. The rest are engaging sketches. Amongst the remaining etchings by which Mörny commands himself to those who study and reflect upon his work, it is enough, perhaps, here, to speak of three. *Océanic: Piche aux Palmes* is almost the only quite satisfactory record of that acquaintance that he made with the antipodes. The *Second State*—with the title—is not scarce at all, and can never be costly. You may pay, perhaps, one or two pounds for it, and for the first, say, four or five. The *Entrée du Couvent des Capucins Français à Athènes—a print devoted in reality to the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates—is the single and the 30 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING very noble plate which a visit to Athens, when he was a sailor, inspired Méryon to produce. This rare plate was done for a book that is itself now rare—Count Léon de Laborde's "Athènes au XVIIIe" et XVIIE" et XVIIIE" Siècles." Even in the Second State the Entrée du Couvent has fetched about £12, in more sales than one. * Rochow's Address Card*, albeit not particularly rare, is curious and worth study. It was executed for the only dealer who substantially encouraged Méryon; and Méryon contrived to press into his little plate much of what he had already found and shown to be suggestive in the features of Paris. Symbolical figures of the Seine and Marie recline at the top of the design. Then there are introduced bits from the *Armes de Paris*, from the *Bain Froid Chevrier* (the statue of Charles Quint), from *Le Pont Neuf*, and from *La Petite Pompe*. No one, however, can deny the correctness of *Rochow's Address Card* very beautiful or grandly imaginative; but it is ingenious, and, like *La Petite Pompe*, though in more limited measure, it is good as a piece of decorative design. The impressions of Méryon's etchings are printed on papers of very different sorts. A greenish paper Méryon himself liked, and it is one of the favourites of collectors. Its unwarthly hue adds to the weirdness of several of the pictures, often most suitably; but it is not always good. Méryon knew this, and many of his plates—amongst them, as I have said already—that unsurpassable masterpiece, the *Aïda*—were never printed on it. I have a *Revue des Musées* 81 FINE PRINTS Garcons—the thing was Baudelaire's favourite—upon very bluish gray. A thin old Dutch paper, wiry and strong, white originally and softened by age, gives some of the finest impressions. Other good examples are on Japanese, and there are fine ones on thinnest India paper that is of excellent quality. Modern Whatman and modern French paper have been used for many plates; and a few impressions, which I think, were rarely, if ever, printed by any one but Mérion himself, are found on a paper of dull walnut colour. If I seem to dwell on this too much, let it be remem- bered that very different effects are produced by the different papers and the different inks. The luxurious collector, possessing more than one impression, likes to look first at his "Black Mérion," and then at his "Brown." The two make different pictures. About the Mérion collections, it may be said that M. Nolli, an Italian Franciscan, was the first important group that was sold under the hammer. Then followed M. Burtys', M. Hirsch's, and afterwards M. Semier's. These fetched but modest prices—prices insignificant sometimes—for Mérion's vogue was not yet. Later, the possessions of M. Wasset—an aged bachelor, eager and trembling, whom I shall always remember as the "Cousin Pons" of certain bric-a-brac-converted upper chambers in the Rue Jacob—were sold for more sub- stantial sums. Since then, the collection of that most sympathetic amateur, the Rev. J. J. Heywood—one of the first men in London to buy the master's prints— has passed into the hands of Mr. B. B. Macgeorge of 20 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING Glasgow, whose cabinet, enriched from other sources, is now certainly the greatest. The Meryon that belonged to Sir Seymour Haden went, some years since, to America, where whoever possesses them must recognise collectors that are his equals, in Mr. Samuel Avery and Mr. Howard Mansfield. If too many carefully gathered groups of Meryon's etchings have left our shores, others remain — though very few. The British Museum Print-Room is rich in the works of the master: many of the best impressions of his prints, there, having belonged long ago to Philippe Burty, who early recognised something at least of their merit, and made, in the Gazette des Beaux Arts of that day, the first rough catalogue of them. It is time we turned for a few minutes to Felix Bracquemond—a dozen years Meryon's junior, for he was born in 1833. Among the sub-headings to this present chapter there occurs the phrase, "Bracquemond's few masterpieces." With "few" we might be asked—indeed, in the Catalogue of the Burlington Club Exhibition of the French Revival of Etching, it is mentioned that the number of his plates extends to about seven hundred, and that the list would have been longer had not Bracquemond, in his later years, accepted an official post which left him little time for this department of work? Well, there are two or three reasons why, with all respect to an indefatigable artist, I still say "few." To begin with, no incon siderable proportion of Felix Bracquemond's etched plates are works of reproduction-translations (like 85) FINE PRINTS Rajon's, Waltner's, Ungers', some indeed of Jacque- mart's) of the conceptions of another. These may be admirable in their own way—the *Erasmus*, after the Holbein, in the Louvre, is more than admirable: it is mostly a picture of a man, an artist, firmly-directed labour, recording worthily Holbein's own arching draughtsmanship, his own profound and clear vision of human character. But we have agreed, throughout the greater part of this book, and more especially in those sections of it which are devoted to the art whose greatest charm is often in its spontaneity, to consider original work and work inspired or dictated by others as on a different level. Then again, in such of Brueque- mond's prints as are original, there is perhaps even less than is usual, in a fine artist's work, of uniformity of excellence. No very great number of all the plates M. Beraldi industriously chronicles need the collector busy himself with trying to acquire. The largish etchings of great birds, alive or dead, are amongst the most characteristic. With singular freedom and rich- ness—an enjoyment of their plumage and their life, and a great essential beauty—these plates are consummated rendered them. If I could possess but a single Brueque- mond—I have none, as a matter of fact—I would have such an impression of *Le Haut d'un Battant de Porte*, with the birds hanging there, as Mr. Alfred Morrison lent to the Burlington Club. The plate was wrought in 1655. But *Margot la Critique et Fauveaux et Surrells*—prints of, I think, about the same period —likewise represent the artist well; and there is a 84 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING plate done only about nine years ago, at the instance of the Messrs. Dowdeswell, which is certainly a triumph at once of technique and of character. This is *Le Vieux Coq*. Dubigny, Maxime Lalanne, Meissonier, Corot, are all amongst French artists who have etched, and have etched more or less ably. The two last-mentioned—doubtless the most important artists in their own customary mediums—wrought the fewest plates. Corot's are highly characteristic sketches. Dubigny worked more systematically at etching, and you feel in all his works a sympathetic, picturesque vision of Nature ; but his prints never reach exquisiteness. Lalanne, who was extremely prolific with the needle, had an unfailing elegance as well as facility. And, as a little practical treatise that I have just upon the subject shows, he was devoted to the craft. He was best in his smaller plates; never, I think, having beaten his dainty plate of the Swiss *Fribourg*, which was given in "Etching and Etchers." Seen in large numbers, his prints reveal, if not exactly mannerism, at least the quickly reached limits of his personality. In the portfolios of the collector, a few prints—which will never cost many shillings—are enough to represent him. But I have no wish whatever to underrate Lalanne, in saying this. Lalanne was not a great artist; but he was an agreeable, well-bred observer, and a graceful draughtsman. A genius, wholly individual of course, or he would not be a genius at all—and yet in a sense the founder of a school or centre of a group of workmen—now occupies FINE PRINTS us. We pass to Jules Jacque'mart, who, born in 1837, died prematurely in 1880; a child of his century, worn out by eager restlessness of spirit, by the temperament, by the nervous system, that made possible to him the exquisiteness of his work. The son of a collector, a great authority on porcelains, Albert Jacque'mart, Jules Jacque'mart's natural sensitiveness to beauty, which he had inherited, was, from the first, highly cultivated. From the first, he breathed the air of Art. Short as his life was, 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 extremely rare exceptions, he did the things that 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 most, when we are most tired in cities—and so there came to him, towards the end, a new surprise of pleasure in so beautiful a world. He was happy in being surrounded all his life long by the affection of the circle of his house. Nor was he perhaps unhappy altogether, dying in middle age. For what might the Future have held for him?—a genius who was ripe so soon. The years of deterioration and of decay, in which first an artist does but daily 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 and honoured is uttered at rare intervals. 68 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING 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 Jacqueuart. He was spared these years. 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, unfortunately by no means implies the power to appreciate the art by which they are retained and diffused. "Still-life"—the portrayal of objects natural or artificial, for the object's sake, and not as background or accessory—has never been rated very highly or very widely loved. The public generally has been indifferent to it. Here lies the reason why the public has been right in its indifference, for often those things are done in a poor spirit, a spirit of servile imitation or vile flattery, with which Art has little to do. But there are exceptions, and there is a better way of looking at these things. Chardin was one of these exceptions—in Painting, he was the greatest of these. Jacqueuart, in his art of Etching, was an exception not less brilliant and peculiar. He and Chardin have done something to endow the beholders of their work with a new sense—with the capacity for new experiences of enjoyment—they have portrayed, not so much matter, as the very soul of matter; they have put it in its finest light, and it has got new dignity. Chardin did this with his peaches and his pears, his big coarse bottles, his copper sauce-pans, and his silk-lined caskets. Jacqueuart did it with the 87 FINE PRINTS finer work of artists 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, and his precious vessels of crystal, jasper, and jade. But when he was most fully himself, his work most characteristic and individual, he shut himself off from popularity. Even untrained observers could accept this agile engraver as the interpreter of other men's pictures—of Meissonier's inventions, or Van der Meer's, Grente's, or Fragonard's—but they could not accept him as the interpreter, at first hand, of treasures peculiarly his own. 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? A short period of practice in draughtsmanship, and only a second experience of the peculiar business of etching, made Jacqueart a master. As time proceeded, he of course developed; found new methods, ways not previously known to him. But little of what is obviously tentative and inattentive 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 "Histoire de la Porcelaine," and though, in that publication, the absolute realisation 83 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING of wonderful matter—or, more particularly, the breadth in treating it—is not so noteworthy as in the later “Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne,” there is most evident already the hand of the delicate artist and the eye that can appreciate and render almost unconsidered beauties. The “Histoire de la Porcelaine” contains twenty-six plates, of which a large proportion are devoted to the Oriental china possessed in mass by the elder Jacqueuart, when as yet there was no rage for it. Many of Albert Jacqueuart’s pieces figure in the book; they were pieces the son had lived with and knew familiarly. Their charm, their delicacy, he perfectly represented. He had learned to distinguish himself of difficulty from the bizarre 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 “Histoire de la Porcelaine”—amongst the quaintly naturalistic decorations from China and amongst the ornaments of Sèvres, with their boudoir graces and airs of pretty luxury fit for the Marquise of Louis Quinze and the sleek young Abbé, her pet and her counsellor, we find, rendered with an appreciation as just, a Brocca Italiana, the Brocca of the Medicis of the Sixteenth Century, slight and tall, where the lightest of Renaissance forms the thin and reed-like arabesque—no mass or splash of colour—is patterned over the smoothish surface with measured exactitude and rhythmic completeness. How much is here suggested, and how little done! The broad touches are almost as 89 FINE PRINTS few as those which Jacquemart employed afterwards in rendering some fairy effects of rock-crystal—the material which he has interpreted, it may be, best of all. On such work may be bestowed, amongst much other praise, that particular praise which seems the highest to fashionable French Criticism—delighted especially with feats of adroitness: occupied with the evidence of the artist's dexterity—"Il n'y a rien, et il y a tout." The "Histoire de la Porcelaine"—of which the separate plates were begun, as I have said before, in 1860, and which was published by Techener in 1862—was followed in 1864 by the "Gemmes et Joyaux de Couronne." The Chalcographie de la Louvre—which concerns itself with the issue of State-commissioned prints—undertook the first publication of the "Gemmes et Joyaux," in this series there are sixty subjects, or, at least, sixty plates; some of them were executed by his Louvre window (which is reflected over and over again at every angle, in the lustre of the objects he was drawing), 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; opposing, say, the transparent brilliancy of the globe of rock-crystal to the texture and hues, sombre and velvety, of the vase of ancient sardonyx, as one puts a cluster of diamonds round a fine cut-eye, or a black pearl, glowing soberly. Of all these plates M. Louise Gousse has given an accurate account, in enough detail for the purposes of most people, in the "Gazette des Beaux Arts" for 14 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING 1876. The Catalogue of Jacqueuart's etchings—which are about four hundred in all—there contained, was a work of industry and of very genuine interest on M. Gonse's part, but its necessary extent, due to the artist's own prodigious diligence in work, cannot for ever sufficiently excuse an occasional incompleteness of description making absolute identification sometimes a difficult matter. The critical appreciation was warm and intelligent, and the student of Jules Jacqueuart must always be indebted to Gonse. But for the quite adequate description of work like Jacqueuart's—the very subject of it, quite as much as the treatment—there was needed not only the French tongue (the tongue, par excellence, of Criticism), but a Gauffer to use it. Everything that Jacqueuart 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 "Gemmes et Joyaux," save only his work with delicate china. And the large plates of this series evince his strength, and hardly ever betray his weakness. He was not, perhaps, 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 an admirable feeling for the unbroken flow of its line, for its suppleness, for the figure's harmonious movement. He was not the master of its most intricate 91 FINE PRINTS 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, "Il n'y a rien, et il y a tout." As nothing in Jacqueuart's 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 gives value by its happy undulations of line to the fixed, invariable ornament of Renaissance decoration—an ornament as orderly as well-obscured verse, with its settled form, its repetition, its refrain. I will name one or two notable instances. One occurs in the etching of a Renaissance mirror (the print a most desirable little possession)—Miroir Français du Siècle XVIIe, elaborately carved, but its chief grace after all is in its fine proportioning—the space much the perfection of thatament as the perfect disposition of the lines. The absolutely satisfactory filling of a given space with the curriculums 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, sufficiently, that it has been best solved by the Japanese; and indeed the Japanese have solved it, often with great 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 as well, in fashions less arbitrary, with rhythm 50 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING 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—as Francis Turner Palgrave said, admirably—"an Athenian tribunal" to understand Ingres and Flaxman, it needs at all events high education in the beauty of line to understand the art of Renaissance Ornament. Such art Jacqueuart understands absolutely, and, against its supposed rigidity, its free play of the nude figure is indicated with touches dainty, faultless, and few. Thus it is I say, in the *Miroir Français du Seizième Siècle*. And to the attraction of the figure has been added almost the attraction of landscape and of landscape atmosphere in the plate No. 27 of the "Gemmes et Joyaux," which represents scenes from Ovid as a craftsman of the Renaissance has portrayed them on the delicate liquid surface of etched *verre de roche*. And not confining our examination wholly to Gemmes et Joyaux, but what we usually call the just spoken of canvas here—let us observe there—or elsewhere in Jacqueart's prints, how his treatment of the figure takes constant note of the material in which the first artist, his original, worked. It is raised porcelain, for instance, or soft ivory, or smooth, cool 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 a 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 Jacqueart gives us in his etchings—not 30 FINE PRINTS the figure only, but the figure so it comes to us through the medium of bronze. See, for example, the *Venus* *Marine*, outstretched, with slender legs in a bronze, long the possession of M. Thiers, I believe. One really cannot but admire this artist's mastery over his material—*choisir*, with its rich, low tones, its patterning outlined by its metal ribs; the coarseness of rough wood, as in the *Salire de Troyes*; the sharp, steel weapons and the infinite delicacy of their lines, as in *Épée*, *Langue de Beuf*, *Poignard*, the signet's flatness and delicate smoothness—"c'est le sien du Roy Sant Louis"—and the red porphyry, flaked, as it were, and speckled, of an ancient vase; and the clear, soft, unctuous green of jade. And as the material is marvellously varied, so are its combinations curious and wayward. I saw, one autumn, at Lyons, their 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 of Diana. The church was erected in its black stone re-arranged, and so the Church completed—Antiquity pressed into the service of the Middle Age. Jacquemart, dealing with the precious objects that he had to portray, came often on such strange meetings: an antique vase of sardonics, say, infinitely precious, mounted and altered in the Twelfth Century, for the service of the Mass, and so, beast with gold and jewels, offered by its possessor to the Abbey of Saint Denis. It was not a literal translation, it must be said again, that Jacquemart made of these things. These things 54 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING sat to him for their portraits; he posed them; he composed them right. Placed by him in their best lights, they revealed their finest qualities. 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. Jacqueemart never sacrificed precision when precision was of the essence of the business, but he did not—scarcely even in his earlier plates of the "Porcelaine"—care for it for its own sake. And the thing that his first critics blamed him for doing—the composition of a 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 art have always done, and for this most simple reason, that the doing of it is Art. As an interpreter of other men's pictures, it fell to the lot of Jacqueemart to engrave the most various masters. But with so very personal an artist as he, the interpretation of so many men, and in so many years, from 1860 or thereabouts, onwards, could not possibly be of equal value. As far as Dutch Painting is concerned, he is strongest when he interprets, as in one now celebrated etching, Van der Meer of Delft. Der Soldat und das leuchende Mädchen was, when Jacqueemart etched it, one of the most noteworthy pieces in the cabinet of M. Leopold Double. It was brought afterwards to London by the charming friend of many artists and collectors—the late Samuel Joseph—in the hands of whose family it of course rests. The big and 58 FINE PRINTS blustering trooper common in Dutch art, sits here, engaging the attention of that thin-faced and creolized maiden peculiar to Van der Meer. Behind the two, who are contentedly occupied in gazing and talk, is the basso-relievo of a woman's head, and, by the side of the couple, throwing its brilliant but modulated light upon the woman's face and on the background, is the intricately patterned window, the airy lattice. Rarely was a master's subject, or his method, better interpreted than in this print. The print possesses, along with all its subtlety, a quality of boldness demanded specially by Van der Meer, and lacking to prints which in their imperitable deliberation and cold skill render well enough some others of the Dutch masters—I mean the Eighteenth Century line engravings of J. G. Wille after Metsu and the rest. Frans Hals, once or twice, is as characteristically rendered. But with these exceptions it is Jacqueuart's own fellow-citizens whom he translates the best. The suppleness of his talent—his high speed of it, not its pithy elaboration—is shown by his engravings of Greene's "Rêve d'Amour," a single head, and L'Orgue, a memorandum of a young and frightened mother, kneeling by her child, exposed to the storm. Greene, with his exjolid art—which, if one likes, one must like without respecting it—is entirely there. So, too, Fragonard—the ardent and voluptuous soul of him—in Le Premier Baucis. Jacquemart, it may be interesting to add, etched some compositions of flowers. Gonse has praised 96 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING them. To me, elegant as they are, fragile of sub- stance, dainty of arrangement, they seem enormously inferior to that last century flower-piece of Jan Van Huysem's --- or rather to that reproduction of it which we are fortunate enough to know through the mezzotint of Earlom. And Jacquemart painted in water-colour---made very clever sketches---his strange dexterity of handling, at the service of fact; not at the service of imagination. In leaving him, it is well to recollect that he recorded Nature, and did not exalt or interpret it. 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. I have not said a word about the prices of the Jacquemart etchings. It is still customary to buy a complete series---one particular work. The "Powe- laine" so costly as a few years ago, the "Bouquets" Jacquet, something monod and Trebours' re-issue, it is worth observing, is better printed than the first edition. Separate impressions of the plates, in proof or rare states, sell at sums varying from five shillings, or half-a-sovereign---when scarcely anybody happens to be at Sotheby's who understands them --- up, I suppose, to two or three pounds. I do not think the acquisition of these admirable pieces is ever likely to be held responsible for a collector's ruin. In the Introductory chapter, a word of reference to two other Frenchmen --- Legros and Paul Hellen ---points to the importance which, in contemporary 37 38 FINE PRINTS original Etching, I assign to these artists. As Legros has lived nearly all his working life in England, he is treated, in subsequent pages, with English fellow-workers. Even Paul Helleu I treated with English men, in the phrase called "Ethnicity in England," because he also has done some part—though a small part—of his work here, and has been one of the mainstays of our Society of Painter-Etchers. But in the present volume—for the purposes of the Collektor—Helleu must be placed with his compatriots. The character of his genius too—his alertness and sensitiveness to the charm of grace rather than of formal beauty, the charm of quick and pretty movement rather than of abiding line—is French, essentially. He is of the succession of Watteau. His dry-points, of many of the best of which there are but a handful of impressions (purchasable, when occasion offers, on at three or four galleries' spieces), are artist's snap-shots, which arrest the figure suddenly in some delightful turn, the face in some delightful expression. In this connection two examples of Paul Helleu's work—that I may guide those who are a little to what see and seek for in these elegant, veracious records—I will name then Femme à la Tasse, with its happy and audacious ingenuity in point of view, and that incomparable Étude de Jeune Fille, the girl with the hair massed high above her forehead, thick above her ears, a very cascade at her shoulders, her lips a little parted, and her lifted arms close against her chin. 98 FRENCH REVIVAL OF ETCHING A Belgian draughtsman—established in Paris, and now approaching old age—has seen of late his reputation extending, not only amongst collectors of the cleverly odious; and he has shown imagination, draughtsmanship, a nimble hand, a certain mastery of process. But in a volume from which I must exclude so much of even wholly creditable Art—a volume in which the subject of Woodcuts, which of old was wont to interest, is deliberately ignored—I adopt no attitude of apology for refusing serious analysis to the too often morbid talent of Félicien Rops. A portfolio containing the delightful inventions of Helleu, and the great things of Meryon, could have no place for the record of Rops' disordered dream. Were I to be occupied with any living Belgian, it would be with one whose work M. Hymanes, the Keeper of the Prints at Brussels, showed me at the Bibliothèque Royale, this autumn—M. de Witte. 99 CHAPTER V The Revival in England—Whistler and Haden, Classics —Haden's first works—"The Agamemnon"—Dry-points—Etching—Zanzibar—Whistler's French Sketches—Thackeray's "The Unfinished period"—The Fenian work—His rarest Dry-points—Whistler's Prices at the Heywood Sale, the Hatchurn Sale, and now. In England, the Revival of Etching, so far as one can fix its origin at all, seems due, in chief, to the great practical work of two etchers of individual vision and exceptional power—Whistler and Seymour Haden. Much writing on the subject—and some of it, I hope, not bad—has also scarcely been without its effect. It has at least roused and sustained some interest in Etching amongst the public that reads. It cannot, fairly, ever have been expected to produce great artists. Whistler and Haden arc, it is now allowed, amongst the Classics already. Each has a place that will not be disturbed. Each is an honoured veteran. The work of Seymour Haden has been clearly seen. It is years since he gave hisetching portfolio to Mr. Keppel in New York; saying, with significant gesture—"I shall etch no more." From the other delightful veteran no such 100 WHISTLER AND HADEN formal declaration has—so far as I understand—as yet proceeded. Mr. Whistler may even now surprise us by a return from Lithography. His lithographs, which will be considered more or less in the final chapter of this book, have been uniformly admirable to the public. But it is by his etchings that Mr. Whistler's fame will live. And though he be to etch two scores of years ago, one would be sorry even now to feel it was quite certain that the last of his etchings had been done. We will speak of Seymour Haden first. He is the older of the two, and his practical work is admittedly over. His etching, though conceived always on fine lines, has somehow always been much more intelligible to the large public than Whistler's. For years, in England and America, he has enjoyed something as near to popular success as sterling work ever can get; and in days when I was able to pick up for six shillings, in Sotheby's auction-rooms, the dry-point of Whistler's *Funny Legend*—which would now be considered ridicu- ously cheap at just as many guineas—Seymour Haden's *River in Ireland* was selling (when it appeared and sold) at 10s., 15s., and 20s., while Whistler's prices. His published series of Etchings, with the text by Monsieur Barty, and then the etchings of Mr. Hamerton, had done something, and justifiably, towards what is called "success"—the success of recognition, I mean, as distinguished from the success of achievement, which was certainly his besides. And then—in the nick of time—there had come the *Agamemnon*, almost the largest fine etching one can call to mind; for, in Etching, 101 FINE PRINTS “important size” often means vulgarity. The *Agamemnon* had an immense sale. It was seen about so much, in the rooms of people who aspired to Taste, that it became what foolish men call “vulgarised.” As if the multiplication of excellent work—its presence in many places, instead of only a few—was positively a nuisance and a disadvantage! Anyhow, Seymour Haden had already entered into fame. In 1880, the late Sir William Drayton—an intimate friend who had collected Haden and admired him—issued through the Macmillan Imprescriptive Catalogue of Handwritten Manuscripts. The Catalogue takes note of a hundred and eighty-five pieces. Scredely anything, I think, is omitted. Of the substantial work none bears an earlier date than 1858; but fifteen years before that—when he was a very young man, journeying—Haden had scratched on half-a-dozen little coppers sparse notes of places of interest he had seen in Italy; and very long ago now (when Sir Seymour was living in Hartford Street) he showed me, I remember, the almost unique impressions from these practically unknown little plates. They were impression upon which a touch or so with the brush laid—if I remember rightly—a little fortified the dreamy and delicate sketch which the copper had received. There is neither need nor disposition to insist too much on the existence of these little plates; they are not valuable because they were wrought. They scarcely claim to have merit. But the fact that they were wrought shows one thing a collector may like to know—it shows that Seymour 102 **WHISTLER AND HADEN** Haden's interest in Etching began before the days of that French Revival in which was excoriated undoubtedly the bulk of his work. These little prints, then, as far as they went, were in quite the right spirit. They were jottings, impressions —had nothing of labour in them. But in the interval that divides them from the important and substantive work of 1858, 1859, 1860, and later years, the artist must have studied closely, though he was in full practice, most of that time, as a surgeon. In the interval, he had lived, so to put it, with Rembrandt; he had become familiar with Claude. And though they influenced, they did not overpower him. By 1864, there were fifty or sixty prints for M. Burtie to chronicle and eulogise, in the *Gazette des Beaux Arts*. The greatly praised *Shere Hill Pond* had been done in 1860. *Majton Hall*—which, unlike Mr. Hamerton, I prefer to the *Sheer Hill Pond*—had been wrought upon year earlier. It shows a shady avenue of trees whose leaves bend to an old man's head, who receives the full light of the sun; and in that print, early as it may seem, there was already the breadth of treatment which as years proceeded became more and more a characteristic of Seymour Haden's work. In 1863 came amongst many other good things, *Butterfly Rock*, which in the First State bore on it this inscription of interest: "Old Chelsea, Seymour Haden, 1863, out of Whistler's window." To the same year belongs the charming plate, *Whistler's House*, Old Chelsea. The tide is out, the mud is exposed; on the left is Lindsay Row; and 163 FINE PRINTS beyond, and to the right, Chelsea Old Church and Battersea Bridge: the picturesque wooden pile-bridge of that privileged day. It was not till 1870 that there came the Agamemnon—the Breaking-up of the Agamemnon, to give it its full title—a view, in reality, of the Thames at Greenwich, seen under sunset light, the hull of the old ship partially submerged by the tide. This is a very rare print existing in a couple of States. The Second, though less rare, is scarcely perceptibly less fine than the First. In it a smoking chimney, a brig under sail, and two small sailing-boats—all of them objects in extreme distance—have been replaced by indications of the sheds of a dockyard. In the Heywood Sale, a rich impression of the Agamemnon—the State not specified, but in all probability a First—sold for £7, 10s. In the Sir William Drake Sale, twelve years afterwards—in 1892—a First State fetched £7, 7s.; a Second, £6, 15s. For convenience sake, I will name a few more excellent and characteristic works—prints which have Seymour Haden's most distinguishing qualities of frankness, directness and an obvious truth. His etchings are deliberately arrested at the stage of the sketch, and it is a sketch executed nobly and executed with impudence. The tendons of the work, as Time went on, wax, as has been said, towards greater breadth; but unless we are to compare only such a print as Out of Study-Windows (done in 1859), with only the most admirable Rembrandt-like Goddes-like dry-print, Winslow Hill (done in 1877), there is no greatly 104 WHISTLER AND HADEN marked contrast; there is no surprise; there is but a steady and not unnatural development. I put this down, in part at least, to the fact that when Seymour Haden first took up Etching seriously (in 1858, re-member) he was already middle-aged. He had lived for years in the most frequent intercourse with dignified Art; his view of Nature, and of the way of rendering her—or of letting her inspire you—was large, and likely to be large. Yet as Time went on there came no doubt an increasing love of the sense of spaciousness and of potent effect. The work was apt to be more dramatic and more moving. The hand asked the opportunity for the fuller exercise of its freedom. Savery Abbey, etched in 1873, is an instance of this, and not alone for its merits is it interesting to mention it, but because, like a certain number of its fellows amongst that later work, it is etched upon zinc—a risky substance, which succeeds admirably, when it succeeds, and when it fails, fails very much. Windmill Hill—The Mill at Walthamstow—The Broom-Beacon, Wacham Bridge, and the Little Boothauns, and again that Grim Spain which illustrates my "Four Masters of Etching" are the prints which I should most choose to possess amongst those of Haden's later period ; whilst—going back to the period of 1864 and 1865—Sunset on the Thames is at the same time a favourite and strong, and Fenton Hook remarkable for its draughtsmanship of tree-trunk and stump. Yet earlier—for they belong to 1860 and 1859—there are the Mytton Hall, which I have spoken of already, 163 FINE PRINTS and the Combe Bottom. Combe Bottom is unsurpassed for sweetness and spontaneity. And Mytton Hall has its full share of that priceless element of Style which is never altogether absent from Seymour Haden's work. Again—and most acceptable of all to some of us—The Hill of Merton (which has been very largely) is, in a perfect impression, to be studied and enjoyed as a characteristic and synthetic transcript of a sudden rain-storm in the Hampshire lowlands, where poplars flourish and grass grows rank. The collector who can put these things into his folios—and a little diligence in finding them out, and three or four guineas for each print, will often enable him to do so—will have given himself the opportunity of confirmation in the belief that among modern etchers of Landscape, amongst modern exponents in the art of Black and White of an artistic sympathy with pure and ordinary Nature, Seymour Haden stands easily first. And to say that, is not to say that he succeeds equally, or his equally tried to succeed, with portraiture or figure-studies. It is not to compare him—to his advantage or disadvantage—with any other artist in the matter of the etcher's peculiar skill and technical mastery. The best collection of Seymour Haden's work that has ever been sold in detail was the collection of Sir William Drake. In it the First State of a River in Ireland—of which only twelve impressions had been taken—fetched £400 (Dunthorne); and the First State of Shere Mill Pond, 1435: a unique impression of 106 WHISTLER AND HADEN Battersea Railway Bridge fetched £18, 10s. (Depros); Erith Marches, First State, £4. 4s.; Combe Bot- ton, First State, £3.; Senat on the Thames, First State, £2, 12s.; and Sandly Abbey, First State, £2. 4s. With the master-etchers of the world—Meyron's equal in some respects, and, in some respects, Rem- brandt—is—there stands James Whistler. Connoisseurs in France and England, in America, Holland, Bavaria, concede this now. It was fiercely contested of old time, and there is not much cause for wonder in that, for the work of Mr. Whistler is, and has been from the first almost, so desperately original that the world could hardly be expected to be ready to receive it. And Mr. Whistler never by anything approaching to cheap issue facilitated familiarity with his work. In 1868 Mr. Hamerton wrote of him: "I have been told that, if application be made to Mr. Whistler for a set of his etchings"—the set, it may be said in parenthesis, was a very small one—the man may perhaps, if he chooses to answer the letter, do the applicantent the favour to let him know that he has not the sense of good house—but beyond such exceptional instances as this, Mr. Whistler's etchings are not in the market." They have been in the market since, however—every- body knows—and if in 1868 a "set" (the Thames Set or the French Set was meant, presumably) was valued by Mr. Whistler at the price of a horse, of late years a single print, such as the Zamond for instance, has been valued by Mr. Whistler at the price of a Humber 107 FINE PRINTS cycle. Even in the days—some sixteen years ago, or so—when the work of the delightful master was least appreciated, there was an enormous difference in the price of a print obtained through what are known as the "regular channels" and its price if obtained in open competition, under the hammer at Sotheby's. Those great days—or days of great opportunities when, as I have said before, became possessed for six shillings of Young Leyland, and, for hardly more than six shillings, of the yet rare dry-point, *Butterscotch Dawn*. About a dozen years ago, I, with the enthusiasm of a convert, began a Catalogue of Whistler's prints, intending it for my own use. I finished it for my brother-collectors, and for poor Mr. Thibaudeneau, who refreshed me with money—and a little for Mr. Whistler, too, if he was minded to receive my offering. The only previously existing Catalogue—that of Mr. Ralph Thomas—had been published twelve years earlier, and had meantime become of little service. There were several reasons for that but, to justify my own attempt—which, as in the case of Meryon, has been justified indeed by my brother-collectors' action—I think it will suffice if I mention Mr. Thomas, working in 1874, catalogued about eighty etchings; I, finishing my work in 1886, catalogued two hundred and fourteen. Of the additional number only a few are prints which had been already wrought when Mr. Thomas wrote, and which had escaped his notice. By far the greater portion have been etched in more recent years. 108 WHISTLER AND HADEN And many of them are unknown to the amateur—by sense of sight at least—even to this day. Whistler's etchings are so scattered, and so many of them are, and must ever be, so very rare, that I could not have done what I did if several diligent collectors, especially Mr. T. H. Thaidieu himself—the craziest dealer—had amassed much information, and placed it at my service. Mr. Samuel Avery, when Mr. Keppel took me to see him in East 38th Street, in the autumn of 1885, put at my disposal everything he knew; and his collection was even then the worthy rival of what Mr. Howard Mansfield's is now—the rival, almost, of Seymour Haden's own collection of Whistler's, which went to America a few years ago; drawn thither by the instrumentality of a great cheque from Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Mortimer Meipes—much associated with Whistler at that time, and who, I suppose, retains the fine collection of Whistler's he then possessed—took much trouble with me in the identification of the rare things he owned, and I had to express my thanks to Mr. Barrrett of Brighton, and to Reginald Stannard of London dealers—to Mr. Brown of the Fine Art Society, and Mr. Walter Dowdeswell, an enthusiast for Whistler, who furnished me with delightful notes I never published, on the precise condition of the impressions in my own set of the "Twenty-Six Etchings." Again, I saw—what any one may see—such of the Whistler prints as are possessed by the British Museum Print-Room. And, 109 FINE PRINTS Lastly, I had access, more than once, to Mr. Whistler's own collection; but that unfortunately was very incomplete. It consisted chiefly of the later etchings. It is now about forty years since Whistler began to etch; but his work in Etching has never been continuous or regular, and though he has done a certain number of things, some fine, some insignificant, since the appearance of my Catalogue, of late his work in Etching appears to have almost ceased. Looking back along his life, one may say, periods there have been when he was busy with needle and copper—periods, too, during which he laid them altogether aside. The first chronicled, the first completed plate, was done, it was believed, in 1857, while he was staying in Paris. But he told me there existed, somewhere or other, in the too safe keeping of public authorities in America, a plate on which, before he left the public service of the States, he neglected to fully engrave that map or view for the Coast Survey which the authorities expected of him, but did not neglect to engrave upon the plate, in triumphant mood, certain sketches for his own pleasure. The plate was confiscated. Young Mr. Whistler was informed that an unwarrantable thing had been done. He perfectly agreed—he told the high official—with that observation. In removing a plate from the hands of its author before he had completed his pleasure upon it, its author had been treated unwarrantably. Just as my Catalogue—a "Study and a Catalogue," I call it—was going to press, there arrived from New York what I then saw by 110 WHISTLER AND HADEN the courtesy of Mr. Kennedy, its owner—an impression from the copper I have just spoken of. It is a curi- osity, and not a work of Art—a geographer's view of the coast. It will be noticed from my little anecdote that, at a very early period of his life, Mr. Whistler was in the right, absolutely, and other people in the wrong—and in the right he has remained ever since, and has believed it, in spite of some intelligent and much unintelligent criticism. He has been felt (let the collector be very sure of this) a law unto himself. He worked in his own way, at his own rate, and took but one course—-the re- sult of it, I dare to think deliberately, the preservation of a freshness which, with artists less true to their art and their own mission, is apt to suffer and to pass away. And with it the charm passes. Now Whistler's newest work—his work of this morning, be it etching or litho- graph—possesses the interest of freshness, of vivacity, of a new and beautiful impression of the world, con- veyed in individual ways, just as much as did his early work of nearly forty years ago. When the compara- tively few people whose artistic sensibilities allow them to really understand the delicacy of Mr. Whistler's method, shall but have known it long enough, they will not be found, as some among the not quite apprecia- tive are found to-day, protesting that there is a want of continuity between the earlier efforts and the later, and that the vision of pretty things comes in detail, and that the firmness and certainty of hand in revealing it, which confidently distinguished the etchings of France 11 FINE PRINTS and of the Thames below Bridge, are missing to the later plates or the plates of the middle period—to the dry-points of what I may term the Leyland period (when he drew all three Miss Leylands, their father and their mother too, and *Spjek Hall*, where they lived), and to the more recent Venetian etchings. *Pecuniæ* I have myself, in my time, thought that this continuity was wanting. I have told Mr. Whistler with exceeding levity of speech, that when, in the Realmus of the Blest, he desired, on meeting Velasquez and Rembrandt, not to disappoint them, he must be provided, for his justification, with his own portraits in these two states. It would be potent introduction. But I am not sure that the Venetian portfolios—the “Venice” and the “Twenty-Six Etchings,” which are most of them Venetian in theme—would not serve Mr. Whistler in good stead. For—spite of some insignificant things put out not long after the appearance of my Catalogue, along indeed, or almost along with some fine ones of Brussels and Tournai—there is a continuity which the thorough student of Mr. Whistler’s work will recognise. There is often in the Venetian things—as in the Door-way of the “Venice,” and in *The Garden* and *The Balcony* of the “Twenty-Six Etchings”—an advance in the impression produced, a greater variety and flexibility of method, a more delightful and dexterous effecting of the means used to bring about the effect. The Venetian technique had people thought at first they were not satisfactory because they did not record that Venice which the University-Extension-educated 112 WHISTLER AND HADEN tourist, with his guide-book and his volumes of Ruskin, goes out from England to see. But I doubt if Mr. Whistler troubled himself about the guides or read the sacred books of Mr. Ruskin with becoming attention. Mr. Ruskin had seen Venice nobly, with great imagination; Mr. Ferguson and a score of admirable archi- tects had seen it learnedly; but Mr. Whistler would see it for himself—that is to say, he would see in his own way the Present, and would see it quite as certainly as the Past. The architecture of Venice had impressed folk so deeply that it was not easy in a moment to realise that here was a great draughtsman—a man more of poetic vision—whose work it had not been allowed to be forgotten. The Past, indeed, were not Whistler's affair in Venice. For him, the lines of the steam-boat, the lines of the fishing-tackle, the shadow under the squalid arbour, the wayward vine of the garden, had been as fascinating, as engaging, as worthy of chronicle, as the domes of St. Mark's. Yet we had not properly understood Mr. Whistler's work in England, if we supposed it could be otherwise. From associations of Literature and History this artist came from the first had cut himself adrift. His subject was what he saw, or what he decided to see, and not anything that he had heard about it. He had dispensed from the beginning with those aids to the provocation of interest which appeal most strongly to the world—to the person of sentiment, to the literary half, to the man in the street. We were not interested—if we were interested at all—in the happy accidents of line 113 FINE PRINTS and light he had perceived, in his dexterous record, in his knowing adaptation. I must be allowed to say, however—and it is useful to the collector that I should say it plainly—that there was some justification (much more than Mr. Whistler, I suppose, would allow) for those of us who did not bow the knee too readily before the Venetian prints. In the States in which they were first exhibited, there was, with all their merits, something rugged and disjointed about several of them. Mr. Whistler worked more upon them later, adding never of course merely finicky detail, but refinement, sensuity. Of these particular plates, the collector should remember, it is not the surfer in the sea, but the fish that is preferred. It is, rather, the latter impression—then even, if need arose through any wear in tirage, suitably refreshed. To return for a moment to Whistlerian character- istics. Though the value of many of his etchings, as Mr. Whistler might himself tell us, consists in the exquisite ness of their execution and of their arrangement of line, it would be unfair not to acknowledge that amongst the many things it has been given to Mr. Whistler to perceive, it has been given him to per- ceive beautiful character and exquisite line in Humanity—that, certainly, just as much as quaintness and charm in the wharves and warehouses of the Port; in the shabby elegance of the side canals of Venice; in the engaging homeliness of little Chelsea shop-fronts. The almost unknown etching of his brother—one of the most 114 WHISTLER AND HADEN refined performances of his career, as exquisite, in its own way, as the famous painting which is displayed at the Luxembourg—proves his possession of the quality which permitted Rembrandt to draw with the reticence of a convincing pathos his most impressive portraits of the aged—the Lutona, the Cléon de Jonghe, the Mère de Rembrandt, an voice nil. Again, the Funny Looking, and The Muff, and many another print that I could name, attest Mr Whistler's solution of a problem which presents itself engagingly, attractively, to the ingenious, and uselessly to the incompetent—the problem of seeing beauty in modern dress, and grace in the modern figure. Whistler, no more than Degas, Sargent or Steinlen sign for the artistic dignity of the fashion of other times. Even at moments when modern Fashion is not in truth at its prettiest, he is able to decry a piquancy in the contemporary hat, and to find a grace in the flutter of blouse and frill. What else after all should we expect from an artist the sweep of whose brush would give distinction to the Chelsea Workhouse, or to the St. George's Union Infirmary in the Fulham Road, and for whom, under the veil of night or dusk, the chimney of the Swan Brewery would wear an aspect not less beautiful than King's College Chapel? It has been given to the master of Etching to see everyday things with a poetic eye. "Take care of the extremities," said old Couture, to a painter who addressed himself to this figure : " take care of the extremities, for all the life is there." But that,
WHISTLER AND HADEN
refined performances of his career, as exquisite, in its own way, as the famous painting which is displayed at the Luxembourg—proves his possession of the quality which permitted Rembrandt to draw with the reticence of a convincing pathos his most impressive portraits of the aged—the Lutona, the Cléon de Jonghe, the Mère de Rembrandt, an voice nil.
Again, the Funny Looking, and The Muff, and many another print that I could name, attest Mr Whistler's solution of a problem which presents itself engagingly, attractively, to the ingenious, and uselessly to the incompetent—the problem of seeing beauty in modern dress, and grace in the modern figure. Whistler, no more than Degas, Sargent or Steinlen sign for the artistic dignity of the fashion of other times. Even at moments when modern Fashion is not in truth at its prettiest, he is able to decry a piquancy in the contemporary hat, and to find a grace in the flutter of blouse and frill. What else after all should we expect from an artist the sweep of whose brush would give distinction to the Chelsea Workhouse, or to the St. George's Union Infirmary in the Fulham Road, and for whom, under the veil of night or dusk, the chimney of the Swan Brewery would wear an aspect not less beautiful than King's College Chapel? It has been given to the master of Etching to see everyday things with a poetic eye.
"Take care of the extremities," said old Couture, to a painter who addressed himself to this figure : " take care of the extremities, for all the life is there." But that,
FINE PRINTS it may truly be answered, is what Mr. Whistler has often neglected to do. It may be rejoined, however, that where he has neglected to do it, somehow "all the life" has not gone out of his work. And the hand of the man sitting in the boat, in one of the most desirable of the early Thames etchings, Black Lion Wharf, and (to name no other instance) the hands in the painting of Sansawe of a dozen years ago, are reminders of how completely it is within Mr. Whistler's power to indicate the life, the temperament, by "the extremities," when it suits his work that he shall do so. And the avoidance, so often commented upon, of this detail here, and of that detail there, itself reminds us of something important--may, perhaps, of the central fact which determines the direction of so much of this great etcher's labour. It reminds us that whether Mr. Whistler's work is record of Nature or not, it has at all costs to be considered evidence of Art. And for the one as well as for the other he must need to know not only what to do--a difficult thing enough, sometimes--but a more difficult thing yet: what to avoid doing. In other words, selection plays a part in his work a part unusually important, and he has occupied himself increasingly, not with the question of how to initiate and transcribe, but with the question how best to imply and to suggest. In nearly all his periods he is the master of an advanced art, which gives a curious and a various and a continual pleasure. And now a word or two on what is matter of business to the collector--the business of the acquisition. 118 WHISTLER AND HADEN of Whistler's etchings. Unlike the thousand prints which, in these later days of "the Revival," are the inadequate result of the laborious industry of popular people—and which have served their purpose when, framed and mounted, they have covered for a while the wall-paper in every builder's tenance in Bayesworth—works of the individuality, the flexibility, the genius in fine of Whistler, appeal to the collector of the highest class and of the finest taste, and, it may be even, to him alone. They lie already in the portfolio by the side of Rembrandts and Meryons. It is not easy to get them; or rather, there are some which it is only difficult, and some which it is impossible, to possess. Certain of these, others are known to have been destroyed; others, which one cannot always particulate, are in so probability destroyed. Then again there are some which never were robust; some of them so delicate, even amenable, that the plate, should it exist, would prove to be worth nothing. It has yielded, perhaps, half-a-dozen impressions, and they have gone far towards exhausting it. Many plates, again, exist, no doubt, in the late state, or in the undesirable condition, and some are yet intact, and others, like the two Venetian series—the "Venice" and the "Twenty-Six"—economically managed from the beginning, have yielded a substantial yet never an extensive array of such proofs as satisfy the eye that is educated. Publication—if one can quite call it so—from Mr. Whistler's etchings first began in 1839, when the artist had worked seriously for only two or three years. 117 FINE PRINTS Thirteen etchings, generally called "the French Set," were printed then by Delâtre in Paris, in very limited numbers, on the thin Japan or China or on the good old slightly-ribbed paper that the collector loves. The "Thames Set"—sixteen in number, and consisting of the majority of the River pieces executed up to that time—were the next to be offered. But they appeared, publicly, only in 1871, when, as Mr. Ellis was good enough to tell me, "Ellis & Green" bought the plates and had a hundred sets printed. Their printing was rather dry, so that it is chiefly by the rare impressions which either Mr. Whistler himself, or Delâtre it may be, had printed, years before, that these plates are to be judged. At all events it is these impressions which represent them most perfectly, though I would by no means speak with disrespect of the impressions printed by Mr. Gunning when the Fine Art Society bought the plates. Mr. Gunning's prints of the consequent ones printed quite a little while, when Mr. Keppel, in his turn, bought the coppers of the Fine Art Society. Of the two other recognised sets—the "Venice" of the Fine Art Society and the "Twenty-Six Etchings" of the Dowdeswell—it must be said first that neither has been subjected to the vicissitudes that attended the earlier plates. The dozen prints in the "Venice" were first issued by the Fine Art Society in the year 1880, but, as I have said earlier, very few of the fine and really finished impressions—of the hundred permitted from each plate—date from as early as that year. The "Twenty-Six Etchings," issued by the Messrs. 148 WHISTLER AND HADEN Dowdeswell, were brought out in 1886; Mr. Whistler himself printing, with consummate skill, every mortal copy, and making the most interesting little changes, repairs, improvements, at the press-side. Of most of the subjects there were but fifty impressions. These things are wholly admirable, and mostly— it is evident—are rare; but the extremest rarity is reserved for a few of those many plates which do not belong to any set at all, and were never formally issued. Thus Paris, Isle de la Cité—etchcd from the Galerie d'Apollon—in the London edition unsurpassable rarity; and It is singularly interesting as having been done with a date as early as 1839, very distinct characteristics of style of which the wider manifestation came much later. The First State of the Reg Gatherers is of great, though not of quite such extraordinary rarity. The Kitchen, in the First State, is not exceptionally rare. It should be had, if possible, in the Second, for, many years after its first execution, Mr. Whistler took it up again, and then, and then only, was it that he perfected it. In subtlety of illumination, in that Second State, it is as fine as any painting of De Hooch's. Westminster Bridge is very rare and very describable in the First State; in the Second—by which time it has gone into the regular "Thames Set" or "Sixteen Etchings"—it has lost all its delicacy and harmony; it is hard and dry. The figure-plates of the Leyland period—dry-points, nearly always—are very rare. They include not only a little succession of portraits—the lovely print of Prince Leopold I have referred to 119 FINE PRINTS to already—but likewise a succession of studies of paid or of familiar models, of which the Model Resting is one of the most beautiful. There is Tille; a model, too: likewise of great rarity and charm. Of the larger etchings, three of the finest are the Potency Bridge, the Battersea Bridge, and the Large "Pool." Beyond this scale, Etching can hardly safely go. Even this scale would be a danger to some, though Mr. Whistler has managed it. But then, that art of his—like Rembrandt's own—can "blow on brass" as well as "breathe through silver." He "breathes through silver" in the dainty rarities of a later time, the little Chelsea shop subjects—Old Chelsea Shop, Fruit Shop, Are those stills?—and in the little etchings of nature in the world and in man. And then, the poetic charm of Prices Candle Works—the easy majesty of London Bridge! As to the prices of Whistlers in the open market? Well, they increase, unquestionably. Some of the very greatest rarities, it may be remembered, have never appeared in the auction-room. There are half-a-dozen, I suppose, for any one of which, did it appear, forty or fifty guineas would cheerfully be paid. The average price, now, of a satisfactory Whistler—to speak to the collector very roughly, and always with the difficulty of striking an average at all—the average dealer's price tonight might be eight guineas. But we will look at the Catalogues; premising, as has been promised already, that there are some rarer things than any that are there chronicled. The time when Mr. Heywood sold his Whistler was the fortunate time to 190 WHISTLER AND HADEN buy. A First State of the *Rug Gatherers* was sold then for less than two pounds; a First of the *Westminster Bridge* (then called "The Houses of Parliament"), for about five pounds; and many quite desirable things went for a pound a piece, and some for a few shillings. In 1892, when there came the sale of Mr. Hutchinson's collection, and of Sir William Drake's, opinion was "more formal"; yet nothing like the prices that would be reached to-day were attained then. In Mr. Hutchin- son's collection, the First State of the *Marchande de Montargis* fetched £30, but this was specially a great event for £4, 10s.; the First State of the *Kitchen for 4s., 15s. ; the *Line Barrows* for £6, 10s.; a trial proof of the *Archer* for £10, 15s.; a trial proof of the *Whistler* for £15, 10s. Again, the *Worry* fetched £12; the First State of *Spiele Hall*, £9, 12s.; the *Fanny Leyland*, £15, 10s.; From Pickled Herring Stairs, 26, 6s.; the *Palaces*, 48, 15c.; the *San Baggio*, 47, 10s.; the *Gar- den*, 15, 10s.; the *Wood Carvers*, 48; the *Little Draw- bridge*, Amsterdam, 29, 15c.; the *Zaandam*, £10. At the Drake Sale—a smaller one, as far as Whistlers were concerned—one guinea was given for the *Kitchen*; £19 for the Forge. It must be added that this Forge, which is in the second published set (the "Thames series" or "Sixteen Etchings", call them which you will) is by the quality of its different impressions more unequal than any other print I know. It varies from an inefficent ghost to a thing of beauty. At £74, let us hope it was a thing of beauty; but very many offenders it is an inefficent ghost—desperately over-rated. 121 CHAPTER VI Etchern since our great Classics—William Strong— His individuality, and obligations to Legros—That excellent Medalist—Legros's superiority to him—His discoveries in the immediate past—Hodgson—The颠uousness of Short—C. J. Watson—Goft, flexible and compre- hensive—the qualities of Cameron—Oliver Hall's Landscape—the question of price—Contemporary Prints generally dear. Though no very definite commercial values may yet have been established, in the auction-rooms, for their work, many living English etchers of a generation later than that of Whistler and of Seymour Haden have been for some time now appealing to the collector; and their prints—sold chiefly perhaps at the " Painter-Etcher's," at Mr. Dunthorne's, and at Mr. R. Gutekunst's—are worthy to be carefully considered. The best of them, at least, will rank some day as only second to the classics of their art. Indeed, if the term "the Revival of Etching" has any meaning, it is to the best men of the later generation that it must most apply ; for " revival" signifies something more than a suddenly wide diffusion of interest, and is a word that could scarcely be used if all we were concerned with were the efforts of two or 192 LATER ENGLISH ETCHERS three isolated men of genius—in France, Mérçon, Bracquemond, Jacqueuart ; in England, Haden and Whistler. No, the collector who addresses himself to the gathering- of modern etchings, must go—or may go, fairly— beyond the limits of the work of the men I have this instant named. But in going beyond them, very wary must be his steps. He who is already a serious student of the older masters—he who by happy instinct, or by that poor but necessary subtilty for it, a steady appre- ciation of the inconceivable—the great master—knows something of the secrets of Style, and so will not fall a ready prey to the attractions of the meretricious and the cheap. But the beginner is in need of my warn- ing; and among the work of the younger generation, the etching that is already popular and celebrated—more particularly the etching that is obviously elabo- rate and laboured—is as a rule the work he must eschew. The thing of course to aim at, is to acquire gradually such “eye” and knowledge as will enable him to pounce with safety here and there upon unknown work ; but at first it is well perhaps that in his travels beyond the territory of the admittedly great, he shall not wander too far. I will give him the names of a few artists, whom the connoisseur begins to appreciate,—men of whose methods it will be interesting, and need not be extravagant, to possess a few examples. Of any such men, here with us in England—save indeed Legros, whose claims to highest place I hold to 123 FINE PRINTS be yet more incontestable—William Strang is the one who has been known the longest, though the number of his years may still permit him, ere he pass from us, to double the already formidable volume of his work. Strang has etched in the right methods, and no one knows much better than he does, the technique of the craft; and, then, moreover, though he paints from time to time a little, it is Etching—and all of it original Etching—that is the occupation of his life. And within less than twenty years Mr. Strang has wrought so well, so between two hundred and fifty and three hundred pounds. It is no good giving the precise number, for before this book was written for a month upon the reader's shelf the number will have grown to be precise. Almost as many kinds of subjects as were treated by Rembrandt, have been treated—and no one of them on one or two occasions only—by Mr. William Strang. He has dealt with religious story—carving always, like Rembrandt, and like Von Uhde-to-day, for dramatic intensity in the representation of it, rather than for local colour—he has dealt too with Landscape, with Portraiture, with grim and sordid aspects of contemporary life. The presence of imagination, the absence, almost complete, of formal beauty, are the very "notes" of Mr. Strang's work—that absence is so remarkable where it would have been least expected, that we are, it may be, a little too apt to forget that in certain of his insatiable portraiture it does not make itself felt at all. He has made etchings of handsome men, 124 LATER ENGLISH ETCHERS and they have remained hand-once. He has even made etchings of men not handsome, and handsome they have become. But he knows not the pretty woman, and his landscape is endowed but scantily with the beauty it cannot entirely miss. Another curious thing about Mr. Strang's landscape is, that more even than that of Legros, his first great master, it seems derived from but a little personal observation and an immense study of the elder art. Indeed, I am not quite sure whether, save in the accessories of his figures, such as the potato-basket and cup of his woodcutter, limping, elderly man, or the dog of Mr. Strang, he has ever drawn and observed anything which had not already fallen within the observation of the great original engravers of the remotest Past. In his dramatic pieces he shows a sense of simple pathos, as well as of the enmity and the weird. In Portraiture Mr. Strang can be effectively austere and suitably restrained. Ocasional failures, or comparative failures, such as the portraits of Mr. Thomas Hardy and of the late Sir William Drake, do perhaps but bring into stronger relief the successes of the Mr. Nichol and of Ian Strange, and many others besides. I must refrain from naming them. When Mr. Strang has done so much, and nearly all of it on a high technical level, it is natural to feel that though out of them all the general collector of etchings might reasonably be satisfied with the production of a dozen--or, peradventure, slightly less--like at least to choose them for himself. Indeed, there is no "best" to guide him to--no "worst" to guard him against. 125 FINE PRINTS Legros has been named as Strang's first master. He belongs to an older generation, and if I name him here, between his best-known pupil and some of the younger men, it is not to minimise his importance, but in part as a convenient thing, and in part because, with his long years of English practice, one hesitates to allow even French birth and a French first education to cause one place Legros outside the English School that he has influenced. Born at Dijon nearly sixty years ago, Legros has been amongst us since 1863. But it is not English life—or indeed any life—that has made him what he is. He might have done his work—most of it at least—the same way which he is currently wandering beyond the bounds of a Hammermith tenement. He has been fed on the Renaissance, and fed on Rembrandt ; but yet the originality of his mind pierces through the form it has pleased him to impose on its expression. He gives to masculine character nobility and dignity ; or rather, he is impressed immensely by the presence of these things in his subjects. His etching of Mr. G. F. Watts is perhaps—taking into account both theme and treatment—the finest etched portrait that has been wrought by any one since the very masterpieces of Rembrandt, nor, honestly speaking, do I know that it fails to stand comparison even with these. Like his most prolific and perhaps also his most original pupil, who has been spoken of already, Legros has little sense of womanly beauty ; but the lines of his landscape—often, as I judge—either an imagined world or bat a fulled memory of our own—have refinement 126 LATER ENGLISH ETCHERS and charm. His art is restful—restful even when it is weird. A large proportion of his earlier work records the life of the priesthood. In its visible dignity—as I have said elsewhere—it is true but limited canonicerdic, in its monotony and quiducet, in its magnificence of service and symbol, the life of the priest, and of those who serve in a great church, has impressed Legros profoundly, and he has etched these men now read- ing a lesson, with their hands on the folio books, one meditating, one observing, one offering up the Host, another, a musician, bending over the 'cello or the double-bass with slow movement of the hand that holds the bow. Dignity and ignorance, pomp and power, weariness, senility, decay—one of these things escape the observation of the first great etcher of the life of the Church. *Communion dans l'Église St. Médard* and *Chantres Espagnols*, when seen in time "states," are amazing and admirable technical triumphs, as well as penetrating studies, the one of religious fervour, the other of impending death. In *La Mort et Bicheron* —in either version of the plate, for there are two—the imagination of Legros is at its tenderest. Is not L'Enfance immémoriale, in its huge and abstract way? Is not *La Mère du Christ* (which—though the story is in "Laur"—the only strange thing that is not, in its scale—a mistake—I know)—would not have it otherwise, though it wants almost a portfolio to itself, or, better, a francouon the wall. One might go on indefinitely—but again it is preferable to send the reader to the study of the master's long and serious 127 FINE PRINTS work—a hundred and sixty-eight pieces there were in 1877, when Thibaudet & Malasius published their Cata- logue; ten years later there were ninety additions to the list; and to this day Mr. Legros has not ceased to etch. Only the very first of his prints show any evidence of technical incompleteness. The very latest—though no doubt, by this time, his own real message must have been delivered—the very latest show no symptom of fatigue or of decay. Not more than once or twice, I think, in all his long career, has Legros published his works in sets, either natural or connected, artificially brought together. Charles Howard, a distinguished pupil of Legros, has twice already published sets—one is his “Icarus” set, and a little earlier in date, yet in no respect immature, his “Monte Oliveto” set. Holroyd—with indi- viduality of his own, without a doubt—is yet Legros’ true spiritual child. He has much of his refinement, of his dignity. Did he love the priesthood from Legros’s etchings, before ever he lived with them in Italy? Rome itself, I suppose, gave him the love of what is visibly Classic—and that is a love which Legros does not appear to share. His composition is generally admirable; his sense of beautiful “line” most note- worthy. His trees—stone pine and olive, or the humber tree of our North—are thus not only indi- vidual studies, true to Nature sometimes in detail, always in essentials—but likewise resolutive and impres- sive decorations of the space of paper it is his business to fill. *Form behind Scarabaeus* shows him honestly, 128 LATER ENGLISH ETCHERS simple, and direct. Was it a Roman garden, or Stadley, that suggested The Round Temple ? In the little plate of the Borghese Gardens—my own private plate, which I bought from him when the first impres- sion of it hung at the Painter-etchers' five or six years ago—Holroyd consciously abandons much that is wont to attract (atmospheric effect, for example), but he re- tains the thing for which the plate existed—dignified and expressive rhythm of "line." That justifies it, and permits it to omit much, and to only exquisitely hint at the thing it would not actually convey. We will turn for a few minutes to another contem- porary who has etched in the right spirit—Mr. Frank Short. Some people think that Mr. Short has not quite fulfilled the promise which only a few years ago he gave, as an original etcher. For myself, I consider that the fulfilment is, at most, only delayed - not rendered impossible. Mr. Short has been several years extremely busy in translations chiefly into mezzotint, of pictures and drawings by artists as various as Turner, Nasmyth, Constable, Dewitt, and G. F. Watts. If engravings that are not original inventions are ever worth buying—and that, of course, cannot be doubted—these translations by Mr. Short are worth buying, eminently. There is not one of them that fails. His flexibility is extraordinary. His productions are exquisite. In a parenthesis, let me advise their pur- chase, when things of the sort are required. But Short is before us just now only in the capacity of an original etcher, and, as an original etcher, with well-night per- T38 FINE PRINTS fect command of technique, he registers the daintiest of individual impressions of the world. That his field as an observer at first hand is limited, is certainly true. Coast subjects please him best. We have no finer draughtsman of low-lying land, of a scene with a low horizon, of a great expanse of mud and harbour deserted by the tide—all their simplicity, even unconcioliness of theme, made almost poetic. Low Tide and the Evening Star ; Evening, Bosham ; Stepping till the Flood, are all, among subjects of this order, prints that should be secured where it is possible—and where the accumulation of modern etchings is not an inconvenience. In Stonebridge Canal and in Wrought Nails—both of them finely left, finely drawn bits of the ragged, sordid " Black Country"—we have desirable instances of Mr. Short's dealings with another class of theme. If you want him in a more playful mood, take Quaker Boy—a quite imaginative yet gossamer vision of an artist looking out to sea from the Belfry of the church of Rye. C. J. Watson has for many years now been etching persistently, and been etching well. But he has not got, and could not perhaps quite easily get, beyond the learned simplicity of Mill Bridge, Bosham, done in 1888. It is a sketch with singular unity of impression—or rather with that unity of impression which is not so singular perhaps when the work remains a sketch. St. Etienne-du-Mont—a theme from which one would have thought that Mr. Watson would have been warned off, remembering how, once and for ever, it had been 130 LATER ENGLISH ETCHERS dealt with by the genius of Mérçon—is, doubtless, an accurate enough portrait, but the individuality—where? And without individuality, such work is an architec- tural drawing. This St. Étienne bears date 1890; but since 1890 Mr. Watson has done finer things—his strong and capable hand stirred to expression by a nature not perhaps very sensitive to every effect of beauty, but feeling the interest of solid workmanship and something of the charm of the picturesque. Ponte del Cavalclo has daintiness, and some yet more recent work in Central Italy and Sicily—with architecture generally as the basis of its interest—may fall reason- ably enough within the province of collectors who can afford to spend what they can afford to add well to well and vineyard to vineyard. Of the remaining English etchers of our time, Colonel Goff, Mr. D. Y. Cameron, and Mr. Oliver Hall are those whom it will be best to notice. Mr. Macheth, Mr. Herkomer, Mr. Pennell, Mr. W. H. May, Mr. Mempey, Mr. Raven Hill, Mr. Haig, Miss Bolingbroke, Mrs. Stanhope Forbes—others besides—have brought out prints of which the possession is pleasant; but it is, I suppose, the three men whom I named earlier who by reason of combined quality and quantity of “out- put” must deserve the collector’s serious consideration. Of these three, Goff—a retired Gardener—has no more really an amateur than Seymour Haden—is, I take it, the best known. Actual popularity he has been, for an etcher, wonderfully near to attaining; He may even now attain it. Much of the excellence is 131 FINE PRINTS of his work is easily intelligible; his point of view, though always artistic, is one that can be reached, often, by the ordinary spectator of his prints. Hence, his relatively large acceptance—an agreeable circumstance which I should be glad to consider was owing exclusively to the skill that is certainly likewise his. Colonel Goll's sympathies are broad; his subjects admirably varied; and the vivacity of his artistic temperament allows him to attack each new plate with new interest. He is almost without mannerism in treatment, and of that which presents itself to his gaze on his journey through the world, there is singularly little which he is not able artificially to tackle. Not quite the architectural draughtsman that C. J. Watson is, he yet can indicate tastefully the architecture of church or cottage or city house. His sympathy with the old, and that is in part because to him a building is not only, or chiefly, a monument with historical associations; it is, above all, an excuse and a justification for an arrangement on the copper, of harmonious and intricate line. Very successfully he has dealt with landscape. Is it the seaboard or the town that he depicts, he can people the place with figures vivacious and rightly displayed. I suppose that he has executed by this time scarcely less than a hundred plates. "Summer Storms in the Itchen Valley" remains the most popular, and would therefore prove, in an auction-room, the least inexpensive. But, among the pure etchings, Pine Trees, Christ Church, and Norfolk Bridge, Shore-105 LATER ENGLISH ETCHERS ham, and the extremely delicate little print of the Chain Pier, Brighton, and Lea Tide, Mouth of the Hampshire Avon—with its own drowsy but impressive beauty—are to my mind distinctly more desirable, and should be possessed if possible; whilst among the dry-points (and a dry-point can never be common) I would place highest, perhaps, the peaceful little Itchen Abbas Bridge. Intricate in arrangement of line, the work of Colonel Goff is in actual workshopmanship less elaborate than that of Mr. D. Y. Cameron, who, though now and again, as in that which remains almost his masterpiece—Border Tucci—a pure sketcher in Etching, much oftener devotes himself to work solid, substantial, deliberate rather than flimsy of realisation than in economy of means. He is a fine engraver on the copper; addicted to those arrangements of shadow and light giving to these, whatever there may be of sense; for seeing as little of the Cottier windiness Mr. Strang bestows upon the figure. Glamour, just a touch of wizardry, is in the Palaeo, Stirling Castle; and not in that only. A master, already, of the arrangement of light and shade—a master, already, of technique— Mr. Cameron (who has studied Rembrandt so much, and, I should presume, Meryon) is finding his own path. Indeed, the Border Tucci shows that all that he has learnt from Rembrandt he has made his own by this time. How else could he have accomplished what is certainly one of the most complete and significant suggestions of Landscape wrought in our day? A Rembrandt Farm is earlier. It is extremely clever, 103 FINE PRINTS but, as its very name might lead one to conjecture, it is more distinctly imitative. Mr. Cameron was not a master at the moment when he wrought the "Flower Market," because he did not make in that the irreconcilable mistake of choosing the wrong medium—water's ink where one's cry, first and last, is naturally for "colour"—he made at all events the mistake that Mr. Whistler is incapable of making (as his etching of *The Garden* shows), the mistake of working with a heavy hand, when what was wanted was a treatment of "touch and go," as it were—the very lightest coquetry of line. Occasionally his industry has failed; occasionally his industry has resulted in the commonplace; but he is a young man still; the collector must take account of him; his may hereafter be a very distinguished name; and meanwhile—now even—the collector of good Modern Etching is bound to put into his folios a few of Mr. Cameron's always sterling prints. Mr. Oliver Hall—a young man also, and one who paints in water-colours as well as schemes hardily have done many pictures by Cameron, yet and no one of them, free sketches of landscape—barely immediate, well-disposed—has Mr. Hall been so unwise as to emulate the almost Mörök-like elaboration not inappropriate to all at events the architectural subjects of Cameron. Oliver Hall's is delightful and maseu-line work. After a very short period of immaturity, during which the influence of Scynour Haden was that which he most disclosed, his *Traces on the Hillside* and *A Windy Day* testified to an extraordinary flexi- 154 LATER ENGLISH ETCHERS bility and force. The lines of "foliages," as people call it—it is the tree, however, rather than the leaf—the lines of the tree-form, however intricate, did not chide his point. Afterwards, Angerton Moss: Windy Day, and the Edge of the Forest, with its gust-blown trees and threatening sky, and later still, King's Lynn from a Distance, came to assure us that here was an artist getting at the heart of Nature—a master who could bring before us a brawl poetic vision of natural effects. Mr. Alfred East, Mr. Mephes, Mr. Jacobus Hoal, Mr. Percy Thomson, Mr. J. H. Heslinie, Mr. W. H. May, Sir Charles Robinson, Eliza Bannister (Mrs. Stanhope Forbes), and Minna Bolingbroke (Mrs. C. J. Watson) ought not to go unmentioned even in a book which has a wider field than "Etching in England"—in which some of them are named less badly. The inexpert purchaser may like to know what is the sort of price asked generally by its producer, or by the dealer, or the Painter-Etchers' Society—to which the print may be intended—for a new etching. I am here on ticklish ground ; but I must make bold to answer, speaking broadly, "Far too much." Later on—before I have quite done with the subject of the Litho- graph—I shall return to the charge, on this matter of solid cash. But each class of work stands, in the matter of price, on its own peculiar footing ; and here we talk, not of lithographs, but of etchings and dry-points. The wholly exceptional genius, approved by Time, and happily yet with no benefit by the result of his fame, may be pardoned for asking twelve 137 FINE PRINTS guineas for one of his most recent etchings. If he gets it, his rewards are delightfully contrasted with those of Mérçon — who was grateful when an old gentleman in the French War Office gave him a franc and a half for an impression of the *Atala de Notre Dame*, which, because of its beauty and of its peculiar and rare "state," is worth to-day about a hundred and fifty pounds. But we are not all men of exceptional genius; and, in the case of etched work, which, without deterioration, may be issued to the number of fifty or a hundred or a couple of hundred impressions, is it wise to take more than two? If I am above not to be the veritof of the world—is it not to limit the issue so very artificially by the simple, I will not say the greedy process of asking two, three, and four guineas for an impression of a good but ordinary etching? A good etching, produced by a contemporary artist, could, quite to the benefit of the etcher, be sold for a guinea. If the etcher has no time to print it himself, or is not, at heart, artist enough to wish to do so, let him send it to a good printer, with definite instructions how to print it, and, on the average, each impression may cost him half-a-crown. Then, of course, if he sells it through a dealer, there will be something for the dealer—perhaps five shillings. Say about fourteen shillings will be left for the artist. The fee is insignificant—but, if you once interest the public, it may be almost indefinitely multiplied. The price that is prohibitive to the ordinary man of taste—the price that prevents him, not, of course, from buying an 136 LATER ENGLISH ETCHERS etching here and there, but from forming any con- siderable collection of etchings—that, if the artist only knew it, is the greatest possible disadvantage to him- self. He is concerned for his dignity; his *amour-propre*, he sometimes says. But an etching—like a book—is a printed thing; and the author of a book conceives, and rightly, that his *amour-propre* is wounded rather by absence or narrow restriction of sale than by the moderation—the lowness, if you will—of the price at which his book is issued. Now a dry-point is an ordinary etching stand on different grounds in this respect. Both are printed things indeed; but whilst the etching will, according to its degree of force or delicacy, yield, without “steel- ing,” from fifty to four hundred impressions—and generally quite near the four hundred as the fifty— a dry-point will inevitably deteriorate after a dozen or twenty impressions, and may even deteriorate after three or four. Each impression, then, of a dry-point that is desirable at all, has its own peculiar value—it’s rarity to begin with (unless you work it to death), and its unlikeness to its neighbour. I blame no good artist, when he has made a good dry-point, for asking two or three or four, or six or seven, guesses for it. I do not as work of art—as providing me with joy—esteem it any more highly than the etching. The etching, which I ought to acquire at a guinea, may give me the gratifi- cation of a Wordsworthian poem. It may be—a happy chance for every one concerned if it be—as directly inspired as the *Inward Mariner*: it may be a thing 137 FINE PRINTS conceived and wrought in one of those “states of the atmosphere” which (it is Coloridge himself who says it) are “addressed to the soul.” Do I underrate it? Not a jot. But I discern that, like the Ancient Mariner, it can be multiplied in large numbers. The dry-point cannot. Even at the risk of being charged with a certain repetition of my argument, I shall return—as the reader has been warned already—it will be somewhere in the chapter on modern Lithography—to this question of the too extravagant price, and therefore of the necessarily too restricted sale, of the contemporary print. 138 CHAPTER VII Recent Interest in Martin Schongauer—A graceful Primiceri—Durer the exponent of the fuller Renais- sance—Some principal Durers—Their prices at the Fisher Sale—German "Little Masters"—The Orna- ment of Aldegrever—the range of the Behamms— Altdorfer—Other Little Masters—and Lucas Van Lynden. Among the least reprehensible, and also among the least widely diffused, of the recent fads of the collector, there is to be reckoned a certain increase in the con- sideration accorded to the work of Martin Schongauer. If Martin Schongauer's ingenious and engaging plates in naive conception, and, in execution, elegance—one ever to be actually preeminent to the praise of pieces which affected the public and the society of Durer, that preference might possibly be explained, but could never be justified. As it is, however, no reasonable admirer of "the great Albert" can begrudge to one who was after all to some extent his predecessor, and not in all things his inferior, the honourable place which, after many generations of comparative neglect, that prede- cessor has lately taken, and now seems likely to hold. Schongauer, even more it may be than Albert Dürer himself, was, as it were, a path-breaker. The interest of the Primitive belonged to him ; and the interest of 153 FINE PRINTS the simple. Some of his religious conceptions were expressed in prettier form—and form on that account more readily welcomed—than any that was taken up by the conceptions of the giant mind that even now draws us upon our pilgrimage to Nuremberg, as Goethe draws us to Weimar. The Virgin of Schönauer is more acceptable to the senses than the average Virgin of Dürer, whose children, on the other hand (see especially the delightful little print, *The Three Genii*, Bartsch 60), have the larger lines and lustier life of the full Renaissance. A touch of what appeals to us as a younger naivete, and a touch of what appeals to us as elegance, are especially discernible in the earlier artist's work ; and that work too, or much of it, has often the additional attractiveness of exceptional scarcity. Likewise, it is to most of us less familiar. But when all these elements of attraction have been allowed for, the genius of Albert Dürer—so much deeper and so much broader than that of his contemporaries and so more dissuasive and expressed by a craftsmanship so much more changeful and more masterly—the genius of Albert Dürer dominates. If our allegiance has waxed, if we have been led astray for a period, by Martin Schönauer himself, it may be, or by somebody less worthy illustrious, we shall return, wearily wise, to the author of the *Melancholia* and the *Nativity*, of the *Knight of Death* and of *The Virgin by the City Wall*. To study long and closely the work of the original engravers, is to come, sooner or later, quite certainly to the conclusion that there are two artists standing above all the 146 A black and white illustration of a horse standing in a tunnel-like structure. The horse is tethered to a post with a rope. A figure, possibly a knight, is mounted on the horse's back. The figure is holding a sword and wearing armor. Above the figure, the year "1505" is inscribed. The horse has a bridle on its head and appears to be pulling a cart or wagon at the bottom of the image. 1505 [API_EMPTY_RESPONSE] DÜRER : THE “LITTLE MASTERS” rest, and that it was theirs, pre-eminently, to express, in the greatest manner, the greatest mind. One of these two artists, of course, is Reinbrandt. And the other is Dürer. Adam Bartsch, working at Vienna, in the beginning of this century, upon those monumental books of reference which, as authorities upon their wide subject, are even now only partially displayed, catalogued about a hundred and eight metal plates as Albert Dürer’s contribution to the sum of original engraving. The Rev. C. H. Middleton-Wake, working in 1883—and profitting by the investigations, all of them more or less recent, of Passavant and G. W. Reid, of Thausing, Dürer’s biographer—catalogued Mr. Kröller-Müller’s number of the Prints at Boston, Massachusetts—one hundred and three. The number — not so considerable as Schiängener’s—by about a couple of score—does not, at first thought, seem enormous for one the greater portion of whose life was given to original engraving ; but then, it must be remembered, Dürer’s life, though not exactly a short, was scarcely a long one. And, again, whatever may have been the processes he employed, and even if, as Mr. Middleton-Wake supposes, etched work, as well as burin-work, helped him greatly along his way, the elaboration of his labour was never lessened ; the order of completeness he strove for and attained had nothing in common with the completeness of the sketch. His German pertinacity and dogged joy in work for mere work’s sake, never permitted him to dismisse an endeavour. 14 FINE PRINTS until he had carried it to actual realisation. Each piece of his is not so much a page as a volume. The creations of his art have the lastness and the finality of a consummate Literature, and of those three material things with which such Literature has been compared— "marbler, onyx, email,"— as the phrase goes, of one who wrought on phrases as Cellini on the golden vase, and Dürer on the little sheet of burnished copper. Of the hundred and three prints which, in the Fitz-William Museum, Mr. Middleton-Wake placed in what he believes to be their chronological order—many, of course, their author himself dated, but many afford room for the exercise of critical ingenuity and care—sixteen belong to the series known as "The Passion upon Copper," which is distinguished by that title from the series of four-and-thirty woodcuts generally known as "The Little Passion." The "Little Passion upon Copper," executed between the year 1507 and 1513, are pronounced " unequal in their execution," "not comparing favourably with Dürer's finer prints," and " engraved for purposes of sale." Now most of Dürer's work was " engraved for purposes of sale"—that is, it was meant to be sold—but what the critic may be supposed to mean, in this case, is that the designs were due to no inspiration ; the execution, to no keen desire. Four much later pieces—including two St. Christopher—are spoken of with similar disparagement. I am 142 DÜRER : THE “LITTLE MASTERS” unable to perceive the justice of the reproach when it is applied to the Virgin with the Child in Scuddling Clothes—a print of which it is remarked that it, like certain others, is “without any particular charm or dignity ; being taken quite casually from burgher-life, and only remarkable for the soft tone of the engraving.” No doubt the Virgin with the Child in Scuddling Clothes is inspired by the human life—and that was “burgher-life” necessarily—which Dürer beheld ; and it is none the worse for that. It is not one of the very finest of the Virgins, but it is simple, natural, healthy, and it is characteristic, as I seem to see, not only in its technique, but in its conception. What more fascinating than the little bit of background, invested there, so small and yet so telling—little stretch of shore, with a boat placed on it, and great waves in the distance—it may be, of Italy—a decor from Venice—a bit of distance too recalling the distance in the Melancholia itself. But we must pass on, to consider briefly two or three points in Dürer’s work : points which we shall the better illustrate by reference to the greater masterpieces. The year 1497 was reached before the master of Nuremberg affixed a date to any one of his plates. That is the not quite satisfactory composition, curiously ugly in the particular realism it affects—and yet, in a measure, interesting—A Group of Four Naked Women. Thausing doubts, or does more than doubt, the originality of the design. Mr. Middleton-Wake holds that in execution, at least, it shows distinct advance upon Dürer’s earlier work, and amongst earlier work he in- UNSURE FINE PRINTS cludes no less than three-and-twenty of the unated plates—putting the *Recueil* first, with 1494 as its probable year, and putting last before the *Group of Naked Women*, a piece which he maintains to be the finest of the earlier prints, the *Virgin and Child with the Monkey*. Looking along the whole line of Dürer prints, in what he deems to be their proper sequence, Mr. Middleton-Wake observes, as all observe indeed, wonderful variations—differences in execution so marked that at first one might hesitate to assign to the same master, pieces wrought so differently. He argues fully how their dissimilarity is due "either to a marked progression in their handling" or to an alteration in their actual method. For quick perception of such partly voluminous change, the student is referred to an examination of the *Coat of Arms with the Skull*, the *Coat of Arms with the Cock*, the *Adam and Eve*, the *St. Jerome*, and the *Melancholia*. The year 1500 was probably the date of the two *Coats of Arms*, the great picture of *Adam and Eve* existing its date of 1513 being the *St. Jerome* of 1512; the *Melancholia* of 1514. The practical point established for the collector by such differences as are here visible, and which a study of these particular examples by no means exhausts, is that he must most carefully avoid the not unnatural error of judging an impression of a Dürer print by its attainment or its non-attainment of the standard established by some other Dürer print he knows familiarly already. The aims technically were so very different, he must know 14 DÜRER: THE “LITTLE MASTERS” each print to say with any certainty—save in a few most obvious cases—whether a given impression, that seems good, is, or is not, desirable. The “silver-grey tone,” for example, so charming in one print, may be unattainable in, or unsuitable to, another. Upon the question of the meaning of certain prints of Dürer, any amount of ingenious, interesting conjecture has been expended in the Past. One of Mr. Stopford Brooke’s memoirs—I heard it preached, now many years ago, in York Street—is a delightful essay on the *Melancholia*. For suggestions as to the allegorical meaning of *The Knight of Death*, it may be enough to refer the reader to Thansing (vol. ii., page 225) and to Mrs. Heseltine’s Life of Dürer (page 108). The *Jahonzog*, Dürer speaks of, in his Netherlandish Diary, as a “Herculean.” *The Knight and the Lady*, Thansing says, is one of the Dance of Death pictures which were in the Middle Ages called *Great Fortunes*. Thansing holds that its enigmatic design, with the landscape below, has direct reference to the Swiss War of 1389, and this we may agree with ; but, explaining, it may be, too far, he writes in detail, *“The winged Goddess of Justice and Retribution stands, smiling, on a globe; curving in one hand a bridle and a curb for the too presumptuous fortunate ones; in the other, a goblet for unappreciated worth.”* Mr. Middleton-Wake, wisely less philosophicul, urges a simpler meaning. The city of Norwichburg he reminds us, had, in compliance with Maximilian’s demand, furnished four hundred foot soldiers and sixty horses; for 145 FINE PRINTS the campaign in Switzerland, and at the head of these troops was Pirkheimer, to whom on his return his fellow-citizens offered a golden cup. "We assume," says Mr. Middleton-Wake, "that it is this cup which Dürer places in the hand of the Goddess." With the Swiss War are also associated the *Coat of Arms with the Cock* and the even rarer (certainly not finer) *Coat of Arms with a Skull*. The one may symbolise the anticipated success, the other the failure, of the campaign into Switzerland. A reference to the Richard Fisher Sale Catalogue (at Sotheby's, May 1892) affords as ready and as correct a means as we are likely to obtain of estimating the present value of fine Dürer prints. Mr. Fisher's collection was unequal; but it was celebrated, and it was, on the whole, admirable. It was, moreover, practically complete, and in this way alone it represented an extraordinary achievement in Collecting. Its greatest feature was Mr. Fisher's possession of the *Adon and Eve* in a condition of exceptional excellence, and with a long pedigree, from the John Bernoulli, Münster, and Hawkings collections. This was the first Albert Dürer that passed under the hammer on the occasion, and so opened the sale of the Dürers with a thunderclap, as if it were—Herbert Meder paying £410 to bear it off in triumph. Then came the *Nativity*, the charming daintiness little print, which Dürer himself speaks of as the "Christmas Day." Mr. Gutekamg gave £49 for it. A fine impression of the *Virgin with Long Hair* fetched £31: an indifferent one of the more beautiful 146 A black and white illustration featuring a coat of arms with a shield at the bottom. The shield has a lion rampant on top of a shield with a lion rampant in the middle. Above the shield, there is a large bird with outstretched wings. The bird is perched on a scroll that is part of the coat of arms. Surrounding the shield and the bird are elaborate, swirling designs. M [API_EMPTY_RESPONSE] DÜRER : THE “LITTLE MASTERS” Virgin seated by a Wall, £10, 15s. The St. Hubert sold for £48—a finer impression of the same subject selling, in the Holford Sale, just a year later, for £150—the *Melancholia*, £39—but it must be remembered, the *Melancholia*, though always one of the most sought for, is not by any means one of the rarest Dürers. The Knight of Death passed, for £700, into the hands of Mr. Gutchelton. An early impression of the *Cost of Love* from the Collection was bought by Mr. Kennedy for £20, the *Cost of Arms with the Soul* going to Messrs. Colnaghi for £42. In the Holford Sale a yet finer impression of this last subject was bought by Herr Moller for £75. Before I leave, for a while at least, the prosaic questions of the Sale-Room, and pass on to direct attention to the artistic virtues of the “Little Masters,” let the “beginning collector,” as the quaint phrase runs, be warned in regard to copies. It has not been left for an age that imitates everything—that copies our charming Battersby Enamel, tint bien que mal, and the “scale-blue” of old Worcester, and the lustre of Oriental—it has not been left for such an age to be the first to copy Dürer’s art, no more-days bespeaks a man unacquainted with copyist Dürer. He is copied now-days only in the hands of photographers. But of old time, Wicrix, and less celebrated men, copied him greatly. This is a matter of which the collector—at first at least—has need to beware. It must be stamped upon his mind that Dürer’s work at a certain period did much engage the copyist. It engaged the copyist only 147 FINE PRINTS less perhaps than did the work of Rembrandt himself, through successive generations. And now we speak, though briefly, of the seven German "Little Masters," of whom the best are never "little" in style, but, rather, great and pregnant, richly charged with quality and meaning: "little" only in the mere scale of their labour. The print-buyer who is in that rudimentary condition that he *only* considers the walls of his sitting-rooms, and buys almost exclusively for their effective decoration, does not look at the Little Masters. Upon a distant wall, their works make little spots. But in a corner, near the fire—on the right-hand side of that arm-chair in which you seek to establish your most cossetted guest, the person (of the opposite sex, generally) whom you are glad to behold—a little frame containing half-a-dozen Behams, Adelheims, to be looked at closely (pieces of Ornamentation; pieces of Art), may indeed charm you with its beauty, which, under circum-stances of Romance, may need indeed no added charm at all from the mere possessions of the collector. Still—all—are moods. And if the German Little Masters come in pleasantly enough, on an odd foot or so of wall, now and then, how justified is their presence in the portfolio—in the solander box—when the collector is really a serious one, and when he no longer bestows upon living, breathing Humanity all the solicitude that was meant for his Behams! To talk more gravely, the German Little Masters should indeed be collected far more widely than 148 DÜRER THE “LITTLE MASTERS” they are, amongst us. Scarcely anything in their appeal is particular and local. Their qualities—the qualities of the best of them—are exquisite and sterling, and are for all Time. The seven Little Masters, on whom the late Mr. W. Bell Scott—one of the first people here in England to collect them—wrote, in an inadequate series, one of the few quite satisfactory books, are, Altdorfer, Barthel Beham, Schädel Beham, Ackergrever, Pence, Jacob Bliek, and Hans Brosamer. One or two of these may quickly be discerned to be inferior to the others; one or two to be superior; but it would be priggish to attempt a range through them all by order of merit. It must suffice to say that to me at least Aldergraver and the Behams appeal most as men to be collected. The Behams—Schädel especially—was a very fine Ornamentist. Aldergraver, it may be, was an Ornamentist yet more faultless. Some examples of his Ornament, the collector should certainly possess. And then he will come back very probably to the Behams, recognising in these two brothers a larger range than Aldergraver had, and a spirit more dramatic—an entrance more vivid and personal into human life, a keen interest in human story. They were realists, not without a touch of the ideal. And in design and execution, they were consummate artists, and not only—which they were too, of course—ininitely laborious and exquisite craftsmen. Adam Bartuch has catalogued, in his industrious way, according to the best lights of his period, the 149 FINE PRINTS works of the Little Masters. His volumes are the foundation of all subsequent study. To Altdorfer he assigns ninety-six pieces (I speak of course here, and in every case, of pieces engraved on metal); to Barthel Beham, sixty-four; to Schad Beham—whose life, though not a long, was yet a longer one than Barthel's—one hundred and fifty-nine; to Jacob Bliek, ninety-seven; to George Peacock, a hundred and twenty-six; to Heinrich Aldegrever, no less than two hundred and eighty-nine; to Brossman, four-and-twenty. But of late years, it has been to expect, certain of these uncles have been brought into the general study. Thus we have, in England, the dainty little catalogue of Schad Beham, by the Rev. W. J. Loftus—a book delightfully printed in a very limited edition. That book brings up the number of Schad Beham's assured plates to two hundred and seventy-four. Dr. Rosenberg has also, in much detail, written in German upon the plates of this fascinating artist; and still more lately M. Edouard Amiullier has published, at Munich, in the French tongue, elaborate, though indeed scarcely final, studies of the Behams and of Jacob Bliek. Of the German Little Masters, Albrecht Altdorfer is the earliest. He was only nine years Dürer's junior; nearly twenty years separate him from others of the group. Born it really even at the present moment seems difficult to say where, Altdorfer, Dr. Rosenberg considers, was actually a pupil of Dürer—an apprentice, an inmate of his house probably, soon after Dürer as a quite young man, already prosperous and busy, 150 DÜRER : THE "LITTLE MASTERS" took up his abode, with his bride, Agnes Frey, at the large house by the Thüringer Gate. But whatever was the place of Altdorfer's birth, and whatever the place of his pupils' birth, neither matter, as it seems, is settled conclusively—Rathibon is the city in which his life was chiefly spent. There he was architect as well as painter and engraver; an official post was given him; and during the last decade of his career his architectural work for Rathibon caused, it is to be presumed, the complete cessation of his work of an engraver. Merits Altdorfer of course have—variety and ingenuity amongst them—or his fame would hardly have survived; but Mr. W. B. Scott, whose criticism of him was that of an artist naturally rather in sympathy with the methods of his endeavour, never rises to enthusiasm in his account of him. His drawing is not found worthy of any warm commendation, nor his craftsmanship with the copper. The great lessons he might have learnt from Dürer, he does not seem fully to have appreciated. His design is deemed more fantastic than Dürer's. But his capacity was not very great, and apart from his practice in what is strictly fine-engraving, he executed etchings of Landscape—carving more than Dürer did, perhaps, for Landscape for its own sake: studying it indeed less lovingly in detail, but with a certain then unusual reliance on the interest of its general effect. Some measure of romantic character belongs to his Landscape: "partly intensified," says Mr. Scott, "and partly destroyed, by the eccentric taste that appears in nearly everything from his hand." 151 FINE PRINTS The pine had fascination for him. "And he loaded its boughs with fronds, like the feathers of birds, and added long lines, eagles of lines, that have little or no foundation in Nature." Of both the Behans, Mr. Loftie assures us that they were pupils of Dürer. Greater even than the artist I have just been writing about, they show, it seems to me, at once an influence more direct from Dürer, and an individuality more potent, of their own. Barthel, the younger of the two brothers—one whose designs Sebald, with all his gifts, was not too proud to copy—was born at Nuremberg in 1502. "Le dessin de ses estampes," writes M. Aumüller, "est savant et gracieux, et son barin est d'une élégance brillante et moelleuse." The words—though it is impossible, in a line or two, to generalise a great personality—are not badly chosen. Exalted from Nuremberg, whilst still young, Barthel Beham laboured at Frankfurt, and later, in Italy—a circumstance which accounts for something in the direction of his work. For in Barthel, the artistic influence is unmistakable; he is, as Mr. Scott says truly, "enamciated from the wilful despising of the graces." In Italy, in 1540, Barthel died. Sebald Beham, the more prolific brother, whose years, ere they were ended, numbered half a century, was born in 1500. He remained at home—not indeed at Nuremberg, but long at Frankfurt—yet, remaining at home, his work was somehow more varied. A classical subject one day, and peasant life the next, an 132 DÜRER: THE “LITTLE MASTERS” ornament now, and now a design symbolical like his Melancholia—these interested him in turn; and, as for his technical achievement, his Coat of Arms with the Cock (for he, like Dürer, had that, as well as a Melan- cholia) would suffice to show, had he nothing else to show, his surpassing genius of detail. The little superior gravures of M. Aumüller are commendable, but justifi- ably, for technical excellence cannot go any further, nor is there wanting majesty of Style. At the Lottke Sale some happy person acquired for £4 this lovely little masterpiece: at the Dunzoo Sale, £5 was the price of it. Analysis of Scholz Beham’s prints shows that of his noble work on metal seventy-five subjects are suggested by sacred and nineteen by “profane” history. Mythology claims thirty-eight designs, and Allegory thirty-four. Genre subjects, treated with the various qualities of observation, humour, warmth, ab- sorb some seventy plates. Of vignettes and ornaments, there are about two score. In 1881—several years after he had finished his Catalogue—the Rev. W. J. Lottke sold in Germany his remarkable collection of Scholz Beham’s works. Next particular interest in this sale was the Lottke collection, was that of Richard Fisher—dispersed as a sale I have already spoken of. From the Fisher Sale, which was so comprehensive in its character, we will take note of the prices here in England of at least a few fine things—premising that whatever be the prices fetched by an exceptional rarity, a very few pounds (often only three or four), spent carefully, will 153 FINE PRINTS buy, at a good dealer's, a fine Beham. In the Fisher Sale then, the *Madonna and Child with the Parrot* fetched £5, 10s.; the *Madonna with the Sleeping Child*, £7, 10s. (Meder); the *Venus and Cupid*, £3, 10s. (Deprez); the magnificently drawn *Leda*, only eleven shillings, but then these have had a great passage, for at a later sale, the *Sale fetched* £4, 10s., and at the *Sale Sale*, £3—Death Surprising a Woman in her Sleep, £3, 19s. (Meder); the *Buffoon and the Two Couples*, £5; the *Two Buffoons, First State, £7, 12s. (Deprez); the *Ornament with a Cuirass and the two Cupids*, £3, 10s. At the same sale, Alder- grever's *Virgin Sitting* had gone for £7, 10s., and Barthel Beham's *Lucretia for U4, his Fight for the Standard for £4, his *Vignette with Four Cupids* for £4, 4s. But it ought perhaps to be remembered that in several cases the representation of the Little Masters in Mr Fisher's Sale was not good enough to bring the prices which, under favourable circumstances, are wont to be realised by the finest impressions. In regard to Barthel Beham, I will add that the highest price accustomed to be fetched by any print of his, is fetched by his "The Young Man with a Book", Fifth Edition. Having said what I can on this point I cannot say that it is undesirable, but it is quite undesirable if it stands alone—for it is exceptional rather than characteristic. In mere size, for one thing. A First State of it has fetched as much as sixty pounds; a Second State averages about twelve. To Aldergerve—perhaps the very greatest of the 154 DÜRER : THE “LITTLE MASTERS” Ornamentists—the most general of recent students of the School, Dr. Rosenberg, does the least justice. Mr. Scott, upon the other hand, asserts his position with strength; nor will it be unprofitable for amateur or collector if I quote, at some length, what he says. The Behanss, who were great, and Atthorfer, who was scarcely great, we have—for our present purpose—done with already. But about the others Mr. Scott may well be heard. George Pence he reminds us, et al., that the Behanss are objects of his Italian influence, both in manipulation and in invention, while Brosamer and Jacob Binck are of comparatively little consequence.” I hope—may I say in a parenthesis?—that Mr. Scott attached great weight to his “comparatively,” for otherwise he did the churning work of Jacob Binck a rude injustice. But to proceed— “Aldegrever is the most worthy successor to Dürer, and is the greatest master of invention, with the truest German traditions of sentiment and romance, as well as the most prolific ornamentist. He remains all his life skilfully advancing in the command of his graver, to which he remains true. Like Linus of Leyden, he lives a secluded life, and his miniature prints continue to issue from his hands with more and more richness and independence of poetic thought, until we lose sight of him, dying where he had lived, in the small town of Sassenheim—and we can only regret the number of his modest efforts. It may be added that Rosenberg considers not only that Aldegrever was never under Dürer’s direct tuition—though carrying out the Dürer 155 FINE PRINTS traditions—but also that he was never in Nuremberg at all. And, by this means isolating Aldigrever from the coterie that grew up in the Franconian town, Rosenberg derives him rather from Lucas van Leyden. To which Mr. Scott answers, that if Aldigrever never left his native village, he must have been a very poor man. And, accordingly, he approached the movement wonderfully from a distance and appropriated as much as he chose—happily for his works—as much as properly analagated with his Northern nature. A great name has passed our lips in discussing this thing briefly. I wish that there were space here—that it had been a part of my scheme to treat, not so utterly inadequately, Lucas van Leyden. But in a book of this sort—which must seize, so to say, upon finger-posts, where it can—half of the business is renunciation, and I renounce, unwillingly, the fair discussion of the great early Flemish master. Dürer himself approved of him; gladly exchanged original prints with Master Lucas of Leyden, who showed him courtesy on a journey. Numerically the work of Lucas is inferior—not rather than other way—to Albert Dürer's; but numerically the work of Dürer is superior, though his range of mind was less vast. In a dramatic theme, Lucas of Leyden could hold his own with any one. He had less ofunction and of sentiment—less depth, in fine, very likely. But the great prints of the Renaissance in the North are not properly represented—in a collector's portfolio, if the work of this master of various and prolific industry is altogether omitted. His 156 A black and white illustration of a classical fountain. The top part features two winged figures, possibly angels, with one holding a scroll. Below them is a large urn with the letter "L" on it. At the base of the urn are two mermaid-like creatures with long tails, each holding a scroll. The bottom of the fountain has a circular base with a small inscription "1528". The overall design is ornate and baroque. 1528 A blank white page with a small black mark near the bottom right corner. DÜRER : THE “LITTLE MASTERS” draughtsmanship, though it improved with Time, was never the searching draughtsmanship of Dürer, indeed, or of one or two of Dürer’s followers. Yet it was ex- pressive and spirited. And spirit, vivacity, a certain grace even, are well discovered in the rare work of Lucas in a particular field in which the Behams and Aldgrevier triumphed habitually and in which Albert was occasionally greatest. I mean the field of Ornament. The “Pietà” (107) of the Altar (Barthel, 1528), in scheme of light and shade, in its line action, in ingenious, never-waning symmetry of lines in tell- ing execution, reaches a place near the summit. The collector, when the chance offers, does well to give the six or seven, eight or ten guineas perhaps, which, in some fortunate hour, may be its ransom. 157 CHAPTER VIII Early Italian Printers—They interest the Antiquary more than the Collector—Nelli—Baccio Baldini—Montagna and his restless energy—The calm of Zuan Andrea—Campano da—the Master of the Caduceus —His “Pagan sentiment” —Marc Antonio — His first practice —His art ripens when his prints inspired Raphael —Important Sales of the Indian Printers. As one of the chief reasons for the composition of the present volume is that the collector, whether a beginner or more advanced, may have ready access to a little book which supplements to some extent, but does not attempt to supersede, any work amongst the labourious and costly studies which treat so often with especial pronouncement themes which it seems lay scarcely at all within the range of their inquiries—it will hardly be expected that much shall be said here on the various departments of Italian Engraving. Italian Engraving, from the *nielli* of Florentine goldsmiths to the larger method and selected line of Marc Antonio, has for generations occupied the leisure and been the subject of the investigations of many students men. Volumes have been written about it: treatises, 158 ITALIAN LINE ENGRAVERS articles, catalogues, correspondence immiscible. About Italian Engraving—in any one of its branches—it would be as easy, or as difficult, to say something new, and at the same time to the point, as it would be to write with freshness about the decorations of the Sistine Chapel or such an accepted masterpiece as the Madonna di San Sisto. The few words I shall write upon the subject will be of a wholly rudimentary character. If the reader wishes to go beyond this subject elaborately, he will find himself in a vast expanse. No one is less an expert upon it than I am; but partly that all sense of balance shall not be wanting to this book, and partly that the beginner, even with this book alone, shall not gropes wholly in the dark, the place of the Italians must be briefly recognised. In recognising it, I do not claim to do more, of my own proper knowledge, than bring to bear upon the question the results of some more general studies, and perhaps the side-lights thrown from more particular investigations into other branches of the engraver's achievement. The milieu—those things wrought so minutely by the early goldsmiths, Mise de Pinigerra and the rest—which are the very foundations of Engraving, are, to begin with, intracable. To the practical collector then, it cannot be pretended that they appeal, though they may engage the attention of the dilettante; again, in a continuation—or spell by the astounding—way, re-working—of the plate, or the wear of the particular impression through its long life of more than three hundred years, the somewhat arturier work of the great 159 FINE PRINTS Primitives, or of those who, like Mantegna himself, stands, a link upon a borderland, is scarcely within the region of practical commerce. The finer work of the fine-engravers upon copper, of the earlier Renaissance in Italy, does not, save on the rarest occasions, appear in Sotheby's auction-room. Perhaps its very scarcity, its gradual absorption during more than one generation, into such great private collections as are not likely to be dispersed, and, yet many, into national, or university, or provincial collections, into which enrichment enters at times at intervals with no period of restriction--the block veil--perhaps this very scarcity is accountable for the lack of vivid interest in such work on the part of the collector of modern mind. After all, even masterpieces have their day: much more those things of which it must be said, that though endowed with a great vigour of conception and executed often in trenchant, if not persuasive, form, they do not in execution reach the standards set up for us--and passing now almost into the position of " precedents" --by the later technique. If, of the work of the greatest master of the German Renaissance--of the greatest, most original, most comprehensive mind in the whole of German Art--it is possible to speak as that very fair and penetrating critic, Mr. P. G. Hamerton speaks, in his general essay on Engraving, which appears in his Encyclopaedia Britannica.--Mr. Hamerton is one of the earlier Italian Whigs in the very passage in which Mr. Hamerton--far too intelligent, of course, to deny the 160 ITALIAN LINE ENGRAVERS greatness of his qualities—devotes to Dürer, they, by something more than implication, are to take their share of the dispense. After telling us that Martin Schongauer's art is a stride in advance of that of "The Master of 1460," Mr. Hamerton adds, "Outline and shade, in Schongauer, are not nearly so much separated as in Baccio Baldini; and the shading, generally in curved lines, is far more masterly than the straight shading of Mantegna. Dürer continued Schongauer's curved shading with increasing manual dexterity and skill; and as he found himself able to perform well with the burin which had been his tool, his burins, he overdid his plate—"some" of his plates, would here have been a reasonable qualification—"with details, each of which he finished with as much care as if it were the most important thing in the composition." "The engravers of those days—it is said further—had no conception of any necessity for subordinating one part of their work to another. In Dürer, all objects arc on the same plane." Here Mr. Hamerton generalises too much; but a strong, exaggerated statement on the matter directs at all events our attention to it. A like criticism could be passed on some, though, it must needs be said, on less, of the Italian work of the earlier time. As a rule, when the pure Pyramides had passed, Italian work was less executed. In Mantegna himself, an immense energy of the finger—the completeness with which the line was charged with the rest of expressing action, and, it may be, the sentiment besides, 161L FINE PRINTS in which the action had its source—restrained him, stayed his hand, diverted his attention from inappro- priate or superfluous detail. And there were other Italian artists of the burin in whom a rising feeling for large and decorative grace had something of the same effect. And when we come to Marc Antonio him- self—trained though he was as a copyist of Northern Schools—we see him able, when addressing himself to render the compositions of Raphael, to subordinate everything to the aim of minimum noise and elegant contour. The finest Marc Antonio—the *St. Cecilia* and the *Lunette*, to name but two of them (respec- tively £25 and £170 in a great Sale three years ago) —were wrought under Raphael's immediate influence; were sculpturque and simple, never elaborately pic- torial—the result, no doubt, in part, of the circumstance that Raphael as well as his engraver recognised that if designs (drawings, not pictures) were the objects of copy, they could be interpreted without going outside the proper art of the engraver. Whatever be the fashions of the moment—said Marc Antonio's prices, notwithstanding an exceptional sum for an exceptional print, are, in the main, low—it must be remembered that, even with his limitations, it was in him and in his School that real pure line-engraving reached maturity. "He retained," says Mr. Hamerton, sum- marising well the true situation in a sentence—he retained much of the early Italian manner in his back- grounds, where its simplicity gives a desirable sobriety ; but his figures are boldly modelled in curved lines, 162 ITALIAN LINE ENGRAVERS crossing each other in the darker shades, but left single in the passages from dark to light, and breaking away in fine dots as they approach the light itself, which is of pure white paper." As general description, this is excellent; but if the new collector, taking to Marc Antonia, and buying him at a time when I may adopt the phraseology of Capel Court, his stock is quoted below par, wishes the opportunity of guidance in the study of the development of his art, let him take up almost the latest book that deals with the subject with minuteness and suggestiveness--if it may not be invested with novelty or systematically arranged series--"A History of Engraving in North Italy," by the late Richard Fisher, whose name as a collector and connoisseur I do not mention now for the first time. Very interesting too is all that Mr. Fisher has to say about "the Master of the Cubensis," Dürer's friend and instructor, Jacopo de' Barbari, who, known as Jacob Walsh, was supposed to be German, although practising much at Venice. Passavant, who admits some thirty pieces by him, considers him of German birth--a thing allowed neither by Fisher nor Duplessis. "In single figures"--writes Mr. Fisher--"we have the best illustration of his talent--Judith with the head of Holofernes and a young woman looking at herself in a mirror." At the British Museum a bust portrait of a young woman, catalogued by Burckh as amongst the numerous Italians, has been given to Barbari. M. Galletton considers him essentially pagan in sentiment. Nor is this incompatible with Richard 163 FINE PRINTS Fisher's statement that in style his Holy Families are completely Italian. "La Gravure en Italie avant Marc Antoine"—a substantial work by Delaborde—is a book that will not pass unnoticed by those whose choice is for the earlier members of the Italian School. Campagnola, it may be—whose chief piece, the Assumption, fetched more than £50 at the Durazzo Sale, and whose Dance of Cupids reached 450 at the Marochetti—he will find adequate treatment there—and there too are made in compact form the instructive comparisons between Mantegna's work and that of Zona Andrea and Antonio da Brescia whose labours have their likeness to Mantegna's own. In the rare Dance of Damsels—"Dance of Four Women," it ought rather to be, for in at least one of its little-draped figures the gravity and fadiness of middle age is well contrasted with the firm and fresh contour and gay alacrity of youth—Zona Andrea, whose prints are "genre-collections preferable" to those of Da Brescia, shows finely not only Mantegna's design, but that something of his own which the great Mantuan's design did not give him. Many people have written well on Mantegna ; he provokes people; he stimulates them ; and Mr. Sidney Colvin, on the so-called "Mantegna Playing-Cards," has written learnedly as an investigator, giving to designs misnamed and misunderstood their right significance. And if it is from Delabordere, I will allow myself to quote one brief passage, which is full at least of personal conviction. What more especially characterises—so he puts it—it—Andrea Mantegna's en-164 A black and white illustration of three women in classical attire, seemingly in distress or falling. The women are depicted with long, flowing hair and are positioned in a way that suggests they are either falling or being carried by another figure. 1 ITALIAN LINE ENGRAVERS graved work, is that it is "un mélange singulier d'âneur et de patience, de sentiment spontané et d'intentions systématiques: c'est enfin dans l'exécution artistique, le câble d'une volonté sûre de lui-même et l'inquiétude d'une main irritée par sa lutte avec le moyen." Zaan Andrea's prints do not present these contrasts. "Tout y ressort d'un travail poussif suivant une parfaite égalité d'humour: tout y respire la même confiance tranquille dans l'autorité des enseignements reçus, le même besoin d'en tenir aux commandes déjà faites et aux traditions déjà acquises." By Zaan Andrea, only five accepted plates have reached our time. By Zaan Andrea, a larger number have at least been catalogued, and it is argued by some that the least authentic, as well as the least credible, are sometimes those which bear his signature. Did I desire to manufacture "paddling," nothing would be easier than for me to extend to a long chapter this summary assemblage of brief and almost incidental notes on the Italian Line-Engraving of the remote Past. But as the subject itself is one to which I have never yet been fortunate enough to devote such a measure of study as might entitle me to claim to be heard when speaking of it, and as the literature of the subject exists in such abundance for the curious, I can afford to be short. It may, however, be of some little interest to the collector who has turned on to the discussion of another branch of Print-Calling-in which I have ventured to take my own line, and am willing on all occasions to back my own opinion, we 165 FINE PRINTS look a little into such records of the Sale-room as throw light upon the changing money values of the engravings by Italian masters. Mr. Julian Marshall, now with us in his middle age, began collecting when he was so young that his great sale occurred as long ago as 1864. Values have changed since that day, very much. Of four his prints by Mantegna, only one — The Flagellation — fetched more than £212. That one reached £21— an early perfect state of The Entombment going for £11, 10s., and Christ Descending into Hell for £29. Domenico Campagnola's Descent of the Holy Ghost then fetched £23, 8s. At the Sydenham Sale, two prints had fetched £3 at the Harford, £1, 15s. At the Marochetti Sale in 1868, not a single Mantegna, unless Christ risca from the Dead, fetched a price of importance, and this only ten guineas; but among the 50s. Antonios the Adam and Eve in Paradise sold to Mr. Colnaghi for £136, and The Massacre of the Innocents to Mr. Holloway for £40. The Two Fauns carrying a Child in a Basket — engraved by Marc Antonio, in his finest manner, after an antique — realised £26, and the Saint Cecilia £51. In the Bole Collection, in 1881, the St. Cecilia fetched £10, and Mariette's impression of the extraordinarily rare Dance of Cupids £94½. That was borne off by M. Clément, who was then what M. Boisselin is now — a marchand d'estampes de la Bibliothèque Nationale. In the Holland Sale, twelve years afterwards, Marc Antonio's Adam and Eve sold to M. Danlos for £180 ; The Massacre of the Innocents 166 Blank white page. A black and white illustration depicting five figures. The central figure appears to be a woman playing a lyre. To her left, two men stand, one holding a staff and the other with a bow and arrow. To her right, another man holds a staff, and a fourth figure, possibly a priest or bishop, stands behind them. In the background, three figures are seated on rocks, possibly in a boat. 10 ITALIAN LINE ENGRAVERS (from the Levy Collection) to the same dealer for £190, and the St. Cecilia and Lucretia both to Mr. Gutchkamst —the first for £31 the second for £60. The great price fetched by a Marc Antonio at this Sale was, however, that paid for The Plague—a print which M. Danos included for £350. Taking note of such a sum, one could hardly believe perhaps that Marc Antonios were not rising; but when a master falls, it is in the minor, not the more eminent pieces—or, at least, in average, not exceptional impressions—that we trace most certainly a decline of value. And, taking the St. Cecilia alone—one of the most charming of the subjects, as I have said before, though not one of the rarest—we find, on the three occasions of its sale that I have cited, a high price, one less high, and then again a lower. We find, indeed, comparing the prices that were fetched by two impressions not presumably very different in merit with each other—Great South Africa 1883 a St. Cecilia brought nearly half what it cost—1884 b St. Cecilia brought nearly half what it cost—1886 c. The question now for the collector’s judgment, as far as money is concerned, is, Is it safe or unsafe for him to buy at just the present stage of a “falling market”? Have Marc Antonios touched bottom? If he buys them now, will he—in the phrase of sprightly ladies “fluttering” in “South Africans”— will he be “getting in on the ground floor”? The collector has a right to ask himself these seemingly irreverent questions. Nor will he love Art less, or have an eye less delicate, because he is obliged to ask them. I do not know that the possessions of a 167 FINE PRINTS prudent collector should — taking things all round— bring him, if he desires to sell, much less than he gave for them. It may be quite enough that as long as he keeps and enjoys them, he shall lose the interest of his money. If, in the interval, the value of his prints happens to increase, so much the better for him —obviously. But he enjoys the things themselves, and can scarcely exact that increase. 168 CHAPTER IX French Line-Engravers of the Eighteenth Century render well its original Art—The Prints from Watteau, Lancret, and Pater—Watteau's Characteristica—Char- dieu's Interiors and Studies of the Boarquiers—Success of his Domatole Théâtre—His Portraits and Still-Life are seen in England—The Engravings of Greuze —Boucher Prints at a discount—Fragonard and Baudoin—Larousse and Moreau. The Eighteenth Century in France witnessed the rise, the development, and the decay or fall of a great School of Art of which the English public remain, even to this day, all but completely ignorant. The easy seductiveness of the maidens of Greuze, with gleaning eyes and glistering shoulders, has indeed secured in England for a certain side of that artist's work a measure of notice in excess of its real importance; and a succession of accidents and the good taste of two or three connoisseurs out of a hundred—they were men of another generation—have made this country the home and resting-place of some of the best of the pictures and drawings of Watteau. But even Watteau is not to be found within our National Gallery. There Greuze and Lancret—Chardin having but lately joined them with but a single pleaset hat immequite picture —their Greuze and Lancret seem at least in what is 169 FINE PRINTS adequate and characteristic, share the task of representing French Art of the period when it was most truly French. They are unequal to the mission. And until some can join them who will fulfil it better, the painted work of the French Eighteenth Century will hardly receive its due. Fortunately, however, French Eighteenth Century artists fared well at the hands of the fine-engravers. Even of a minister who possessed more than many others the charm of colour, it could be said by one of the keenest of his critics that the originality of his work passed successfully from the picture to the print. That is what Denis Diderot wrote of Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, and it is true of them all, from Watteau downwards. Theirs was the century of Line-Engraving in France, as it was that of Mezzotint in England. And the practitioners of Line-Engraving and of Mezzotint were something beyond craftsmanship. Not only were they artists in their own departments—some of them painted, some of them designed—they were in sympathy with Art and possessed by its spirit. Hence the peculiar excellence of their work with burin or scraper—the high success of labours which their intelligence and flexibility forbade to be simply mechanical. An Exhibition which at my suggestion the Fine Art Society was good enough to venture on, eleven years ago—in that which attracted so little attention from the great public we wanted to engage, that it must some day, I suppose, be repeated—aimed to show those 170 FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY engravings in which, with fullest effect, the line-engra- vers of the Eighteenth Century rendered the thought and the impression of painters or of draughtsmen who were, in most cases, their contemporaries. Watteau was the first of these painters. The prints after his pictures were chiefly wrought in the years directly following his far too early death. His friend, M. de Julienne, planned and saw closely to the execution of that best monument to Watteau's memory. Cochin and Aveline, Le Bas and Anabam, Surugue and Brion, Tardieu and Laurent Cars, worked dexterously or noblely, the one might say, to preserve the perfection of the master's dexterity and grace. Laurent and Pater were often translated by the same interpreters. Chardin's work was popularised—as far as France is concerned— a very few years after, and with substantially the same effect. Later in the century, some changes which were not all improvements, began to be discernible in the newer plates. The manly method of which Laurent Cars was about the most conspicuous master, yielded a little to the softer practice of the interpreters of Lavrince or to the airy yet not inelegant daintiness of the method of the translators of Beauve. The later style of engraving was suited to the later draughtsmanship and painting. Probably indeed it was adopted with a certain consciousness of their needs. Anyhow, not one of the conspicuous figures in the history of French Eighteenth Century Design—except Latour, who probably never had been equalled at all —can be said to have suffered seriously at the hands of 171 FINE PRINTS his translators. What French pictorial artists thought and saw and tried to tell, upon their canvases and drawing papers, is, in the main, to be read in the prints after their works. In these prints we may note alike the triumphs and the failures of the real French School. There is no denying its deficiencies. But it is as free from conventionality as the great School of Holland—-as independent of tradition—and it is as true to the life that it essays to depict. Along the whole of the Eighteenth Century—not in France only—Watteau who lived in it but twenty years, is the dominating master. To put the matter roughly and briefly, he is the inventor of familiar grace in Art. His treatment of the figure had its perceptible influence even upon the beautiful design of Gainsborough; and the way in which he saw his world of men and women dictated a method to his successors in France, down to the revival of the more academic Classicism. Artists—when they have been so comprehensive as to occupy themselves with other people's Art—have known generally that Watteau's name has got to stand among only ten or a dozen of the greatest, but the English amateurs, or rather English picture and print buyers, are still but few who are acquainted with his range and feel the sources of his power. He has not been very popular, because, according to ordinary opinions, there is but one subject in his designs—the characters in his dramas are doing little—they are doing nothing perhaps. But as the knowledge of what real Art is, extends, 172 FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY and as our sensibility to beauty becomes more refined, we shall ask less, in presence of our pictures, what the people are doing, and shall ask more, what they are. Are they engaging—we shall want to know. Are they pleasant to live with? Watteau placed a real humanity in an ideal landscape; but it was still a chosen people that entered into his Promised Land, and the chosen people were ladies of the Court and Theatre, and winning children, and presentable men. His pictures—all the large, elaborate, finely wrought prints after them—are the record of what was in some measure in these people's daily lives, yet it was even more their own dreams. It was the dream of a person et de rôles vertueux de sa tête, remplissant son œuvre de l'éclatage d'une vie surnaturelle." Through all his art he takes his pleasant company to the selected places of the world, and there is always halcyon weather. Sometimes it is only the comedians of his day—whose mobile faces Watteau had seen behind the footlights of the stage—who make modest picnic, as in the Champs Élysées (the engraving by Tardieu)—find shade as in the Bosquet de Bouches (the engraving by Cochin), or enjoy at leisure the terraced gardens, the vista, the great trees of the Perspective (the engraving by Crepy). And sometimes—inhabitants no more of a real world—the persons of his drama própria, with free bearing, to set out upon long journeys. It is now a pilgrimage to Cythera (L'Enlèvement pure de Cythère, or the Insula Picturae)—suddenly they have been 173 FINE PRINTS transported indeed to the "enchanted isle" (Le Bas's drawing of the distant mountains in L'Île Enchantée, is, I may say in an underbreath, a little indefinite and puzzling). In any case the land that Watteau's art has made more beautiful than ordinary Nature, is peopled by a Humanity keenly and finely observed, and portrayed with an unlimited control of vivacious gesture and of subtle expression. The unmitting study that made not only possible but sure an unvarying success, in themes so manifestly limited, is evidenced best in such collections of Watteau's drawings as that acquired gradually by the British Museum, and that yet finer one inherited by the late Miss Jameson at her death. There is no con- plete command of line and character is best of all made clear, and the solid groundwork for success in Watteau's pictures is revealed. Elsewhere—in the "Masters of Genre Painting"—I have found space to explain more fully than can be done in these pages, that however manifestly limited were his habitual themes, his range was really great enough, since—not to speak of the "Elysian Fields"—it covered the landscape and the life of the France he knew. He has drawn beggars as naturally as did Murillo; negroes as fearlessly as Rubens; people of the bourgeoisie as faithfully almost as Chardin. And, far from the cut chestnut-trees on whose trimmed straightness there falls in an unbroken mass the level light of his gardens, Watteau draws at need the open and common country, peasants and the soldiery—the baggage-train passing FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY along the endless roads from some citadel that Vauhan planned. What Watteau saw was the sufficient and the great foundation of all that he imagined, and his art's abandonment of the everyday world was to exalt and to refine, rather than to forget it. The line-engravings after Watteau—largely, deco- rate, vigorous while delicate—remain comparatively in- expensive. A rare impression "before letters" attains, perhaps, now and then a fancy price; but Time has very little affected the money value of the impressions with full title, which, if reasonable care is exercised, can be secured in fine condition, of such a dealer as Colnaghi, here in England, and in Paris, of Dunlos, say, or of Bonhams—supposed though they all of them are, habitually, worth their costly things. Often two or three impressions by any one excellent Watteau, clean and bright, and not benefit of margin. To have to give as much as £5 for one, would seem almost a hardship. And the work of Lancret and Pater—in- genious, interesting practitioners in Watteau's School— may be amicably at an expense even less considerable. Lancret was but a follower of Watteau: Pater was confessedly a pupil. We shall have to come to Char- din to find in French Art the next man thoroughly original. And Chardin was a great master. But Lancret and Pater, though they are but secondary, are still interesting figures. Neither of them, initia- tive though they were in varying degrees—neither of them made any pretensions to their forerunners' in- spired reverie. Lancret, so far as his invention was 175 FINE PRINTS concerned, was at one time satisfied with a symbolism that was obvious, not to say bald. At another, as in the sédul L'Hiver (engraved by Le Bas), and the charming pictures of the games of children, Le Jeu de Cache-cache and Le Jeu des Quatre Coins (both of them engraved by De Larressure), he was gracefully real, without effort at a more remote imagination than the themes of reality in gentle or in middle-class life existed. At another time again, he lived so much in actual things, that he could make the portraits, sort of deep grave men indeed such as the Bossets and the Fournier of the Seventeenth Century, but not the lighter celebrities of his careless day. That day was Louis the Fifteenth's—"c'était le beau temps ou Canargos trouvait ses jupes trop longues pour danser la gargouillade." And Lancret painted Mlle. Canargos (and Laurent Cars engraved her), springing to lively airs. Voltaire had said to her, distinguishing all her alacrity and fire from the more cautious graces of Salké, the mistress of poetic pantomime—Voltaire had said to her— Les symphys sontent comme vous, Et les graces dansent comme elle. And the truth of the description is attested by Lancret's picture, and by the rosy and vivacious pastel in Latour's Saint-Quentin Gallery. Pater, a fellow-townsman of Antoine Watteau's, was his pupil only in Watteau's later years. At that time Watteau suffered from an irritability bred of an exhausting disease and of a yet more exhausting 176 FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY genius. Master and pupil fell out. But, in his last days of all, Watteau summoned to him the painter who had come from his own town, and in a month, for which the younger artist was ever grateful, Pater was taught more than he had ever been taught before. The pupil had the instinct for prettiness and grace, and in cultivating it Watteau was useful. But there was one thing the master could not teach him—originality. And his record of the engaging trivialities of daily life, where pleasure was most gracious and life most easy, was undertaken by a mind wholly contented with its lot. The mind that desired no farther. The faces of Watteau, especially in his pictures, are often those of thoughtful beauty; sometimes, of profound and sadening experience. But, like a lesser Mozart—and the Mozart of a particular mood—Pater proffers us his engaging allegro. The aim of all his art—it's light but successful endeavour—is summed up in the title of one of the prettiest of his prints and pictures. It is, *Le délit de plaisir*. Presently we leave that world of graceful fantasy, which Watteau invented, and his pupils prolonged—a world in which dainty refreshments are served to chosen companies under serene skies—and still in the full middle of the Eighteenth Century, we are face to face with the one great artist of that age whom Watteau never affected. Chardin was the painter of the bourgeois. With a persistence just as marked as that of the most honestly honest, but with a refinement of feeling to which they were generally strangers and 177 FINE PRINTS which gave distinction to his treatment of his theme, he devoted himself to the chronicle of prosaic virtues. In his Art, no trace of the selected garden, of the elegant gallantries, of the excitement of Love in the gay or lascivious weather. The honest townspeople know hardly a breath in their measured sobriety. They are mothers of families ; the cares of the ménage press on them; house-work has to be got through; children taught, admonished, corrected. Never before or since have these scenes of the kitchen, the schoolroom, or the middle-class parlour, been painted with such dignity, such truth, such facility, than in such a rare and fortunate reserve. We see them perfection in Char- din's prints—in the prints, I mean, that were made after him, for he himself engraved never. There are two other sides of his Art which the contemporary line-engravings do not show. One of them is his mastery of still-life—his great and exceptional nobility in the treatment of it. There is just a hint of that, it is true, in the delicate engraving of L'Economie, and the broader, richer engraving of La Pourvoyeuse; but for any real indication of it, and even that is but a partial one, we must come to Jules de Goucourt's etching of the Gobelet d'Argent, which suggests the luminousness, the characteristic reflets, and the touche grasse of the master. The other side of Chardin's talent which the engravings do not represent, is his later skill in professional portraiture, and especially in portraiture in pastel, to which the fashionable but well-meeted triumphs of Latour directed him in his old age. But 178 LE JEU DE L'OEVE [API_EMPTY_RESPONSE] FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY the deliberate limitations of the Eighteenth Century prints do not in any way invalidate the excellence, the completeness even, of their performance. The collector should address himself to their study. A little diffi- gence, a little patience, and a hundred pounds, and it would not be impossible to form a collection in which nothing should be wanting. I remember that I gave M. Lacroix or M. Rapilly, in Paris, not more than seventy-five francs an impression for pieces in extraordinarily fine condition, and with margins almost intact. Chardin went on working till he was eighty years old. He enjoyed popularity, and he outlived it. From 1758 to 1757, there were issued, in close suc- cession, two volumes, about one hundred plates each, with all their differences, together with all sorts of interest- ing notes about them, M. Emanuel Bocher has con- scientiously and lovingly catalogued. They were published at a couple of francs or so apiece; their appearance was wont to be welcomed in little notices in the *Mercure de France*, just as the *Standard* or the *Times* to-day might applaud a new Whistler or a new Frank Short; and they hung everywhere on bourgeois walls. The canvases which they translated were owned, some by a King of France, and some by a foreign Sovereign. Little in the work of the whole century had greater right to popularity than the *Jeu de l'Orgue*, with its exquisite and homely grace—Surriage has perfectly engraved it—it—*L'Étude du Dessin*, astute and masterly (Le Bas has rendered well the figure's attitude of absorption), *Le Bonheur* with the unaffected piety, 179 FINE PRINTS the simple contentment of the narrow home, and *La Gouvernante*, with the young woman's friendly camarderie and yet solicitude for the boy who is her charge. At last Fashion shifted. Chardin was in the shade. Even Didierot got tired of him ; though it was only the distaste of a contemporary for an excellence too constantly repeated—and the artist betook himself, with vanished popularity, to changed labours. But the vogue had lasted long enough for his methods to be imitated, and you may look at his life through Charlin's glasses. But Jeanet did not catch the sentiment of Chardin as successfully as Lancret and Pater had caught the sentiment of Watteau. And along with a little humour, of which the print of the *Citrons de Juvicott* affords a truce, he had some coarseness of his own which assailed ill with Chardin's honesty but unalloyed refinement. Chardin was profound; Jeanet, comparatively shallow. You look not with interest at the productions of the one; you enter thoroughly into the world of the other. The creation of Chardin—which his engravers pass on to us—has a sense of peace, of permanence, a curious reality. Reality is that which to us of the present day seems above all things hinging to the laboured and obvious moralities of Greuze, who was voluptuous when posed to the moment, who was convivial when sought to be merry. Yet Greuze saw that he was not the painter of the too seductive duchess, but a family pieti and family afflictions, must have spoken to his 180 FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY own time with seeming sincerity. Even a liberal philosophy—the philosophy of Diderot—patted him gently on the back, and invited him to reiterate his commendable and salutary lessons. But the philosophy was a little sentimental, or it would scarcely have continued to Greece the encouragement it had withdrawn from Charlin. The Greuze pictures chiefly engraved in his own time were his obtrusive manœuvres. They now find little favour. But Levassor's print of *La Laîtière* and Massart's of *La Crèche* classic—elaborate, highly wrought, and suggesting that ivory flesh texture which the master obtained when he was most dexterously luxurious—these will fascinate the Sybarite, legitimately, if they still many sensations. Before the first summer of the century of that *Laîtière* and that *Crèche* came, the one was flourishing at Court, under the Pompadour's patronage, the "rose-water Raphael," the "bastard of Rubens." This was François Boucher. The region of his art lay as far as indeed from reality as did Watteau's "enchanted isle," and it had none of the rightful magnetism of that country of poetic dream. It was not, like Watteau's land, that of a privileged and fortunate humanity, but of "False Gods, and Moses misbegot." Where Boucher tried to be refined, he was insincere; and where he was veracious, he was but picturesquey gross. His notion of Olympus was that of a mountain on which ample human forms might be undraped with 181 FINE PRINTS impuity. That Olympus of a limited imagination he frequented with industry. But, as a decorative painter, there is no need to undervalue his fertility and skill, his apparently inexhaustible though trivial impulse; and if few of his larger compositions have deserved those honours which they have obtained, of translation into elaborate fine-cutraving, hosts of the chalk studies which are so characteristic of his facile talent were appropriately reproduced in fac-simile by the ingenious inventions of Desormeaux. These fac-smiles were very cheap indeed—not many years ago, a single day's to-day exposure. Of Boucher's more considered works en-graved in line, La Naissance de Vénus, by Dufos, and Jupiter et Léda, by Ryland, are important and agree-able, and, as times go, by no means costly instances. Fragonard, besides being a nobler colourist than Boucher—or the silvery pinks and creamy whites of the Chemise au kerf, at the Louvre, would alone be enough to indicate—was at once a master of more chastened taste and of less impotent passion. He was of the succession of the Venetians. Fragonard came to Paris from the South—from amidst the olives and the flowers of Grasse—and he retained to the end a measure of the warmth and sunshine of Provence. The artistic eager-ness, the hurried excitement, of some of his work, is much in accord with his often fiery tones; but in Etruscan Freedom, Les Belges and La Bonne Mère (of which I suggest you see De Lannoy), the col-lector can possess himself of compositions in which Fragonard depicted domestic life in his own lively way. 182 FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY That is only one side of his mind, and, like his love of dignified and ordered artificial Landscape, it is little known. Elsewhere he showed himself a skilled and an appreciative observer of wholly secular character, and he embodied upon many a canvas his conception of Love—it was not to him the constant devotion of a Jésus, but the unostentatious tribute of an hour. Le Verre d'Éau et Le Pot au Lait are good gay prints, but not for every one. In Le Chiffre d'Amour, Affection, which with Fragonard is rarely inelegant, becomes for a moment sentimental. Contemporary with Fragonard were a group of artists who, more than Fragonard, left Allegory aside, and exercised their imagination only in a rearrangement of the real. These were the French Little Masters: amongst them, Lavrencé, the Saint-Aubins, Baudoin, Eisner, Morcan le Jeune. They had seen the life of Paris—Baudoin, the debased side of it; but even Baudoin had some feeling for elegance and comedy. Eisen was above all an illustrator. Augustin de Saint-Aubin, a man of various talents, displayed in little things, is staided most agreeably in those two pretty and well-dispersed interiors, Le Concert and Le Bal puré. They are his most prized pieces; and prettiness having often more money value than greatness, they are worth more than any Watteaus—they are worth full twenty pounds the pair. And that is all I can afford to say of Augustin de Saint-Aubin. Lavrencé and Morcan must be spoken of a little more fully. 183 FINE PRINTS Nicholas Lavrénce was by birth a Swede, but, educated in Paris and practising his art there, he was more French than the French. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the best historians of the Painting of the time, do not much appreciate him: at least in comparison with Baudoin. The very fact that Lavrénce's method was larger and more artistic than Baudoin's whose way was generally the way of somewhat painful finish. I have seen by Lavrénce one agreeable water-colour which has all the impulse of the first intention, and, so far, belies the De Goncourt's judgment. But the judgment is doubtless true in the main. That does not make Lavrénce a jot less desirable for the collectors of prints. Both lie and Baudoin ought to be engraved, but Lavrénce's work was done with a much larger measure of reference to that subsequent interpretation. The true gounches of Lavrénce are of extraordinary rarity; and if their method is in some respects less excellent than that of the companion-works of Baudoin, their themes are more presentable. Lavrénce, in his brilliant portrayal of a luxurions, free-living Society, sometimes allowed himself a liberty our century ought not to allow. His "La Toilette" is such an exquisite subject as that of La Toilette, which depicts the simplest and most graceful of his models—was on a par with that of Retif de la Bretonne. A proof before all letters of the delightful Toilette—engraved so delicately by Pence—is worth, when it appears, ten or twelve pounds: a more ordinary, a less rare impression, is worth perhaps three or four. 184 FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Baudouin—in too much of his work—was the por- trayer of coarse intrigue in humble life and high; Lavreince and Moreau, masters of polite Genre, with subjects wider and more varied, the chroniclers of con- versations not inevitably telle-telle. For vividness and intellectual delicacy of expression in the individual heads, one must give the palu to Moreau. The De Goncourt's claim for him also pre-eminence in com- position, but in one piece at least—in the *Assurable au Concert*, engraved by Desquevauvilliers—Lavreince now Moreau hard. And Lavreince, he can't help thinking himself increasingly less refined. What can be gentler, yet what if gentlest be more abun- dant, coarser than his, in the *Directeur des Toilettes*? —the scene in which a prosperous Abbé, an arbiter of Taste in women's dress, dictates the choice to his de- lightful friend, or busily preserves her from the chances of error. And very noteworthy is Lavreince's way of availling himself of all the opportunities for beautiful design—beautiful line, at all events—which were af- forded him by the noble interiors in which there passed the action of his drama. Those interiors are of the days of Louis Scize, and are a little more severe, a little less intricate, than the interiors of Louis Quinze. Musical instruments, often beautiful of form—harp, harpsichord, and violoncello—play their part in these pictorial compositions. Prints from Lavreince, like prints from Moreau, are too gay and too agreeable not to be always valued. England and America will surely take to them, so France has done long ago. 185 FINE PRINTS It has been claimed for Moreau—Moreau "le jeune," to distinguish him from his less cunning brother—that he is yet more exact than Lavrencin is, in his record of the fashions of his period in furniture and dress. And sometimes, on this very account, his effect is more prosaic—perhaps because the contemporary themes in these series are apt to dominate or dwarf the person of the drama. Yet Moreau's prints have generally some interest of individuality and liveliness, and these characteristics are nowhere better seen than in the two series which he designed to show the life of a great lady from the moment of motherhood and the daily existence of a man of fashion. These prints—such as *C'est un fils, Monsieur ; La Sortie de l'Opéra, La Grande Toilette*—should be possessed, let me tell the collector, with the "A. P. D. Q." still upon them : not in a later state. Moreau, besides being a charming and observant draughtsman, was himself a delicate engraver; but he left to others (Romant, Baugy, and Malbeste amongst them) the business of reproducing his story of the ruling classes—of the leaders of Society—and it was sufficiently popularised. Having regard to what it was—a story of the people of nothingness, such as elegant triviality—rather than as well for those ruling classes of the ancien régime that it did not go further—that it was not actually broadcast. Of Beau-marchais's pungent comedy the saying has since passed round, that it was the Revolution "en action." So envy or contempt might surely have been fostered by the wide-spread perusal of Moreau's exquisite, 186 FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY unvarnished record, and the Revolution have been advanced by a day. With Moreau's art, the Eighteenth Century closes. There is an end of its luxury and its amenity—an end of the lover who insists and the lady who but lightly forbids. There followed after it the boneless, nerveless, still eminently graceful pseudo-classicism of Prud' hon, and the sternier pseudo-classicism of David, which recalled the ideal of men to a more strenuous life. But that life was not of the Eighteenth Century. The inflexible David, like the drowsy Prud' hon, an artist for another age. The graceful, graceful Eighteenth Century—with its own art and its own with its own virtues—expressed its last work. Familiar and luxurious, tolerant and engaging, it had expressed through Art the last of its so easily supported sorrows and its so easily forgotten loves. 187 CHAPTER X The range of Turner's Prints—His earlier Engravings—His "Liber Studiorum"—Its etchings, proofs, completed mezzotints—His money value—"Liber" Collectors—the "Southern Coast" Series—the "England and Wales"—The "Richmondshire" Prints—"Poets" and "Rivers of England"—The Turner Prints secure the Master's fame. Turner prints constitute a class apart. The prints which others made after Turner's drawings and pictures, the prints he executed to some extent or wholly himself, the engravings in line and the engravings in mezzotint, are all of them wont to be collected not so much as part of the representation of a particular method of work, but rather as the representation of an individual genius and of a whole school of the most highly skilled craftsmen. The Turner prints range in period from a year at least as early as 1794 to a year at least as late as 1856—for though Turner was then dead, one or two of the finest engravers whom he had employed were at that date still labouring in the popularisation of his pieces. They range in size from the dainty vignette a couple of inches high, to the extensive plate—a wonder of executive skill, yet often, too, a wonder of misplaced ingenuity— 188 **TURNER PRINTS** which may be three feet long. Between them come the very masterpieces of the landscape engraving of our century—line-engravings like the "Southern Coast"; mezzotint supported by etching, like the "Liber Stu- diorum." They range in value between a couple of shillings or so—the price, when you can get the print, of a specimen of the early publications in the "Copper- plate Magazine"—to, say, well shall we say to £50? —the price of an exceptional proof of a fine, rare subject in "Liber." In point of number, those of which account may reasonably be taken by the student of our greatest Landscape artist through the charming medium of his prints—-in my opinion by the student of English art generally—in short after all, there is some sufficient range of method in the illustration of Land- scape—in point of number those which there need be no desire to ignore or forget, reach, roundly speaking, to four or five hundred. It is possible to make the study and acquisition of them the main business of the life of an intelligent collector. Mr. W. G. Rawlinson is perhaps amongst existing connoisseurs the one whose knowledge of the engravings by Turner, and after him, is the widest and most exact. Mr. Rawlinson has greatly extended the sum of his own knowledge since he penned that catalogue ru- some of the "Liber Stadiorum" which remains his only published contribution to the history of the prints of Turner. The book is of much value; but though, bravely considered, it remains an adequate and serviceable guide, it must be this time be a 189 FINE PRINTS good many corrections in the matter of "States"— rarely is it that the issue of a First Edition of a de- scriptive catalogue of engraved work does not elicit, from one source or another, some information, the existence of which the author had no reason to surmise. And, moreover, it may be hoped that Mr. Rawlinson's more extended studies in the field of his particular inquiry will bear fruit upon some day the production of some volume devoted to this time to the tale of the great series of Line-Engravings and the less numerous productions in pure Mezzotint. "Liber," remember—the master-work, which is thus far the only one to have been elaborately discussed or chronicled by any critic—is the result of a combination of Mezzotint with Etching. But we will go back a little, and will take the prints—or such of them as there is cause to mention—in due order. I recollect Mr. Rawlinson saying to me, not many months ago—in speaking of the little publications of the "Copperplate Magazine" and of such-like small and early work—that Turner was never properly en- graved till he was engraved by James Bosse; and I think, upon the whole, that this is true. At a later period, Turner himself protested that he was never properly, at all events nearly quite perfectly, engraved, till he was engraved by John Pyne—but that was for a quite different order of work, from that which occupied him in the first years of his skilled and accom- plished practice. What Mr. Rawlinson meant was, that whereas the engraver—tasteful and in a measure 190 TURNER PRINTS delicate, yet slight and wanting wholly in subtlety of realisation and treatment—who did the little prints in the "Copper-plate Magazine," such as the *Carlisle* and the *Wakefield*, failed to translate into his art all the really translatable qualities of the immature yet interesting work to which he addressed himself. Basire, in the brilliant and solid prints which served as head-pieces to the "Oxford Almanacks," from 1799 to 1811, did the most thorough justice to their mainly architectural themes. It was in the year in which Basire finished—and Turner's art, by this time, had, of course, greatly changed—that there was executed by John Pye, the engraver (Page 30), a plate which ex- terred from Turner what it ought to have been—a warm tribute of admiration to anybody who translated him. But four years before this, Turner, with Charles Turner, the engraver in mezzotint, had begun the publication of the immortal series of "Liber Studiorum." The set of prints which Turner issued as his "Liber Studiorum"—with an allusion, tolerably evident, to the "Liber Veritatis" of Claude—is but one series of several with which the English master of Landscape occupied himself during the fifty years, or more, of his working life. But it is the first series that was conceived by him; and it is, in the best sense, the most ambi- tious; and it remains the noblest and the most representative. In its actual execution Turner had a greater hand—an incomparably greater hand—than in that of any of its successors; and its scheme permitted a variety, an effective sublimation of transition, denied to 291 FINE PRINTS the artist when, in later years, he was depicting that portion of the county of Yorks which is known as Richmondshire, or the "Southern Coast," or the "Rivers of France," or the "Ports of England," or even all the places which it pleased him to choose for one of the most elaborate of his productions. The Picturesque views in England and Wales. A long tether with a "Liber" inscribed imperiously, in some of these sets; but in the "Liber"—as it is called, briefly and affectionately, by collector and student—there was no question of tether at all. In it, a subject from Classical Mythology might stand side by side with a subject drawn from English barton and hedgerow—I am, as it were, naming Procris and Cephalus, Esoxus and Hepcrus, the exquisite though homely Straw Yard, the curiously prosaic Farm Yard with a Cock. The interior of a London church, with its Georgian altar and its pews closely curtained for the most respectable of bourgeois, might be presented in near neighbourhood to some study which Turner had recorded of the eternal hills, or of a great storm that gathered, rolled over, and passed away from Selwyn Moss. I have already said that this is it. It is Turner's own. But each plate in "Liber Studiorum" is much more than a study. It is a finished composition. Turner spared neither time nor pain—though in this case, as in others, he was careful, where that was possible, to spare money—in making his work all that the wisest lover of his genius might expect it to be. Whatever rivalry there was with the "Liber Veritatis" of Claude,—192 TURNER PRINTS —the later portions of which were issuing from the house of Boydell at the very moment that Turner was planning the “Liber” —the rivalry was conducted upon no equal terms. I say nothing in depreciation of Claude’s “Liber Veritatis.” In it, one of the greatest practitioners of mezzotint engraving—Richard Earleom—reproduced, with learned simplicity, Claude’s mas- terly monuorama—the sometimes slender yet always stately drawings in the preparation of which Nature had counted for something, and Art had counted for more. Charles’s bistro sketches, by their dignity and style—even the hurried visitor to Chardworth may know that he has seen—to be indebted to Rembrandt, to the studies of Titian. But the artist of a “Liber Veritatis” worked in haste, worked purposely in slight- ness, and more than one generation separated him from the engraver who was to execute the plates. Turner worked with abandonment, and worked at leisure, and he etched upon the plates, himself, the leading lines of his composition, and he was in contact with the engravers, and his directions to these accomplished craftsmen were rightly fastidious and endlessly minute. Claude too was an etcher, yet it is not in the “Liber Veritatis”—it is in the rare and early States of his Shepherd and Shepherdess Conserving of his Cocherel (“Le Bonvier”, ) of his Cattle in Stormy Weather— that (as a previous chapter has insisted) we are to find proof of his skilled familiarity with that mode of expression which Turner employed as the basis of his work in the “Liber.” Claude when he etched, etched 193 FINE PRINTS for Etching's sake, and used with pleasure and with ease the resources of the etcher's art. Turner restricted Etching within narrower limits. When one remembers the circumstance that, having etched the outlines on the plate, he took a dozen or a score, perhaps, of impressions from it before he caused the work in mezzotint to be added, it is difficult to assert that he did not attain a certain value to the etched outlines. And indeed they have this quality of signalized strength; they show economy of labour, certainty of vision and of hand. It is very well that they, as well as the finished plates, should be collected. But, in his pleasure in possessing himself of these rare, noble things, the collector must not allow himself to forget that they were essentially a preparation and a sustenance for that which was to follow—for that admirable mezzotint on which the subtlest lights and shadows of the picture, its infinite and indescribably delicate gradations, were intended to depend. Of this Mezzotint it is time to speak. Its employment, though it proved—as I think I have implied already—wonderfully conducive to the quality of the "Liber" plates, was not resolved upon at first. The process of aquatint, in which much work was done about that time—in which only a very few years before—Turner began, Thomas Girtin had produced some broadly-troated views of Paris—had, at first, been thought of. Negotiations were opened with Lewis, and he executed in aquatint one of the plates, which Turner did indeed eventually use, 194 TURNER PRINTS but which he was careful not to use in the earliest numbers of the publication. The superiority of Mezzotint he recognised quite clearly. He employed the best mezzotinters. He based himself to instruct them as to the effects that he desired. He learnt the art him-self, and himself mezzotinted, with great exactness, ten out of the seventy-one plates. He worked, in later stages, upon all the rest of them ; obtaining generally the most refined beauty, but working in such a fashion as to exhaust the plate with extravagant swiftness. Then he touched and retouched, almost as Mr. Whistler has touched and retouched the plates of his Venetian etchings. So delicate, so evanescent, rarity is not an aim, but a need, with them. The publication of the "Liber"—the great undertaking of the early middle period of Turner's art—began in 1807, and its issue was arrested in the year 1819. It was never completed—seventy-one finished plates were given to the world out of the hundred that were meant to be. But Turner had by that time proceeded far with the remainder, of which twenty plates, more or less finished, testified to a gathering rather than a lessening strength. By the non-publication of these later plates, the collector—not necessarily the student—is deprived of several of the noblest illustrations of Turner's genius. Nothing in the whole series shows an elegance more dignified than that which the "Shore and Apse" displays; the mystery of dawn is magnificent in the "Moonrise," and never was pastoral landscape—the England of field and wood and 195 FINE PRINTS sloping hillside—more engaging or suggestive than in the *Crocus*. The mention of these plates—the hint it gives us as to difference of subject and of aim—brings up the question of the various classes of composition into which Turner thought proper to divide his work. The advertise- ment of the publication affords a proof of how widely representative the work was likely to be; but, indeed, did the catalogue fall short of Turner's hope in this respect. The work was to be—and we know, now, how fully it became—an illustration of Landscape Com- position, classed as follows: "Historical, Mountainous, Pastoral, Marine, and Architectural." And further, it is said in the advertisement, "Each number contains five engravings in mezzotint; one subject of each class." But Turner, in these matters, was extraordinarily un- methodical—I should like to say "muddled." Each number did contain five engravings, and they were "in mezzotint," with the preparation in etching; but it was by no means always that there was one subject of each class, for Turner divided the Pastoral into simple and what he described as "elegant" or "epic." Pastoral ("Mr. Regent") that there were two means "epic"), and the very first number contained a His- torical, Marine, and Architectural subject, but it contained no Mountainous; for the Pastoral was represented in both of its forms ("P." and "E.P."). The actual publication was exceedingly irregular. Sometimes two numbers—or two parts, as we may better call them—were issued at once. Sometimes 196 TURNER PRINTS there would be an interval of several years between the issue of a couple of parts. There is no doubt that as the work progressed Turner felt increasingly the neglect under which it suffered. Gradually he lost interest in its actual issue—but, never for a moment in its excellence. Charles Turner, the admirable mezzotint engraver—who, it should hardly be necessary to say, was no relation of the greater man—had charge of "Liber" in its early stages. The prints of the first parts bore an inscription to the effect that they were "Published by C. Turner, 50 Warren Street, Fitzroy Square." But in 1811—when three years had elapsed since the publication of the fourth part—the fifth came out as "Published by Mr. Turner, Queen Anne Street, West" and "Mr. Turner" meant Charles, the author of the work. Charles Turner who had entered in mezzotint every plate contained in the four parts with whose publication he was concerned, engraved, likewise, several of the succeeding pieces. Thus his share in the production of "Liber" was greater than that of any of his brethren. William Say's came next to his in importance—importance measured by amount of labour—and Mr. Rawlinson has pointed out that William Say approached his work with little previous preparation by the rendering of Landscape. The remark is, in some degree, applicable to most of Say's associates. The engraver in mezzotint, at that time, as in earlier times, flourished chiefly by reproducing Portraiture. Raphael Smith and William Ward—great artists who 147 FINE PRINTS were still living when the "Liber" was executed, but who had no part in the performance--had been em- ployed triumphantly, a very little earlier, in popularis- ing that delightful art of Morland, in which landscape had so large a place. Dunkarton, Thomas Lupton, Clint, Eashing, Annis, Dawe, S. W. Reynolds, and Hodges complete the list of the engravers in mezzo- tinto who worked upon the "Liber." Admirable artists many of them were, but the collector, if he is a student, cannot forget how much the master, the originator, dominated over them all. Mr. Ruskin and several subsequent writers have written, with varying degrees of eloquence, of origin- ality, and, I may add, of common sense, as to the moral, emotional, or intellectual message the "Liber" may be taken to convey. This is scarcely the place in which to seek to decipher with exhaustive thoroughness a communication that is on the whole complicated and on the whole mysterious. The reader may be referred to the last pages of the final volume of "Modern Painters" for what is at all events the most im- pressive statement that a prose-poet can deliver as to the gloomy significance of Turner's work. Mr. Stefan Brook—rich in sensibility and in imaginative perceptiveness—follows a good deal in Mr. Ruskin's track. I doubt if Mr. Hauertor or Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse—instructive critics of a cooler school— endorse the verdict of unmitigated gloom, and I have myself (in a chapter in a now well-nigh forgotten essay of my youth) ventured to hold forth upon the 198 A black and white photograph of a waterfall. The waterfall is central to the image, with water cascading down from the top left corner to the bottom right. The surrounding area is dark, emphasizing the brightness of the waterfall. There are trees on either side of the waterfall, partially obscuring the view. [API_EMPTY_RESPONSE] TURNER PRINTS intervals of peace and rest which "Liber Studiorum" shows in its scenes of solitude and withdrawal: the morning light, clear and serene, in the meadows below Oakhampton Castle; the graver silence of sunset as one looks wistfully from heights above the Wye, to where, under the cadlcs skies, the stream deploys to the river. I am referring, of course, to the Oakhampton Castle subject, and to the Severn and Wye; but the argument might have been sustained by allusion to many another print. More important to our present purpose than to settle accurately its author's mission or to agree upon the senti- ment of this or that particular plate, is it to value properly the sterling and artistic virtues which "Liber" makes manifest. Of these, however, there is one thing only that I care to emphasise here. Let all beauties of detail be discovered; but let us even here, and in lines that are of necessity brief, lay stress upon the all- important part played in the plates of "Liber" by one old-fashioned virtue, that will yet be fresh again when some of those that may seem to supplant it have indeed waxed old. It is the virtue of Composition: "Liber Studiorum" shows, in passage after passage of its draughtsmanship, close reference to Nature, deep know- ledge of her secrets; but it shows I think yet more the unavoidable conviction, alike of true worker and true connoisseur, that Nature is, for the artist, not a Deity but a material: not a tyrant but a servant. In the near and faithful study of Nature—and nowhere more completely than in the prints of "Liber"—Turner did 190 FINE PRINTS much that had been left undone by predecessors. But he was not opposed to them—he was allied to them—in his recognition of the fact that his art must do much more than merely reproduce. "Nature," said Goethe, "Nature has excellent intentions." And by Composition, by those means which Nature employs by very luxuriant hidden labour, it is the business of the artist to convey these intentions to the beholders of his work. How much does he receive? How much of himself, of his creative mind, must we exact that he shall bestow? Let us come down, immediately, to money matters, and other practical things for the collector's benefit. It is still possible, here and there, in an auction room, to buy an original set of "Liber Studiorum"—a set, that is, as Turner issued it—but it is never desirable. For Turner, who was not only a great poet with brush and pencil, and sanguine etching needle, but an exceedingly keen hard bargainer and man of business, took horrible care (or just care, if we choose to call it so) that the original subscribers to his greatest serial should never get sets consisting altogether of the fine impressions. He would not allow any one to take the second-rate with the first. It was not till collectors took to studying the pieces for themselves, and making up collections by purchase of odd pieces here and there—rejecting much, accepting something—that any sets were uniformly good. The first fine set, perhaps, was that, in various States, which was amassed by Mr. Stokes, and passed on to his niece, Miss Mary Constance 200 TURNER PRINTS Clarke. To have the marks of these ownerships at the back of a print, is—in ninety-nine cases out of a hun- dred—to have evidence of excellence. Twenty years ago, one could buy such a print, now and then, at Halsted's, the ancient dealer's, in Rathbone Place ; and have an instructive chat to boot, with an old- world personage who had laid with speech with " Mr. Turner." Even now, in an auction room, one may get such a print sometimes. Another of the very early collectors was Sir John Hesseye, who bought origin- ally on Halsted's recommendation, and who, having been years afterwards, wrote works of other masters— called by his flattering, so to speak, on " Liber Studi- orum," on the chair opposite to him, as he sat at his meal, a fine print was wont to be placed. Amongst living connoisseurs, Mr. Henry Vaughan and Mr. J. E. Taylor, Mr. Stopford Brooke and Mr. W. G. Rawlinson, have notable collections of very varying size and import- ance. Mr. Rawlinson believes much more than I do— if I understand him right—in the desirability of possessing engravers' trial proofs—in a certain late stage. Most engravers' proofs are, of course, mere preparations, curious and interesting, but in themselves far less desirable than the finished plates to whose effects of deliberate and attained beauty they can but vaguely approximate. Of course if you are so ex- ceedingly lucky a man as to have been able to possess upon the particular proof which was the last of the series, you possess a fine and inconceivable thing; but generally an early impression of the First published 201 FINE PRINTS State represents the subject more safely and assuredly ; and, failing that, an early impression of the Second State; and so on. An indication of priority is no doubt well—but it is well chiefly for the feebler brethren. You must train your eye. Having trained it, you must use it with care. Besides, the knowledge of States are useful, but are not sufficient. In the few years that elapsed between the establishment of "Liber" as avowedly well material for the diligence and outlay of the collector, and the great sale of the "remainders" in Turner's own collection—which only left Queen Anne Street in 1873, some two-and-twenty years after his death—prices for fine impressions of the "Liber" plates, bought separately, were high. Then, in 1873, during that long sale at Christie's, a flood of prints, and many of them very fine ones, came upon the market. "Would they ever be absorbed?" it was asked. They were absorbed very quickly. But just until they were absorbed, it was, naturally, possible, not only to choose (at the dealer's, chiefly, who bought big lots; at the Cohaghi's and Mrs. Noseda's, particu- larly)—it was possible to choose aggressively, out of so great a number of good things that were available. Then "markets hardened." The various writings calling attention to the wisdom of collecting had probably their effect. Then things slackened again. And now, though rare proofs and very fine impressions—which are what should be most cared about—hold their own, there is a certain lull in the activity of buying. The undesirable impression goes for very little. Yet the 202 TURNER PRINTS fluctuations, such as they are, either way, are of no vast importance. Of any but the very rarest, or very finest subjects, six to twelve guineas gets a good First State. Three to six guineas may be the price of a good Second. A Third or Fourth or Fifth State fetches less, unless—as in an exceptional instance, like the Cullin—it is preferable. Of all the different subjects, the rarest is Ben Arthur. In a fine impression—with the cloudland and the shadows not impenetrably massive—it is exceedingly impressive. But never as a thing of power should I rate it above Sinking Moss or Hind Head Hill ; or, as a thing of beauty, above Severn and Wye. No great collection of the "Liber Studiarum" has been sold of late years, but if we go back to the year 1887, we can give a few prices called from the catalogue of the Buckeedge Sale. An engraver's proof of the Woman with a Tambourine fetched £15, 15s. there ; an engraver's proof of Bank, £27 ; a proof of the Mount St. Gothard, which at least must have had the virtue of approaching finish, fell to Colnaghi's bid of £55 ; the First State of the Holy Island Cathedral, which sold for £3, 3s., must either have been poor or monstrously cheap, though the plate is one in which, even to the collector with the most trained eyes, the possession of the First State is not strictly necessitated : the subject is among those—and they are not so very few—in which the Second State, well chosen, is altogether adequate. The First State of the Hind Head Hill reached £14, 14s. ; The First of the London from 203 FINE PRINTS Grecovich, with its noble panorama of the long stretched Town and winding river, reached £15, 1s. A proof of the Windmill and Lock reached £91 ; a First State of the Secret of W. G. 231 ; a First State of the Procris and Cupidule, £71 ; a First State of the Watercress Gatherers, £71, 1s. These are things which I have written of in an earlier paragraph in this chapter, sell, generally speaking, for three or four guineas apiece; the etching of the Isles, which is extremely rare, fetched at the Bocclough auction £23, 13s. By the Fine Art Society 174 was paid for a First State of the Ben Arthur. The plates least eagerly sought, or in inferior condition, went for all sorts of prices between a pound or two and four or five guineas. I think, as far as value may be judged without the presence of the particular impressions which were sold, the little lot I have now given above may fairly indicate it, but no quite thorough indication can be got without an immense accumulation of detail, and, on the reader's part, an immense knowledge in interpreting it. It is not unimportantly that we have lingered long over the "Liber." Indeed than one other great series must engage at all events a brief attention. In 1814 began the famous "Southern Coast" series, which was brought to an end in 1827. For these prints, engraved in admirable and masculine "line," chiefly by the brothers George and William Cooke, Turner had made water colours, whilst as a preparation for the "Liber," he had made but slight though finely 204 TURNER PRINTS considered sepia drawings—mere guides and hints to himself and the engravers he employed upon the plates: things whose significance was to be enlarged : not things to be merely copied and scrupulously kept to. In quite tolerable condition the ordinary impressions of the “Southern Coast” plates are to be had in large book-form ; but the collector, buying single piece by single piece, at one or two or three guineas each, seeks generally impressions before letters or with the scratched title. Of course the variations in condition are noticeable, but in the firm “line” of the “Southern Coast” they are at least much less noticeable than in the delicate and evanescent mezzotints of “Libert.” The year 1835 saw the publication of the “Southern Coast” was finished — when prints picturesque and vivid, and in some cases, as in the *Cleavly* of William Miller, perfectly exquisite, had been presented of the most interesting seaboard places between Minehead and Whitstable—that year was the period at which the publication of the third great series, the “England and Wales,” was begun. It was to have extended to thirty parts or more: each part containing four subjects. But, like “Libert,” it received, on its first issue, no full and satisfying measure of encouragement, and though it reached its twenty-fourth part, it did not go further. It was published at about two guineas and a half a part. “England and Wales” sets forth with great elaboration of fine engraving the characteristics of the later middle period of Turner’s art, so far as black and white can set it forth at all. That was the period in 205 FINE PRINTS which subject was most complicated and most ample— even unduly ample—and in which Turner dealt at once with the most intricate line and with all sorts of prob- lems of colour, atmosphere, illumination. The work of all that period, from 1827, say, to ten years onwards —with many of its merits, its inevitable shortcomings, and its immense audacity—the "England and Wales" represent. The work of various engravers trained by Turner for the interpretation of all that was most com- plicated, it will ever be interesting and valuable. Such prints as Stanford, Llanthony Abbey, and the noble Yarmouth stand ever in the front line. The last, like the Clovelly of the "Southern Coast," is a work of William Miller, the old Quaker engraver, whose render- ing of Turner's delicate skies no other line engraver has approached—not even William Cooke, who did so well that troop of light little wind clouds in the Mar- gate of the "Southern Coast." Admirable then, indeed, many of these things must be allowed to be; and in this sense they are almost unique, that scarcely any- thing else has possessed their qualities. Yet on the whole one admires "England and Wales" with reserva- tions. One admires it but more thoroughly to "Liber" and to "Southern Coast." There are other series which must not be passed over altogether—the "Richmondshire Set," of which the first print was executed, I think, in 1820, though the whole volume was not issued till 1823. It is too in line: the finest print of all, perhaps the Inghelborough. Then there are six "Ports of England:" impressive, 206 TURNER PRINTS varied little mezzotints, unsupported by etching—prints in one of which Turner has set down, for all time, his clear, unequalled perception of the beauty of the Scarborough coast-line. Then there are the "Rivers of England," with the noble *Arundel*, the restful *Potness*. Then there are, in line, the almost over-dainty yet miraculous little prints of "Rivers of France." Then there are the wonderful vignettes in illustration of Walter Scott. These, like the illustrations to the Rogers' "Poems" and the "Italy," with which they have the most affinity, are luxurious and gem-like. The Rogers illustrations of course deteriorate in later editions; the "Italy" of 1830 and the "Poems" of 1835 being only a few years apart. There were the present volume of a wider scope and addressed to the book-collector, I should allow myself to say here what it seems I do say here, without "allowing myself"—that the collector should get, if possible, a copy in the original boards, and may give £5 for that as safely as a couple of sovereigns for a re-bound copy. Turner is represented on many a side by the engraver's art, and in most cases with singular good fortune. For some, there are the vignettes which have the finish of Collini work. For some, it may be, the large, more recent plates, the *Modern Italy and Ancient Italy*, that hang, I cannot help considering, rather ineffectively upon the wall: too big, not for their place, but for their method of execution—and yet, like so many, wonderful. He is represented best of all perhaps in 297 FINE PRINTS works of middle scale — in the virile line of the “Southern Coast,” and the unapproachable mezzotint and etching of the “Liber.” If everything that he has wrought with brush or pencil were extinguished, these things, living, would make immortal his fame. 208 CHAPTER XI The healthy appreciation of Mezzotint—Its facility of conveying the painter's very touch—Landscape Scenes in Mezzotint—Comparative Rarity of Landscapes — The Contablets—Fast volume of Rare Pieces and Portraits—The Prints after Sir Joshua Reynolds—Dr. Hamilton's Catalogue — The smaller number of Cattleshead and other prints by Gainsborough—Mr. Perry Horne's book on these men—George Morland—The cost of Mezzotints now, and when first issued. Or modern fashions in Print Collecting, the appreciation of Mezzotints is assuredly one of the healthiest, and apart from the question of the very high prices to which mezzotints have lately been forced—there is only one drawback to the pleasure of the Collector in bringing them together: the collector of mezzotints has to resign himself to do without original work. The scraping of the plate in these broad masses of shallow and light—a method immensely popular as means of interpretation or translation of the painter's touch—has from the days of the invention of the process by Ludwig von Siegen to the days of its latest practice, never greatly commended itself to the original artist as a method for fresh design. There are a few exquisite exceptions, and perhaps there is no sufficient reason why there 209 FINE PRINTS should not be more; but the exceptions best known, and most likely to be cited, the prints of Turner's "Liber Studiorum," are exceptions only in so far as regards that small proportion of the whole—about ten amongst the published plates—wrought by Turner himself. Andal, further, the collector, if he cares much for Landscape subjects, will note that landscapes in mezzotint are comparatively few. It was in the Eighteenth Century that the production of mezzotint was most voluminous; and the Eighteenth Century took little interest in Landscape. In the earlier half of our own century—are yet the art had almost ceased to be practised—the world was given a few famous sets of landscapes in mezzotint; but they were very few. Turner's "Liber" (with its backbone of etching) was followed by the half-dozen pieces of the "Porta of England," and by "Rivers of England," or "River Scenery," as it is sometimes called, "after Turner and Girtin;" and then, well in the middle of the half-century, we were endowed with the delightful, now highly prized mezzotints, which were executed by David Lucas after the works of Constable, finally when they were sombre, homely too when they were most sparkling and alive. They took like the "Liber" prints of Turner—profited by the suggestions of the great master. The Academy of Mr. Lucas was to make them too black, and perhaps a little too massive. Sparkle and vivacity were wanted in any adequate renderings of Constable; and these, by Constable's own solicitude, and doubtless too 210 MEZZOTINTS by the adaptability of Lucas's talent, were eventually obtained. In our own day, several most meritorious artists—Wehrschmidt and Gerald Robinson and others—have done, in several branches, accomplished and interesting work in mezzotint, and Frank Short, in one print especially that I have in my mind after a Turner drawing—an Alpine subject—and again in a bold decisive mezzotint, A Road in Yorkshire, after Dewitt (a road skirting the moors)—is altogether admirable. And, to name yet a third instance of the art of this so flexible and extraordinarily sympathetic translator, there is the quaint wonderfulistic vision of the silvery grey Dales. After a sketch by Constable in the possession of Mr. Henry Vaughan, when greater Constable, the Hay Wain, was generously made over to the nation, many years ago. The work of David Lucas, done under Constable's eye, never—not even in the radiant Summerland or in the steel-grey keenness of the Spring—for one moment excelled in delicacy of manipulation Frank Short's delightful rendering of that vision of the Downs. But I am not to dwell longer upon particular instances. We are brought back to a repetition of the fact that it is not, generally speaking, in examples of Landscape Art that the collector of mezzotints must find himself richest. The mezzotint collector's groups of landscapes will be limited. In the collection of religious compositions, of genre pieces, of theatrical subjects, of "faerie" subjects—in which that which is most "finely" is the prettiness of the female—as in racing 211 FINE PRINTS subjects (amongst the latter there are a few most admirable prints after George Stubbs), and most of all, of course, in portraits, from the days of Lely to the days of Lawrence, there will be opportunities of filling portfolios after portfolio, drawer after drawer. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance more for the student who has not a collector's practical interest in the matter—to realise what is actually the extent of that contribution to the world's possessions in the way of Art, which has been made, and all within about two hundred years, by the engravers in mezzotint. Some eighteen years ago, an Irish amateur, Mr. Challoner Smith, began the publication of a Catalogue which when it was concluded, several years later, had extended to five volumes. It was a colossal labour. Styled by its compiler, "British Mezzotint Portraits," it really includes the chronicle of many things which at least are not professedly portraits—yet it excludes many too. Whatever it excludes, its bulk is such, that, amongst the mass of its matter, it comprises full descriptions of between four and five hundred places by one artist alone—Thomas Gainsborough, junior. Fifty plates are chronologized by an engraver of modern character, more popular to-day — Richard Earlom ; amongst them, more than one of the genre or incident pictures after Wright of Derby (in which a difficult effect of chiaroscuro—an effect of artificial light—is treated boldly, vigorously, not always very subtly), and the marvellously painter-like plates of *Marriage à la Mode*, so much more pictorial than the 212 A portrait of a woman with light-colored hair, wearing a dark dress and a choker. She is looking to her left. WATERMARK MEZZOTINTS brilliant line-engravings executed much earlier after those subjects. But not, be it observed, mentioned by Challoner Smith amongst the Earlsons, are two other prints in which, in the reproduction of still-life, engraving in mezzotint reaches high-water mark : I mean the now most justly sought-for plates after the Fruit and Flower Pieces of Van Huysum. By James Watson, a contemporary of Earlson's, more or less, about a hundred and sixty prints are described. By J. R. Smith— who engraved so many of the finest of the Sir Joshua —there are described two hundred, but by the John Smith who, a century earlier, recorded almost innumerable Kneller's, there are all but three hundred. The difference in the number of plates produced by the younger men and by the older—James Watson, Earlson, and J. R. Smith upon the one hand ; John Smith and Paton on the other—is mainly an exception in the tendency of our art to become more elaborate, more refined, more perfect, presumably slower, during the hundred years or so that separated the beginning, not from the end indeed (for the end, strictly speaking, is not yet), but from the very crown and crest of the achievement. Much of the early work is very vigorous. John Smith, especially, was within limited lines a sterling artist ; though mainly, like the portrait painters that he worked after, without obvious attractiveness and indeed without subtlety. The exceedingly rare examples of Ludwig von Siegen and of Prince Rupert show that these men—at the very beginning even—were artists and not bunglers. But when one 419 FINE PRINTS compares that early work, John Smith's even-done, all of it, when the art was but in its robust childhood —with the infinitely more refined and flexible performance of the men of the Eighteenth Century, one wonders only at the great body of achievement, dexterous, delicate, faultlessly graceful, vouchsafed to the practitioners of mezzotint during the last decades of that later epoch. And between the distinctly later work and the distinctly earlier is the less engaging excruciating thereof which we remember as the master-line art of M'Anell, a link in the chain ; for M'Anell learnt something from the early men, and was the master of more than one of the more recent. He is admirable especially in his rendering of the portraits of men. A vast proportion of the work of the first practitioners of Mezzotint appeals rather to the collector of portraits for likeness sake, than to the collector of prints for beauty's sake and Art's. Such a collector is a specialist the nature of whose specialty obliges him to amass a certain amount of artistic production without necessarily having any great regard for the Art that is in it. We are not concerned, in this volume, with his specialty, honourable and serviceable as it may be—a book which, by reason of more pressing claims on our attention, has passed into the family and yet highly refined labours of Nantucket, Edelkind, the Drevets (masters of reproductive work in pure "line"), may well be pardoned if it does not pause over mere portraiture—I mean, the less artistic portraiture—in 214 MEZZOTINTS mezzotint. The collector who is as yet but a beginner should be encouraged to direct his eye to the more-statedly and purposely artistic—to the hill-tops where he will find already, as his comrades in research, those who have brought to the task of collecting a long experience and a chastened taste. In other words, the generation of Reynolds and of Gainsborough, or else the generation of Romney and of Morland, has to be touched upon. The important collector can not hands on the great prizes of his pursuit. The perfectly translated art of these painters is amongst the few things which may be accounted popular and yet may be accounted noble. In saying this, I do not preclude myself from saying also that I think the sums given at present for the most favourite instances of mezzotint engraving are distinctly excessive. We will look at a few of them in detail, on a later page. Fashion knows little reasonableness—but little moderation—and hence it is that a translation of Reynolds, gracious and engaging, commands, if it happens to be at all rare, the price, and often more than the price, of an original and important creation of Dürers, or even of Rembrandt's. But what shall we say when we have to recollect that, at the present moment, even the mezzotints after Happens are ridiculously dear? Of all the masters of the Eighteenth or early Nineteenth Century, it is Sir Joshua Reynolds who has been engraved most amply. It is safe to say that there are something like four hundred prints after 215 FINE PRINTS his painted work—prints of the great time, I mean, ending not later than 1830, and taking, amongst others, no account of the smaller plates of which S. W. Reynolds executed so many. The latest and best Catalogue of these great Reynolds prints is that of Dr. Hamilton—a labour of diligence and loving care undertaken in our own generation. Of the painters of the British School, Morland probably comes next to Reynolds, in respect of the number of engravings executed after his work. Apart from prints in stipple, there exist after Morland something like two hundred mezzotints. A systematic Catalogue, with states and all, is still to be desired, as a sum practical guide to the collector of Morland; but meanwhile useful service has certainly been rendered by the Exhibitions at the Messrs. Vokins’s, for these were wonderfully com- prehensive, and with them careful lists—only just short of being catalogues rationales—have been issued. William Ward—Morland’s brother-in-law—and J. R. Smith, with whom he was associated in his two principal works—but neither of these accomplished craftsmen had a bad in popularising his labours by reproducing his themes—amongst them John Young, the author of the rare and little known, and poetic plate, Travellers. Mr. Percy Horne—himself, like Dr. Hamilton, a well-known collector—has done for Gains- borough and Romney what Dr. Hamilton has done for Sir Joshua. In one volume, charmingly illustrated with a few specimen subjects, Mr. Percy Horne has issued a Catalogue of the engraved portraits and fancy 216 A black and white photograph of a group of statues or sculptures. The statues appear to be made of stone or marble and are arranged on a platform or pedestal. The background is dark, possibly indicating an indoor setting. [API_EMPTY_RESPONSE] MEZZOTINTS subjects painted by Gainsborough and by Romney— the Gainsborough pieces of which he has taken note having been published between 1760 and 1830 ; the Romneys, between 1770 and 1830. By Gainsborough, there are eighty-eight, of which seventy-seven are por- traits. The numbers include some in stipple and for even in line, but not both, are, as I suppose, mezzotints. By Romney, the engravings most popular with the en- gravers, and it would seem, with the public—there are no less than a hundred and forty-five, of which a hundred and thirty-six are portraits. But it is diffi- cult, in this matter, to draw the line very sharply, owing to the habit of the beauties of that day to be painted not only as themselves, but “as Miranda,” “as Sensibility,” and the like. Mr. Horne himself re- minds us, by cross references in his index, that even of the few Romneys which he has chosen to cata- logue as “fancy subjects,” some are in truth portraits. Among the engraved Romney portraits, no less than twenty are avowed representations of the fascinating woman who inspired Romney as did no other soul, and without whose presence he not seldom plied. She was Lady Hamilton—Lady Hamilton Hart, or Fanny Hart, mistress of Charles Grey. He knew her afterwards as the wife of Sir William Hamilton. The modified and unforbearing Classicism of her beauty accorded well with his ideal—he helped perhaps to form it—and, admirable as is much of the work of his in which she had no place, Romney is most completely Romney when it is Lady Hamilton he is recording. 217 FINE PRINTS The value of an average Romney print is to-day at least as high as that of an average Reynolds, and much higher than that of an average Gainsborough. An exceptional print like his *Mrs. Carwardine*, than which nothing is finer—a well-built gentlewoman, seen in profile—close white cap her head bent prettily over a nestling child—her hair waves clasped at her back—all sell for about a hundred pounds. A print in a fine impression, is scarcely likely to fetch less. It was engraved by J. R. Smith in 1781. Very beautiful and delicate, though not perhaps so extremely rare, is the *Elizabeth, Countess of Derby*, engraved by John Dean. Two hundred pounds has been fetched by Raphael Smith's engraving of Romney's Lady War- wick. Of Gainsboroughs, perhaps the very finest is one engraved by Dean; this is the *Mrs. Elliot*, a print of 1779: a very great rarity; a thing of delight- ful and dignified beauty, and in its exquisite delicacy, quite as characteristic of the engraver as of the origi- nal artist. It is a long time since any impression has been sold. About £270 was the last chronicled price for it. Would fetch more, so experts think, did it reappear. The highest price ever yet paid for a print after Sir Joshua is, as I am told, £350; and this was given for an impression of Thomas Watson's print after the picture sometimes called "An Offering to Hymen"— the Hon. Mrs. Bereford, with the Marchioness Twem- head and the Hon. Mrs. Gardiner. For a while, the Ladies Waldegrave, engraved by Valentine Green, was 218 MEZZOTINTS considered at the top of the tree. £270 has been cheerfully paid for it. Mr. Urban Nosedæ — than whom no dealer in England is a greater specialist in mezzo-tint, for he has inherited, it seems, his mother's eye—the eye which made that lady so desirable a friend to the collector, a quarter of a century ago—Mr. Urban Nosedæ (if I can get somehow to the end of a sentence so involved and awkward that I am beginning to feel it must necessarily be very clever too) tells me, from Notes to which he has had access, that the original price of even the most important of these Sir Joshua prints was never more than a guinea and a half, and that not a few were issued at five shillings. The Mezzotints of Sir Joshua are, when compared with those of average Sir Joshua; actually cheap when compared with those that are finest and rarest. Lately, the charming pair, A Visit to the Child at Nurse and A Visit to the Child at School, fetched, at Sotheby's, twenty-seven guineas; the Farmer's Stable fetched, at the Huth Sale, £11. 10s.; the Currier's Stable, not long since at Christie's, fetched twenty-one guineas; Fisherman going out, by S. W. Reynolds, has realised £17. The Story of Letitia, a small set, has realised £30, but would to-day fetch more—in fine condition. Mr. Nosedæ says—and I suppose those other great authorities on mezzotint, Messrs. Colnaghi, would confirm him—that the original prices of the Morlands ranged from seven and sixpence to a guinea. Great as the difference is between the sum first asked and the sum now obtained, I cannot. 219 FINE PRINTS in the case of this so genial, graceful, acceptable, observant master, think it is excessive. A generation that has gone a little mad over J. F. Millet and other interesting French rustic painters, may allow itself some healthy enthusiasm when George Morland is to the front. 250 CHAPTER XII Lithography, the convenient invention of Senefelder—Its recent Revival due to the French and Whistler—Fantas—Whistler's Lithographs only inferior to his Etchings—C. H. Shawou's Lithographs the best expression of his art—Lithography and Etching compared—with Blochstein—the Lithographs of Rousseau—Other Drawings by Rousseau—Whistler's Paper—The Modern Lithograph foolishly costly. A final chapter I devote to another of the most justifiable and reasonable of the more recent finds in Print Collecting—to a branch of the collector's treasure far less important, indeed, and far less interesting than Etching, far less historic than Mezzotint, but far more creditable than the mania of the inartistic for the pretty ineptitude of the coloured print. I am speaking of Lithography. Men who are familiar with the later development of artistic work, know that not exactly alongside of the very real and admirable Revival of Etching, but closely following behind it, there has proceeded some renewal of interest in the art of drawing upon stone, which, in 1796, was invented by Senefelder. Often, however, nowadays, it is not literally "on stone." Without defending the change—and yet without the possibility of violently accusing it—seeing the achievements which 293 A black-and-white illustration of a man in a suit holding a book. FINE PRINTS at least it has not forbidden—I may note that, as a matter of fact, a transfer-paper, and not the prepared stone, is, very frequently in our day, the substance actually drawn on. Well, the renewal of interest in the art of Lithography owes something to the Frenchmen of the present generation, and something too to Mr. Whistler. I say—the present generation—in talking of the French, because (not to speak of the qualities attained two generations ago by Mr. English), Gavarni's "velvety quality" and the "fever and freedom of Daumier" were noticeable and might have been influential before the days of our present young men. The work of Fantin-Latour, one may take it, has been to them an example, and, yet later, the work of Whistler. Fantin-Latour—that delightful painter of flowers and of the poetic nude—has endowed us in Lithography as well, with reveries of the nude, or of the slightly robed. They are all done in freely scraped crayon. A few of them—such as The Genius of Music, or the quite recent To Strindahl—the collector of the lithograph should certainly possess. But I must turn, in detail, to Mr. Whistler. Mr. Tom Way, who knows as much about Lithography as any one—and more, perhaps, than any one about the lithography of Whistler—assured me, a year since, that something like a hundred drawings on the stone, or transfer-paper (for Mr. Whistler sometimes uses one and sometimes the other), had been wrought by whose reputation is secure as 000 LITHOGRAPHS the master-etcher of our time. Since then Mr. Way has accurately and eulogistically catalogued them. They amount now, or did when Mr. Way finished his catalogue, to exactly a hundred and thirty. But Mr. Whistler is always working. Let us recall a few of them—and most, though indeed by no means all, of them have been seen in an exhibition held scarcely a year ago in the rooms of the Fine Art Society. Before then, they were wont to be shown privately by one or two dealers. Earlier still, they were not shown at all, though a few of the finest of them had been long ago wrought. There was that most distinguished drawing that was published for a penny in the *Whistler*—the lady seated, with a hat on, and one arm raised, which was called *The Winged Hat*. As in Mr. Whistler's rare little sketches of slightly-draped cross-kneed girl stooping over a basket one enjoys, in *The Winged Hat*, the suggestion of delicate tone on the whole surface: the working of the face is particularly noteworthy by reason of the subtle way in which the draughtsman had suggested, by means of the handling of his chalk, a different texture. "By means of the handling of his chalk," did I write?—perhaps a little too confidently. One can't quite say how he did really get it. But he has got it, somehow. Then there is that admirable portfolio, of only six or so, the Gonville published—containing the *Limehouse*, mysterious and weird, and a *Nocturne*, Batehouse, wholly exquisite. Again, there is the *Battersea Bridges*, of 98 FINE PRINTS 1878, which, good though it is, does not stand comparison with Mr. Whistler's etching of the same and similar themes. Then there is the rare subject which people learned in Lithography are wont to account almost if not quite the Whistlerian masterpiece in the method—a drawing tenderly rendered: a thing of masses and broad spaces, more than narrow lines. It is called *Early Morning*, and is a vision of the River at Battersea. It is faint—faint—of gradations the most delicate, of contrasts the least striking—a gleam of silver and white. Later, among many others, there have been that drawing of a draped model seated which appeared in M. Marty's "L'Estampe Originale;" the fine portrait of M. Mallarmé—a writer so difficult to understand that by the faithful and by the outsider his profundity is taken for granted—the interesting and clever print, *The Doctor*, which adorns the "Pageant;" the *Belle Dame sans souci*; with, most especially it may be, the quality of a chalk drawing; the *Belle Jardinière*, which has something, but by no means all of the infinite freedom of the etching of *The Garden*; again, *The Balcony* with people peering down from it, as if at a procession—and procession indeed it was, since the thing was wrought on the day of Carnot's funeral. Then, in the Forge and *The Smith of the Place du Dragon* there is the tender soft grey quality which people learned in these things conveive, I think generally, to be impossible to transfer. But of the younger artists who have worked in 224 LITHOGRAPHICS Lithography it is time to say something. Mr. Frank Short, with his placid dream of Putney, with the intricate rhythm of line of his *Tender-Ships*, Yarmouth, should not be passed by. Nor Mr. Francis Bate, who, to draw as he has drawn, and see as he has seen, *The Whitling Mill*, could not possibly have been wanting in originality of expression or of sight. Nor Mr. George Clausen, again, whose *Hau Bura* bears witness not only to his easy command of technique but to his flexibility. It is this most transient of rustic life in which Mr. Clausen has chosen to want to show the influence of Millet, if not of Bastien Lepage. It is of a realism artistically subdued, yet undeniable. Of the work of C. H. Shannon I must speak a good deal more fully, for of C. H. Shannon Lithography is the particular art. He is no beginner at Lithography: no maker of first experiments. I do not know that he—like Mr. Short—is an engraver in any way. He is not, like Mr. Whistler, celebrated on two continents as etcher and painter to boot. He is above all things draughtsman—a draughtsman poetic and subtle. The air of Lithography he breathes as his native air. C. H. Shannon's art it is by no means easy for the healthy normal person to appreciate at once. It is possible even for a student of the matter to lose sight of Shannon's poetry and sensitiveness, in a fit of impatience, because they seem to him ignoble does not always seem to be true, or because his draughtsmanship has not robustness. I have a lurking suspicion that I was myself rather slow to appreciate him. Few people's 055 r FINE PRINTS appreciation of the original in Art, comes to them all at once. And touchy folk—unreasonable, almost irresponsible—are apt to blame one on this account. One has "swallowed one's words," they say—because one has modified an opinion. The world, even the intelligent world, is not so much ready to receive them. Is that so very amazing? Themselves, doubtless, were born with every faculty matured—they possessed, upon their mother's breasts, a nice discrimination of the virtues of Latteé of '60. Some of us, under such circumstances, can but crave their tolerance—we were born duller. Of lithographic technique, Mr. C. H. Shannon—to go back to him, after an inexcusable digression—is a master; and here let it be said that not only does he draw upon the stone invariably, whilst Mr. Whistler (it has been named before) sometimes does and sometimes does not draw on it, but he insists also upon printing his own impressions. He has a press; he is an enthusiast; he sees the thing through. The precise number of his lithographs it is not important to know. What is important is that he is upon the relative scale of the whole, nearly all of which he has thoroughly considered composition takes the place of the dainty sketch. Faulty the works of Charles Shannon may be, in certain points; deficient in certain points; but rarely indeed are they slight, either in conception or execution. Of each one of them may it be said that it is a serious work; the seriousness as apparent in the more or less realistic treatment 236 LITHOGRAPHS of *The Modeller* as in *Debia*, ideal and quenlent and Titianesque. The *Ministrants*, of 1894, is perhaps his most important. What is more exquisite than the just suggested movements of *The Sisters?* *Non-Breccia* is noteworthy, pure, in composition, and refined, of course, in effect. Before I go on to discuss a few others of the modern men, it may be more interesting to remind the reader— it may be, even to inform him—what is and what may hope to be Lithography's place. In such signs of its revival as are now apparent, he will surely rejoice. One does rejoice to find an artist equipped with some new medium of expression—one medium of expression, at all events, by which his work, while remaining auto- graphic, may yet be widely diffused. And the art or craft of Lithography, whatever it does not do, does at least enable the expert in it to produce and scatter broadcasts, by the hundred or the thousand. He chooses whether he will print all the quality of a pencil or chalk drawing—or, if it is desired, much of the quality even of a drawing that is washed. This is excellent; and then again there is the com- mercial advantage of relatively rapid and quite inex- pensive printing. But what the serious and imperiast amateur and collector of Fine Art will have to notice on the other side is, first of all, that Lithography is not richly endowed with a separate quality of its own. With work that is printed from a metal plate, this is quite otherwise. Mezzotint has a chiarra that is its own, entirely. And Line-Engraving has the par- 227 FINE PRINTS ticular charm of Line-Engraving. And Etching—the biting, which gives vigour now, and now extreme deli- cacy; the printing, which deliberately enhances this or modifies that; the burr, the dry-point work, its in- tended effect; the papers, and the different results they yield, of tone or luminousness—all these things contri- bute to, and are a part of, Etching's especial quality and especial delight. A comparison between Lithography and Etching in particular—putting other mediums aside—leads to further reflections. Lithography lacks the relief of etched work. You can have grey and black lines—a skillful etcher says to us, when he prints Lithography as well as Etching, and sometimes practises it—it—you can't have grey and black lines, in that the printing of a lithograph is surface-printing, and every mark upon the stone prints equally black. Therefore for grey work in Lithography, you must have a grain upon the stone—or on the transfer-paper—that your drawing is made on." And he adds, "Whatever can be done upon a lithographic stone, can be done with a much higher quality upon a plate." And the soft grey line, he says, when got upon the stone—is well, if that is what you want, in a soft-ground etching it can be got much better." As to Mezzotint again, to compare the quality of a fine mezzotint from copper, with any quality that is obtainable in stone, would, generally, be absurd. We are brought hack, however, to that which is Litho- graphy's especial virtue and convenience—it gives the 288 LITHOGRAPHS autographic quality of the pencil drawing, of the chalk drawing, of the drawing that is washed. When, in these last words, I tried to indicate Lithography's natural limits, and said, practically, that its main function was to produce "battalions" where ordinary drawing must produce but "single spies," I said nothing that need encourage readers to suppose that its process lay perfectly at the command of every draughtsman, and that the first-comer, did he know well how to draw, would get from the lithographic stone every quality the stone could yield. And this being so, it can surprise no one if in a chapter on the Revival of Lithography I give conspicuous place to the young men who have really bigged at it, rather than to the possibly more accomplished, the certainly famous artists who have drawn just lately on tracing-paper, and who have been able to demonstrate recognition of the fact that now a hundred years have passed since Alois Senefelder invented the method which, half a century later, Hulmann did something to perfect. Mr. C. H. Shannon—pre-eminently noticeable among these younger men—has been discussed already. We will look now at the work of another of them—Mr. Will Rothenstein, whose mind, whose hand-work, is conspicuously unlike Mr. Shannon's, in that, though he can be romantic, he can scarcely be poetic. A vivid realism is his characteristic; and, with that vivid realism, romance, pantyque, quipre—either or all—may find themselves in company; but poetry, hardly. Mr. Rothenstein—as there is some reason, perhaps, 259 FINE PRINTS telling the collector—is not only young, but extremely young. His series of Oxford lithographs were wrought, most of them, when he was between twenty and two-and-twenty years old. It was an audacious adventure, with youth for its excue. For this set of Oxford portraits was to be the abstract of the Oxford of a day. In it, Professors and Heads of Houses are—men who for perhaps a generation remain in their places—but in it, too, are athletes, engaging undergraduates, lads whose achievements may become tradition, but whose places know no such name. The first part of the "Oxford Characters"—that is the proper name of it—appeared in June 1893. In it, is the portrait of that great Christ Church boating man, W. L. Fletcher, and a portrait of Sir Henry Acland, for which another more august-looking rendering of the same head and figure was after a while substituted. Again, there is an admirable vision of Max Müller—Mr. Rothenstein's high-water mark, perhaps, in that which he might probably suppose to be the humble art of likenes-taking. Quite outside the charmed Oxford life are the subjects of some of Mr. Rothenstein's generally piquant portraits. There is the portrait of Emile Zola, for instance. I never saw the man—this may or may not be a torrid view of him. Maybe it is, but certainly the face with its set lips and hollow cheeks, is cleverly rendered, though in such rendering we may fancy not so much the author of the Faute de l'Abbé Mouret and of the Page d'Amour, as the author 230 LITHOGRAPHS of Nana and of La Venteur de Paris. Again, there is a portrait, at once refined and forcible, of that great gentleman, path-breaking novelist, and dainty connoisseur, Edmond de Goncourt, elderly, but with fires unquenched in the dark, piercing eyes, and the great decoration, so to say, of snow-white hair. Then again, the pretty, pleasing lady, the fresh young thing with her big bonnet—the lady seen full-face, her lips drawn so tenderly. Such flesh and blood as hers, had the Millemant of Congreve. If sometimes in them the anatomy of the figures is expressed insufficiently, these works are at least executed with well-acquired knowledge of the effects to which Lithography best lends itself. It can escape no one that, whatever be their faults, the artist utters in them a note that is his own. To trace, with fairness, the revival of Lithography, even in England only, it should be mentioned that a generation after the achievements of Samuel Prout—his records of architecture in Flanders and in Germany—and the somewhat overrated performances of Hand- ing, the members of the Hogarth Sketching Club made one night, at the house of Mr. Way, the elder—the date was the 15th of December, 1874—a set of drawings on the stone. They must be rare, now. Indeed the only copy I have seen was that shown to me at the printing-house in Wellington Street. One of the best was Charles Green's drawing of two men—artists, both of them, or of oster rank—one of them lighting his pipe. The hand is excellently modelled: the light and 391 FINE PRINTS shade of the whole subject has crispness and vigour. Sir James Linton contributed a *Corollary* subject, in something more than outline, though not fully expressed—and yet it is beautifully drawn. Mr. Coke sent a *Masseure of the Innocents*, classic and charming in contour; while to look at the *Sir Galahad* of Mr. E. J. Gregory is to recall to mind completely the great Romantic Gregory of that early day. In the Paris Exhibition of Lithographs and in that at Mr. Dunthorne's, there have figured a group of subjects done lately by well-known Academicians and others, and printed with such striking effects—by or under the close direction of Mr. Gouding, that famous printer of etchings, who now, it seems, has the laudable ambition of rivalling, as a printer of lithographs, the great house of Way. He has his own methods. The original work is of extremely various quality. Much of it was produced somewhat hurriedly. I do not mean that the drawings were done rapidly, or that it would have been wrong if they had been ; for, obviously, the rapid drawing of the capable is often as fine as the slowest, and has the interest of a more urgent message. I mean that they were done, for the most part, by those not versed, as yet, in such secrets as Lithography possesses. Yet, coming often from artists of distinction, many of them have merits. Not much is finer than a girl's head, by Mr. Watts. It is most "in tune," and it is scarcely too much to say of it that it is strong and mythic of Leonardo—anything of Holbein's, one might as easily declare, 232 LITHOGRAPHS did not Holbein's name suggest, along with strength, a certain austerity which Mr. Watts modestly avoids. There is a graceful figure-drawing by Lord Leighton, who was interested in the new movement, but who was far too sensible to set vast store by what—as I remember that he wrote to tell me—was the only lithographic drawing he had ever executed. There are strong studies by Sargent—rather brutal perhaps in light and shade—of male models, whose partial nudity there is little to render interesting. We are brought back then to the work of artists not Academicians at all—men some of them comparatively young in years, but oh! in a faithful following of the lines on which the craft of Lithography most properly moves. There is Mr. C. J. Watson, for instance. The personal note—which, I cannot conceal—it estemest most of all, and most of all must revel—in—the personal note may be, with him, a little wanting; but thorough craftsman he undoubtedly is. And by Mr Oliver Hall, one of the most delightful of our amateur etchers, who as either has been trained in the place where this is a vision of those grey swerving valleys—"Walden"—with trees only in middle distance, or in the remote background. In it, and perhaps even more especially in that quite admirable lithograph, "The Edge of the Moor," we recognise that way of looking at the world which we know in the etchings; but the intelligence and sensitiveness of the artist have suffered him, or led him rather, to modify the work: to properly adapt it to the newer medium. "The Edge of the Moor" 253 FINE PRINTS is, I have implied, quite masterly; and then again there is a tree-study in which Mr. Hall recalls those broad and massive, yet always elegant sketches made by the great Cotman, in the latest years, generally, of a life not too prolonged. Again, among fine lithographs exhibited or not exhibited, there is, by Mr. Raven Hill, *The Opener-Barrage*—a marvellously vivid, faithful study of "Over the Water" (or of Dean's Yard, it may be) by night—and the equally monomaniacal, sentimental vision of *The Bathing* with the rotund Mrs. Hether, and more than the expressive essence of the late Indian—a baby lost, one must avow, to all angelic dreams, and set on carnal things. Perhaps Mr. George Thomson's finest lithograph remains the *Brentford Egot*, though there is charm of movement in at least one figure-study. By Mr. Charles Sainton there is a luxurious head of just the type one might expect from the author of silver-points promptly seductive and popular. Mr. Walter Sickert's work, whether you like it or not, at least has, visibly, its source in personal observation and deliberate principle. By M. Théodore Roussel there are a whole group of lithographs, dainty and delightful, exquisite and fresh—with so much of his own in them, as well as some-thing, of course, of Mr. Whistler's. By the side of his *Scene on the River* quaint Battersea or Chelsea bit, I take it—place one of these two audilities, with his supple unity place his *Opera Club*. The man is a born artist—he not only draws but sees, sees with 254 LITHOGRAPHS refinement and distinction. And there must come a time when Rousseau's work will be appreciated far more widely. By Mr. Jacob Hood there is a spirited elderly man's portrait, and an Idyll—a Classical or an Arcadian pas de quatre—of singular, unsought charm. By Mr. Corbett, the semi-classical landscape painter, there is a nude study—a torso, magnificently modelled. By Mr. Solomon Solomon there is a Frau, correct in draughtsmanship of course; nor wanting in dramatic quality, for it is not the undressed woman of too many students, but Aphrodite herself—a Venus, à sa proie attachée." And lastly—since I cannot merely catalogue—there is Mr. Aning Bell, who has bestowed on us enjoyable designs—book-plates hors ligne indeed, so charming are they in their reticence and grace and measured beauty. In Lithography we may be thankful for the Taitterian grace of his "Bacchus" (Gerl. "Why Tuinig?")—a sketch. Because Classical without austerity—provokingly Modern, and yet endowed with the legitimate and endless fascination of Style. And now, to end with, it seems advisable to say something on the very practical matter of the acquisition of lithographs by the collector, and on their cost. The money value of the lithograph is most uncertain. When the lithograph appears in a popular magazine—the actual lithograph, remember; no merely photographic reproduction of it—is, on publication, valued at a couple of shillings, or at a shilling, or as in the 235 FINE PRINTS extraordinary case of publication in the extinct *Whirlwind*, even at a penny. The prices I have named are, most of them at least, absurd; but on the other hand the dealer's price—sometimes the original artist's price—for an impression, is wont to be excessive. A lithograph can be printed—as magazine issue suffices to show—in considerable numbers. Nothing restricts it as the ordinary unetched etching is restricted: still less, as the dry-point is restricted. There is no reason, except the scantiness of the public demand, why it should not be issued in considerable numbers, and that at the average booth. Nor is the printing costly. Nor has the drawing on stone or transfer-paper involved anything more of labour, skill, or genius, than is involved in the preparation of a single chapter of a fine novel—a single paragraph in a fine short story. Yet while the novel sells probably at six shillings, and the whole short story (and other short stories along with it) sells, very likely, at three-and-sixpence, the impression of a lithograph—unless, as I have said before, it be published in a magazine—is sold seldom for less than a guinea. The Fine Art Society asked something like three guineas apiece, I think, for the lithographs of Mr. Whistler, when it exhibited them. I mentioned the circumstance to a man who was interested in the question, both as artist and connoisseur. "You do not want to vulgare lithographs," he said; "by exhibiting too many impressions." I wonder how many impressions of Gray's "Elegy" have been issued? And how many of the "Ode to Duty"? And I wonder whether Words-236 LITHOGRAPHS worth and Gray have been “vulgarised,” because the fruit of their genius has been widely diffused? About five shillings seems a reasonable price for a lithograph issued in our time. When draughtsmen (and their publishers) realise this, they will confer a boon upon themselves, and will do no injury whatever to us who admire them. And until they do realise it, the collecting of lithographs will go on only within a limited circle—a circle of rich people, possibly, but most likely idle, and therefore probably, at bottom, unappreciative. Indeed such a circle cannot be said to consist, truly, of “collectors.” They will be “purchasers,” rather—which is a different affair. 237 --- APPENDIX 1 CERTAIN WOODCUTS Though when this volume was first planned, it was supposed that in its regular course it might embrace a chapter upon Woodcuts, nature consideration and the progress of the art, I resorted to me the usefulness of treating either by my own hand or a qualified hand the theme of Woodcarts, at any important length; and in adding here a Note on certain examples of that ancient art, it is convenient that I should say plainly why the matter has been omitted. First, then, treatment exhaustive, or adequate, could only have been supplied by some one other than myself: my own knowledge of Woodcuts being merely that of an outsider who cannot withhold a measure of interest from any development which may be made of them. The assumed presence of an enthusiast in the particular thing--would have been at least to deprive the book of that unity of sentiment which comes of unalloyed authorship, and would have created a sense of unreality, especially in a book moreover, although a complete Guide to Old Prints must include of necessity many words about woodcuts, it was doubtful whether the subject of "Fine Prints" involved even a mention of them. I mean, it ought not to be thought that all woodcuts are, because fine in their design--and the design of the giant Durer was given to some of them--are in the very nature of things scarcely "fine" in execution. To say that the best recall the utterance of noble sentiment by rough and unseemly tongue, is not for me nominal to minimise their steling. 21 FINE PRINTS worth. Lastly, too, the collectors of them—in England at least—are scanty in the extreme. When—one may ask—do they appear at Sotheby's? As objects of research, they seem to me to have no raison d'être, unless they had their day when only the Past was thought interesting. But it has been one of the objects of this book to acknowledge specially the interest of more modern achievement, and not call to contemporary genius only "talent," until it is evident that long after being dead—and dead long—since—may be accorded its due. But I should like to tell the beginner in the study of prints one or two quite elementary things—as, for instance, that the majority of the woodcuts of old woodcuts are German; that not a few of the earlier masters of copperplate engraving carried out upon the wood-block certain of their designs; that in the days of Bewick, the English woodcut was nothing less well adapted than book illustration at all events to the rendering of Bewick's homely and rustic themes. And so one might go on—but after all, book illustration is no part of one's theme. Let it just be mentioned about Bewick—hefore—there are English woodcuts for the earlier masters—that the rarest and most valuable is the most important of his works (not, I think, the most fas- cinating) is the piece known as the Chillingham Ball. When only a few impressions had been taken from it, the original block spilt. Hence the print entirely; and in its scarcity we see a part at least of its atten- tiveness. A passage in the last annual report made by Mr. Sidney Colvin to the Trustees of the British Museum, his equator as Keeper of the Prints—reminds me of a splendid gift made lately to the nation by the munificence of Mr. William Mitchell: a gift which the possession of money alone, and of a generous intention, could not have 285 APPENDIX empowered him to make; only deep knowledge, and real diligence in the art of collecting, made the thing possible. Through Mr. Mitchell's gift there passes into the store-house of the Department of Prints this connois- sur's collection of Germania and other woodcuts, including a series of 150 cuts by Lucas Cranach, complete, and "quite unrivalled." Mr. Calvin says, "in quality and condition." The whole array includes 1290 early woodcuts, chiefly, as will be seen, German, and consti- tuted for the most part (about 1300) by anonymous Germania cuts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; 151 single cuts by Albert Dürer, together with the Little Passion (set of proofs), the Life of the Virgin (first state, without text), and the Great Passion, the Life of the Virgin, and the Last Supper (with the original text, edition of 1511); 63 by Hans Schäufelein, including 78 proofs of two series of the Passion; 18 by Hans Spring- inkle, including 14 proofs of illustrations to "Hortulus Amoris," 7 by Wolfgang Huber; 30 by Hans Baldung; 2 by Johann Eckardt; 2 by Hans Holbein; 2 by Lucas Cranach, including an unique impression of the St. George, printed on gold on a blue ground; 60 by Albert Albrecht; 40 by Hans Burgkmair; 312 by or attributed to Hans Baldung; 9 by Urs Graf; 12 by Heinrich Holz- muller; 16 by Hans von Leyden; 6 by Anton van Worms; 16 by Lucas van Leyden; 6 attributed to Geoffrey Troy; one attributed to Marie de Medicis; the large view of Venice by Jacques de Barbaray, first state; 9 by Nicolas Boudan; 2 by L. H., with the head. As an inspection of this collection shows at the Museum Room, constitutes, at first hand, an introduction to the study of an ancient, quaint, and pregnant art. So much had I written when there came to me a note from Mr. O'Gallagher, curiously confounding, on the whole, the view that I had taken up to the small piece placed by 243 **FINE PRINTS** Woodcuts, generally, in the scheme of the modern collector. It is not, however, so much on this account that I print the note here, as because it contains one or two particular facts which have been brought to my attention by me, and which may be of interest. “The history of Woodcuts,” says Mr. O. Gutenkunst—instructing my ignor- ance—begins, as you know, correctly and with printed books in which the woodcut took the place of the mini- ature; a fact which Mr. Durand has shown in his book on the Fifteenth Century the Woodcut was thus confined to illus- tration, and belongs far more to the bibliophile than to the Print-collector. Fate ‘Tibbia Panzeran’ and similar works —in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands—Block Books, Imitations of Manuscripts, and other things, are express- ing as a distinct art by itself—then and now appreciated mode of expression of the artist—is the first half of the Sixteenth Century. Mr. Gutenkunst then cites to me works by masters whose work is known to us all—such as Dürer, Cranach, Holbein, Altdorfer, Bresamer,” he says: “Fine specimens of these men’s work, particularly per- traits, and when printed in one, two, or more colours, are now, and always must have been, exceedingly rare, with prices varying from 500 to 1000 dollars each for fine specimens. The decadence begins with Just Amman, for instance, in Germany, and Andreae, say, in Italy, where the works of earlier, and more particularly the masters who lived after 1530 are very rare indeed; they are even reproduced in chiar-oscuro.” With the exception perhaps of the remarkable impressions in Mr. Mitchell’s collection, Mr. O. Gutenkunst asserts that the finest specimens always were most appreciated in Germany, and adds: “There has ever been more interest taken in Woodcuts by German collectors than by any others.” 244 BIBLIOGRAPHY ALVIN, Louis. Catalogue Raisonné de l'Œuvre des trois frères Jean, Jerome et Antoine Wierix. 8vo. 1865. ANDERSEN, Augustus. Der Deutsche Peintre-Graveur, oder die Deutsche Maler als Kupferstichsammler. Two vols. 1864-73. APELL, Aloys. Handbuch für Kupferstichsammler. 1880. AUMÜLLER, E. Les Petits Maîtres Allemands. Barthel et Schmid Berlin. 8vo. 1881. Les Petits Maîtres Allemands. Jacques Bineck. 8vo. 1893. BARTECH, Adam. Le Peintre-Graveur, and Supplement. 22 vols. 1803-43. BERDAL, Henri. Les Graveurs du Dix-Neuvième Siècle. 4to. BLANC, Charles. L'Artiste Complet de Rembrandt. Two vols. 8vo. BOUCHARD, Emmanuel. Les Graveurs Français de la Dix-Huitième Siècle. Six volumes at present, viz.:— Nicolas Lavrétine, 1875. Pierre Antoine Baudoin, 1875. Jean Baptiste Simon Chardin, 1876. Nicolas Lancret, 1877. Augustin Pajou, 1879. Jean Michel Moreau, le jeune, 1882. BOURCART, Gustave. Les Estampes du Dix-Huitième Siècle. 1889. 245 FINE PRINTS BRYAN, MICHAEL. Dictionary of Painters and Engravers. 8vo. 1865. Supplement, by Outley. 8vo. 1886. A New Edition, by Graves. 8vo. 1884–85. CHAUVENIERE, ÉMILE DELLIER de la, et LOUIS LAVOYAT. Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Artistes de l'École Française. Two vols. 1835. COHEN, HENRI. Guide de l'Amateur des Livres à Vignette, du XVIIe Sicle. 1873. A New Edition. 1880. CUMBERLAND, GEORGE. An Essay on the Utility of Collecting the Best Works of the Ancient Engravers of the Italian School. 1832. Daniels, Frederick R. Catalogue Raisonné of the Engraved Works of Richard Cosway, R.A. With a Memoir of Cosway by Sir Philip Currie. 1850. DELAROBE, LE VICOTRE HENRI. La Gravure en Italie avant Marc Antoine. 1882. Le Département des Estampes à la Bibliothèque Nationale. Didot, A. FURIN. Histoire de Gravure sur Bois. 8vo. 1863. Les Graveurs de Portrait en France. 8vo. 1875–77. Les Drevet: Catalogues Raisonnés de leur Œuvre. 1857. Dobson, Austin. Life and Works of William Hogarth. 1891. Drake, Sir W. R. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Francis Seymour Haden. 8vo. 1880. DUCHESNE AIME. Essai sur les Niales. 8vo. 1826. Duplessis, George. De la Gravure de Portraits en France. 8vo. 1875. 246 BIBLIOGRAPHY DUFLESSIS, GEORGES (and BOUCHOT). Dictionnaire des Mor- ques et Monogrammes de Graveurs. 8vo. 1886. DEUTOT, ÉCOUENÉ. Manuel de l'Amateur d'Estampes. 8vo. 1881-88. — L'Œuvre Complet de Rembrandt. Three vols. 4to. 1883-85. FAIGN, LOUIS. Catalogue of Woollett's Engraved Works. 8vo. 1883. Catalogue of Faithorne's Engraved Works. Collector's Marks. 4to. 1883. FISHER, RICHARD. Early History of Engraving in Italy. 1886. GELPIN, WILLIAM. An Essay on Prints. 8vo. 1781. GONSE, LOUIS. L'œuvre de Jules Jacquetot. 1876. HADEN, FRANCIS SYKES. About Etching. 8vo. 1787. Etched Work by Rembrandt. A Monograph. 1879. HAMPTON, PETER GRIEVE. Etching and Etchers. 1848. A Second Edition, revised. 1880. A Third Edition. 1880. HAMILTON, EDWARD. A Catalogue Raisonné of the En- graved Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds. 1874. A Second Edition. HORNE, HENRY. An Illustrated Catalogue of En- gravings, Portraits and Fancy Subjects by Gainsborough and Romney. 1891. HYMAN, HENRY. Histoire de la Gravure dans l'Ecole de Rubens. 8vo. 1879. — L'Œuvre de Lucas Vesterman. 1895. JACKSON, JOHN. A Treatise on Wood Engraving. 8vo. 1853. A Second Edition, enlarged. 1861. LE BLANC, Manuel de l'Amateur d'Estampes. Two vols. 8vo. 1954. 247 FINE PRINTS LE BLASC. Catalogue de l'Œuvre de J.G.Willa. 8vo. 1847. Catalogue de l'Œuvre de Robert Strange. 8vo. 1848. LXII, Max. Wendel von Ohnitzu. 1859. Der Meister der Liebes Garten. 1853. The Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet (Chalcographic Society). 1860. LYMANIE, L. de. L'Oeuvre de Gilles Demarteau Fainé, Graveur du Roi. 1895. LIEPMANN, P. Der Italienische Holzschnitt. 8vo. 1885. The Art of Wood Engraving in the XVth Century (English edition of the above work). Lorter, Rev. W. J. A Catalogue of the Prints of Hans Sebald Beham. 1890. MADERLEY, J. The Print Collector. 1844. MALASER, A. P., and Thibaudet. Catalogue Raisonné de l'Oeuvre Gravé et Lithographique d'Alphonse Legros. 8vo. 1877. MARSAULT, JULIUS. Engravings of Ornament. 8vo. 1869. MAURICE, EUGENIE. Recherches sur la Vis et les Ouvrages de Jean-Baptiste Collet. Two vols. 1860. MEYER, JULIUS. Allelegmene Kunstler Lexicon. MIDDLETON-WAKE, Rev. C. H. Catalogue of the Etched Work of Rembrandt. 1878. NICHOLSON, R. George Moirand. 1896. OPPEL, W. Y. History of Engraving. Two vols. 4to. 1836. PAPELLON, J. B. M. Traité Historique et Pratique de la Gravure en Bois. 1766. PASTEUR, G. Hollar Catalogues. 8vo. 1558. PASSAVANT, J. D. Le Peintre-Graveur. Six vols. 8vo. 1860-64. PYE, John, and J.L ROGERE Notes on the "Liber Studiorum" of Turner. 8vo. 1872. 248 BIBLIOGRAPHY RAWLINGSON, W. G. Descriptive Catalogue of Turner's "Liber Studiorum." 8vo. 1878. REGERATE, S. Dictionary of Artists of the English School. A New Edition. 1878. ROSENBERG, Asolf. S. and B. Beham. 1875. ROVINSKI, Dmitri. L'Éuvre grave de Rembrandt. Reproductions des Planches originales dans tous leurs États successifs. 1890. SCOTT, WILLIAM BELL. Albert Dürer, his Life and Works. 1869. The Little Masters. SMITH, J. CHALSTON. British Mezzotint Portraits. Five vols. 8vo. 1573-83. SMITH, WILLIAM. Corinthus Vicher. 8vo. 1864. TAYLOR, JAMES. Albert Dürer. English translation. Two vols. 1882. TEFFIN, W. B. English Mezzotint Portraits. 8vo. 1883. WEEDMORE, FREDERICK. Meryon, and Meryon's "Paris," with a Descriptive Catalogue of the Artist's Work. 8vo. 1872. A Second Edition, revised. 8vo. 1892. WILKES'S FISHING: A Study and a Catalogue. 8vo. 1886. Ritching in England. 1895. WILLSHEE, W. H. An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Prints. 1874. Second Edition. Two vols. 1877. Early Prints in the British Museum. Two vols. 1879-83. WILSON, J. ("An Amateur"). A Descriptive Catalogue of the Prints in the Collection of the Royal Society of Arts, London, 1854. WOLTMANN, Holbein und seine Zeit. Two vols. 1866-68. WORNUM, R. N. Life of Holbein. 1867. 219 I N D E X Abade de Notre-Dame, 72, 73, 74 Adam and Eve, 148, 149, 160 Amenica, 150, 151, 152 Apocryphal, 101, 104 Adlsgewer, 15, 154, 155, 156 Ahlberth, 153 Austenbrau, Verse of 53 Aztecus, 153 Angélico, Maio, 135 António da Branca, 160 André de Sá, 160 Arche de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72 Arque de Noé (Nóes), 72. Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, 8 Barriga, Francisco, BARRIGA FRANCISCO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DAKO - DOK INDEX Buffon and Two Couples, 151 Burtly, P., 82, 83 Butlerian, 15 Calm, A, 203 Cemargo, Mlle, 175 Carnegie, J., 173, 181 Cesareo Venetia, 37, 39 Chapman, W., 169 Carrie's State, 251 Carlo, 174 Cardenelle, Mrs., 219 Carruthers, Mrs., 174 Carruthers, Mrs., in Storage Weather, 37, 38 Cerbon, Saint, 102, 167 Cerbon, Saint, in Storage Cerbon, Saint, in Storage Cerbon, Saint, in Storage Chasin Pier, Brighton, 153 Chassier, Mme., 209 Chatterie, Sir Thomas, 46 Chatterie's House, 46 Chauvire Espagne', 127 Chauvire Espagne', 177-180 Chauveur le Fiché, 154 Chauveur le Fiché, 154 Chauveur le Fiché, 154 Chiffre d'Assise, 193 Christ Heating the Sick, 26 Christ Heating the Sick, H. H., 106 Christopher, Sainte, 142 Clancy's House, 208 Clarke, Mary Constantine, 201 Clarke's House, 208 Clarence, George, 225 Clarence's House, 208 Clint, 198 Clint's House, J., 205, 206 Cost of Arms with the Corky', 143 Cost of Arms with the Corky', 143 Cost of Arms with the Corky', 143 Cost of Arms with the Corky', 143 Cost of Arms with the Corky', 143 Cost of Arms with the Corky', 143 Corbett's House, 251 Corbett's House, 251 Corbett's House, 251 Corbett's House, 251 INDEX Ehlichek, 13 Edge of the Forest, 135 Edge of the Forest, 203 Elkemeyer, 187 Elms, 183 Elliot, J., 216 Ellis, F.S., 118 Eldersley's Journal for Cyther, 173 Empire Picture Book, 205 "England and Wales," 205 Episodes, 205 Extrait du Conseil des Cognacais, 80 Fayet, 205 Fayet de la Rue, Prop. wards, 94 Ferrara, 205 Erich Mordel, 107 Elbassan, 205 Elbeau, 205 Elude de Jeanne Fille, 98 Emanuél, 205 Ennui de Dantes, 175 Evans, 205 Faber, junior, 212 Farley, R.J., 205 Farrar's Dictionary of Art, 101, 115, 121 Fantin-Latour, 205 Farm behind Serdarchiv, 126 Fernandez de la Torre, 205 Ferrow's Shade, 219 France à l'Est, 205 Fight for the Standard, 154 Flaubert, Gustave, 34, 47, 57, 106, 135, 143 Fishel, H., 205 Fisherman's Grocery Outing, 219 Fluggelette, Y., 206 Foray to Paris, 206 Forer Nubel House, 183 Forgiveness of Sinners, 206 Forsberg, S., 206 Fredrickson, L., 206 Gambelhorst's Calendar of Events in the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ Jesus Christ and of the Year of Our Lord Christ JesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristandoftheYearofOurLordChristJesusChristianesfthecornersofthesquare,"88, 89,96,97, Harpsonge,"98, Hogarth,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollard,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"99, Hollander,"100 INDEX Holy Island Cathedral, 203 Hood, Jacob, 153, 254 Hogarth, William, 186 Horni, Percy, 216 Horsley, John, 129, 120 Horsburgh, 37 Hubert, Saint, 147 Hugues, 147 Hulmardam, 229 Humphrey, Bishop, 57 Hughghnian, 121 Humphrey, Sir Thomas, 57 Hyman, Henry, 50 Hyde, Sir John, 197 Ivanhoe, 197 Jehovah's Witnesses, 203 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 130 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste de, 254 Lange "Paul," The. 254 Lansdowne. See. 254 Lancaster. See. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254 Lebrun. 254254 INDEX Brembrandt, Farn., A, 133 Béte d'Amour, 96 Béziers, 108, 109 Bisbee, 125, 216 "Richmondshire," 206 Bispham, 207 "Bivers of France," 207 Boad in Yorkshire, 211 Booth, J., 196 Boyes, J., 196 Bowles, J., 196 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 212 Bowman, 213 INDEX "Yenice," Tha, 112, 117 Frasse and Cupid, 154 Fugitive with Four Cujids, 154 Talbot's Carriage, 154 Virgins by the City Wall, 109, 147 Virgin and Child with a Seraphim, 138 Clothes, 143 Virgin and Child with the Monop, 148 Virgin with Long Hair, 146 Volksma, 146 Vood-rouen, Lucas, 40 Vestments, 146 Wakon, Q. J., 253 Watson, 171-172, 177, 181 Way, T. R., 222 Whitaker, 223 Watermaster Bridge, 119, 121 Whitaker, 223 Whitaker, 100, 107-121, 222-224 Whitaker, John; Whittaker; 103 Whitaker, 37 Whitaker; Sir David, 67 Wilkinson, William; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Wilkinson; Woman with the Arrow, The, 63 Farnouah, 206 Zamoraum, 107, 121 Zoan Altars, 68 THE END Printed by Ballantyne, Hambly & Co. Edinburgh & London 03-18-2023 15:56:47 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. DEAC & MORGAN DISCHARGE NOV 13 1999 OUT 24 RECD U-DRAW JAN 26 1982 RECD EDITOR JAN 26 1982 4 07 3 1158 00629 9613 10 585 2536 AA 000610464 0 U.S. POSTAL SERVICE A black and white photograph of a person's face, possibly a portrait.