Frederick Wedmore

“ An initiator in his own generation, and ever tastefully experimental, Whistler no doubt has found enjoyment in the variety of the mediums he has worked in, and in the variety of subjects he has brilliantly tackled. The absence of concentration in the Whistlerian temperament, the lack of great continuity of effort, may probably prove a drawback to his taking exactly the place as a painter of oil pictures, which, in other circumstances, his genius and his taste would most certainly have secured for him. In the future Whistler must be accounted, in oil painting, a master exquisite but rare. ”

“ Doing excellent things continually through all the ’seventies, when he was in late middle age—gaining scope in colour, having now so many notes—faithful no longer wholly to his amazing range of subtle greys, now blithe and silvery, now nobly deep—sending to the Salon great canvases, and to the few enlightened people who would buy them of him the toile or panel of most moderate size on which he best of all expressed himself—Boudin was yet not acceptable to the public or to the fashionable dealer. ”

“ Nor, of course, had the youngest of the three Jameses—the one with whom, as far as artistic matters are concerned, the family dies out—either the good or evil fortune to be without contemporaries of conspicuous talent. He must have known both the impulse and the depression that may come from rivalry. In the very middle of his uneventful and unillustrious career, the best of the line engravers after Turner—the engravers of his landscape—were doing, for the applause of a later generation, their most exquisite work. ”

“ The art of Méryon is completely misconceived when his etchings are spoken of as views of Paris. They are often “views,” but they are so just so far as is compatible with their being likewise the visions of a poet and the compositions of an artist. It was an epic of Paris that Méryon determined to make, coloured strongly by his personal sentiment, and affected here and there by the occurrences of the moment—in more than one case, for instance, he hurried with particular affection to etch his impression of some old-world building which was on the point of destruction. ”

“ BASIRE, JAMES (1730–1802) ; BASIRE, JAMES (1769–1822) ; BASIRE, JAMES (1796–1869) , represent four generations of a family more or less known as engravers; but as three of the four men who practised their art bore the same Christian name, and as longevity allowed the life and work of one to overlap that of another or of the rest in a remarkable manner, it is with the utmost difficulty that the student traces their careers, and it is better to recognise frankly the impossibility of assigning with assurance to each member of the family his proper share in labour or reputation. ”

“ Nearly every etching in the series is an instance of technical skill, but even the technical skill is exercised most happily in those etchings which have the advantage of impressive subjects, and which the collector willingly cherishes for their mysterious suggestiveness or for their pure beauty. Of these, the Abside de Notre Dame is the general favourite; it is commonly held to be Méryon’s masterpiece. Light and shade play wonderfully over the great fabric of the church, seen over the spaces of the river. As a draughtsman of architecture, Méryon was complete ”

“ An art in which so much might be mechanical ceased to be due to the inspiration of individual taste, and in Basire's own case the skilled apprentice at this time—and later the son—had, it is fair to presume, an unacknowledged share in the labour. ”

“ Mr Whistler's pictures have as a chief source of their attractiveness those mental qualities of alertness and emancipation. Charm of colour and of handling enhance the hold which they obtain upon such people of taste as may be ready to receive them. There are but very few of them, however, at least very few oil pictures, when one considers the number of years since the artist began to labour; and one notable fact must be at once understood—the admitted masterpieces in painting belong almost entirely to the earlier time. ”

“ Among learners' work, done for his own advantage, are to be counted some studies after the Dutch etchers such as Zeeman and Adrian van de Velde. Having proved himself a surprising copyist, he proceeded to labour of his own, and began that series of etchings which are the greatest embodiments of his greatest conceptions—the series called “Eaux-fortessur Paris.” These plates, executed from 1850 to 1854, are never to be met with as a set; they were never expressly published as, a set. But they none the less constituted in Méryon’s mind an harmonious series. ”

“ Like his forefathers, he was a busy man, but much of his life fell upon a time when antiquarian record and research were less generously encouraged than in the older days, and he seems to have been personally disposed to wield a less severe burin than that whose employment had made the fame and secured the competence of the earlier members of his house. ”

“ Sometimes, as in the case of La Morgue, it is they who tell the story of the picture. Sometimes, as in the case of La Rue des Mauves Garçons—with the two passing women bent together in secret converse—they at least suggest it. And sometimes, as in L’Arche du Pont Notre Dame, it is their expressive gesture and eager action that give vitality and animation to the scene. ”

“ On March 1793 the firm of Boyd, Benfield, & Co. was established in London. Boyd, as the principal partner, contributed 60,000l. to the common stock, and his 'name, connections, and exertions' soon carried it to a great 'pitch of celebrity.' He was 'zealously attached to Mr. Pitt, and enjoyed his confidence for many years' (advertisement to 2nd edition of Letter to Pitt) . He was employed in contracting to the amount of over thirty millions for large government loans, and for some time was very prosperous. ”

“ A pupil nominally of Glaize, but more really of Ribera, of the great Flemings and of Chardin, Théodule Ribot had yet conspicuously his own noble and personal vision, his own intensity of, feeling and rich sobriety of performance. Beginning to work seriously at art when he was no longer extremely young, and dying before he was extremely old, Ribot crowded into some thirty or thirty-five years of active practice very varied achievements ”

“ This was called forth by a pamphlet on the effects of the suspension of cash payments in 1797, and was intended to prove 'that the increase of banknotes is the principal cause of the great rise in the price of commodities and every species of exchangeable value' (p. 7) . ”

“ In 1886 he became president of the Royal Society of British Artists (a title at which afterwards he scoffed) ; and he took a leading part later in founding the International Art Society, of which he was the first president. ”

“ He was beginning to be himself by 1864 or 1865—that was the first of such periods of his as may be accounted good—and, though not at that time so fully a master of transient effects of weather as he became later, he began then to paint with a success genuinely artistic the scenes of the harbour and the estuary, which no longer lost vivacity by deliberate and too obvious completeness. ”

“ That was a time at which the romantic outlines of the Norman coast engaged Isabey, and the green wide valleys of the inland country engaged Troyon; and Troyon and Isabey, and Millet too, came to the shop at Havre. Young Boudin found his desire to be a painter stimulated by their influence; his work made a certain progress, and the interest taken in the young man resulted in his being granted for a short term of years by the town of his adoption a pension, that he might study painting. ”

“ One other medium taken up by Whistler must now be mentioned. His lithographs—his drawings on the stone in many instances, and in others his drawings on that “lithographic paper” which with some people is the easy substitute for the stone to-day—are perhaps half as numerous as his etchings. ”

“ They are drawn more with an eye to grace than to academic correctness. But they are not “landscape-painter’s figures” at all when what we are concerned with is not the method of their representation but the purpose of their introduction. ”

“ One or two of the minor English subjects of the “Twenty-six Etchings”—those done after the artist's return from Venice—give indications of the phase reached more clearly in certain little prints executed a few years later, and, with perhaps one exception, never formally published. “Fruit Shop,” “Old Clothes Shop,” and “Fish Shop, busy Chelsea,” belong to this time. ”

“ His drawings were sometimes “complete in themselves,” and sometimes fragmentary but powerful preparations for painted canvases. The etchings, of which there are only about a couple of dozen, are of the middle period of his practice; they show a diversity of method as well as of theme ”