Sir Frederick Wedmore

“ 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—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. ”

“ And here and there, in brief suggestive studies of contemporary existence, an imaginative light is flashed upon the page, a touch of romance suggested, as where, in the curious little etching of a Bohemian wayfarer—a someone who has lost caste probably, whose pence and whose friends are few—lighting his pipe at a flaring gas-jet over some street bookstall on a Saturday night, you feel that for a moment there has sprung into your vision a fellow-creature with a history, whose mysteriousness you will not solve. ”

“ Yes, it is a purely painter-like quality, the poetry of colours in that more than blameless juxtaposition which is a rare achievement of Art—the poetry of gleaming form, of discreet light, of restful and mysterious shadow—that Henner will live by. The story he illustrates gains nothing in dramatic interest by his treatment of it. His business, even when he paints an ‘Hérodiade,’ is to solace and charm rather than to excite; and the refinement and suavity of his vision may accomplish for us of the Nineteenth Century what David’s music did for the troubled soul of King Saul. ”

“ The years of deterioration and of decay, in which first the artist does but dully 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 is uttered at rare intervals 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 Jacquemart. ”

“ We have etchers amongst us, and clever ones, too, to whom the presence of character in their living models, and in those models’ backgrounds, has been, above all things, precious; to whom the presence of the eccentric has been valuable, and the presence of beauty, superfluous, not to say burdensome. But, with M. Helleu, beauty—beauty of no conventional order, the rapid charm of movement, of expression, of contour—is the inspiring and satisfactory thing. He lives in its intimacy. ”

“ Even at moments when modern Fashion is not in truth at its prettiest, he is able to descry a piquancy in the contemporary hat, and to find a grace in the flutter of flounce 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? ”

“ But when one recognises this, one may remember, too, how the methods acceptable to one age may be ineffective in another. Mrs. Siddons’s epoch was the epoch of the acceptability of Claude’s and David’s art. It was the age of firm contour in draughtsmanship, of composition in painting, of deportment in manners. In manhood, the age admired as ideal what Mr. Turveydrop, some time afterwards, only unwittingly burlesqued. The fire, and genius, and spontaneity of Rachel would speak to us to-day. ”

“ Alive, undoubtedly, to grace of form, fire and vehemence of expression are yet his dominant qualities. With him, as the artistic problem is first conceived, so must it be executed, and it must be executed immediately. His energy is not to be exhausted, but of patience there is a smaller stock. For him, as a rule, no second thought is the wisest; there is no fruitful revision, no going back to-day upon yesterday’s effort; little of careful piecing and patching, to put slowly right what was wrong to begin with. He is the artist of the first impression. ”

“ 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 in his own dream. “Toute une création de poëme et de rêve est sortie de sa tête, emplissant son œuvre de l’élégance d’une vie surnaturelle.” ”

“ Chardin’s figures do not cease to be typical of the race, while they retain the delicate accuracy of personal studies, and betray an untiring reference not to a few models only, but to all the nature he lived amongst. Always without exaggeration, always with directness and a deep simplicity, the self-effacing art of Chardin accomplished its task, writing for us in picture after picture, or print after print, the history of the quietest of refined lives that the Eighteenth Century knew; arresting for us the delicate gesture, in itself so slight, yet so completely revealing ”

“ There is accent about the etching; emphasis, vitality; an atmosphere plays, as it were, amongst the boughs; the tree is not the tree only, but a part of Nature and the day.
Gœthe said to that disciple to whom he most fully unveiled himself,—to the privileged Eckermann,—“All my poems are ‘occasional’ poems.” In that resided their freshness, and Gœthe knew it well. “All my etchings are ‘occasional’ etchings,” could be said by nearly every fine etcher, too wise to set forth upon the picturesque tour with the deliberate resolution to perpetrate particular prints. ”

“ Afterwards, in a series of pastels, it became clear who it was that had seen Venice. It was Mr. Whistler the exquisite colourist, not the exquisite etcher.
Mr. Whistler’s fame as an aquafortist, then, rests chiefly still on his Thames-side work; and, even there, less on the faint agreeable sketches done of later years, though these have their charm, like the better of his painted Nocturnes, than on the work of his first maturity. ”

“ He has dealt with religious story—caring 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 masculine portraiture it does not make itself felt at all. ”

“ For this reason and that, every industrious and thoughtful, as well as every careless, student of pictorial Art, has his own favourites in Portraiture: there is our pride in Reynolds, our joy in Gainsborough, our wonder at the magic of Velasquez, our steady confidence in truth when Holbein is the draughtsman, our grave and brooding satisfaction over the august portraiture of the Venetians. But Rembrandt unites men’s suffrages—carries with him even those who admire most warmly this painter’s unswerving veracity and that one’s fluent grace. ”

“ It is a piece of pure realism—the hideous flounces and more hideous crinolines, the squat figures, the slop-shop fashions, the common faces empty of records. And in this pure and unrelieved realism there is a certain value, if there is no charm. But the pieces to which Legros will owe such fame as the better-judging connoisseurs and critics shall eventually accord him are those in which the artistic instinct and desire of beauty, either of form or of thought, has found some expression. ”

“ Now, with the delightful artist of the day whose eulogium I am slowly making, that is never the case.
Francis James’s fondness for flowers is, in some sense, akin to a woman’s instinctive fondness for everybody’s children. He has joy in their mere life. And it is their life that he paints. And he paints them in their own atmosphere—the sunlight heightening so the key of their colour, or a little rain perhaps has fallen and their life is refreshed. ”

“ To begin with, they are—and in this one respect they resemble Marc Antonios 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 evident that they may be, and yet by no means be criminal. 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 austere and in no captivating, overwhelming beauty, but in its feeble grace, lies its chief virtue. ”

“ They have put matter in its finest light: it has got new dignity. Chardin did this with his peaches, his pears, his big coarse bottles, his copper saucepans, his silk-lined caskets. Jules Jacquemart did it—we shall see in more of detail presently—very specially with the finer work of artistic 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, with his precious vessels of crystal and jade and jasper. ”

“ If Pater himself had been the inventor of the genre,168 or even, perhaps, if he had practised it in any fashion recognisably his own, this piece of delicate and painter-like work—which, as it is, no one with any true appreciation of the graceful can possibly dispraise—would have had a higher rank. As it is, we recognise the dexterous handiwork, the pupil’s strangely complete reception of his master’s spirit; but feel, at the same moment, that Pater is an echo rather than a voice—that his talent glowed only at the fire that Watteau lit. ”

“ Again, and for his further joy, if the collector be but a beginner, or with a purse not deep, he may note that the masterpieces 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 nowadays, 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. ”

“ What is more remarkable—what would be remarkable anywhere—is the perfection of accomplished workmanship, the carrying out to the end, with all the vividness of a sketch, of a conception definite and elaborate from the beginning. The colouring comes as an inheritance from the Venetian—as Watteau’s adaptation of the palette of the supreme decorators. There are many canvases by the master spirit of the French Eighteenth Century larger of touch than this one; there are few more happily intricate or truer to the graceful side of life, in a world finely imagined as well as finely seen. ”

“ 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—do we find he has portrayed, at different ages, his homely, striking, penetrating face. ”

“ Whistler has drawn interiors, and in one of his interiors we note a success second only to the very highest these Dutchmen attained. This is the interior described as The Kitchen. Only the finest, the most carefully printed impressions possess the full charm; but when such an impression presents itself to the eye, the Dutch masters, who have followed most keenly the glow and the gradation of light on chamber-walls, are seen to be almost rivalled. The kitchen is a long and narrow room, at the far end of which, away from the window and the keen light, stand artist and spectator. ”

“ But his work, from end to end, in its serene, deliberate accomplishment, suggests no chances and changes, no personal emotion, and even no actual experience of human life. One says at first, it might have been done at any period; then one recognises perhaps what one may call a modern feeling for the object portrayed; then one thinks of Hollar’s ‘Five Muffs,’ and of Rembrandt’s ‘Shell,’ and remembers that both have a freedom, a delicate skill, akin, after all, to the skill and the freedom in the etchings of Jacquemart. ”

“ 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. ”

“ ALPHONSE LEGROS. Any generation since the brilliant times of Art—since the sixteenth century in Italy, the seventeenth in Holland, the eighteenth in England and in France—has had to deem itself fortunate if it has produced three or four artists of individuality united with large attainment; and it is much to be surmised that no generation will have greater cause than our own to think it has done well if it has produced even as many. ”

“ Henner can perceive character, but it must be conveyed without emphasis. With the palette set as of old, and the schemes of colour such as the ideal work has already accustomed us to, Henner must pursue his task. Perhaps it is the pallor of a thoughtful face of middle age, to be framed in black hair, with an olive background. Perhaps, as in the ‘Créole,’ it is the old Venetian tresses that are to fall richly on the bust that is shining marble, that is gleaming ivory. ”

“ A touch of what appeals to us as a younger naïveté, 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, at once more philosophical and more dramatic, and expressed by a craftsmanship so much more changeful and more masterly—the genius of Albert Dürer dominates. ”

“ Perhaps, without his knowing it, some slight imaginative interest in the lives of Londoners prompted Mr. Whistler, or strengthened his hand, as he recorded the shabbiness that has a history, the slums of the eastern suburb, and the prosaic service of the Thames. Here, and often elsewhere, his work, if it has shown some faults to be forgiven, has shown, in excellence, qualities that fascinate. The Future will forget his failures, to which in the Present there has somehow been accorded, through the activity of friendship or the activity of enmity, a publicity rarely bestowed upon failures at all ”

“ LORD LEIGHTON By the death of Lord Leighton, the Royal Academy loses a great President and England a many-sided artist, who was certainly not far removed from being a great painter. It was more, perhaps, by the combination of so many various qualities of character and talent than by the firm possession of one especial vein of genius, that ‘our dear President, our admirable Leighton’—to use the words most fittingly applied to him by Sir John Millais—had come, of recent years at least, to be distinguished and known. ”

“ 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, Greuze’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? ”

“ It will be much fuller of Art than any drawing which ordinary good fortune is to enable you to get for the same outlay. And I say this as one who loves drawings—as one who, notwithstanding his theories, even ventures to live with a few of them; but, if I have a preference in the matter of collecting—well, I suppose it is for prints.
About a print, every point is interesting. Apart from subject, apart too from technical treatment of the copper, there is the delightful question, How does your own impression compare with other people’s? ”

“ 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—there 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: only one with his perfection—his perfection, I mean, when he was at his best—Bega. ”

“ To institute a perpetual comparison between him and Sir Joshua is to make the sterile blunder that is made when Dickens is pitted against Thackeray, the epic of Copperfield against the satire of Vanity Fair. In each case it was only accident that brought the men into juxtaposition; and as regards Gainsborough, it is rather with Velasquez or Vandyke, or with some French Eighteenth Century Master of familiar grace, that we should compare him. ”

“ Though the value of many of his etchings, as Mr Whistler might himself tell us, consists in the exquisiteness 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 perceive 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. ”

“ Pessimism, it seems to me, can only be excusable in those who are still bowed down by the immense responsibility of youth. It was a great poet, who, writing of one of his peers—a man of mature life—declared of him, not ‘he mopes picturesquely,’ but ‘he knows the world, firm, quiet, and gay.’ To such a writer—only to such a writer—is possible a happy comedy; and possible, besides, a true and an august vision of profounder things! And that is the spirit to which the Short Story, at its best, will certainly return. ”

“ And even a poor man may have a few good Rembrandts, though only quite a rich man can have them in great numbers and of the rarest. Rembrandt is a superb tonic 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. ”

“ Henner, it will be allowed by those who are most qualified to notice, is a great painter of the Nude. The Nude, according as you treat it, can rise to poetic heights and address itself to the refined, or can sink to more than prosaic depths. There is the high and there is the low, and there are many levels for the painter to stay at and live upon between them; and to the real artistic instinct, to the real fineness of taste, in looking at the Nude, there is permitted that immediate ease of judgment and decision by which the work is classed at once, and its motive appraised. ”

“ He learnt the art himself, and himself mezzotinted, with great exquisiteness, 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. ”

“ GAINSBOROUGH AT THE GROSVENOR GALLERY ‘If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire for us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the art, among the very first of that rising name.’ So wrote, in his Fourteenth Discourse, Sir Joshua Reynolds—a lover of pomp and ceremony even in the art of Literature—doing therein ‘untimely justice’ to the merits of his contemporary, whom he survived. ”

“ The St Etienne-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 Méryon, 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 ”

“ He is a painter essentially of the succession of Rembrandt—a master of the arrangement of light and shade—holding his own honourably in the presentation of landscape, but known chiefly, and known on the whole most to his advantage, as a painter of church interiors. His earlier work is in method drier and smaller than his later. The maturity of his genius finds him as broad as Cotman or Dewint. He has the restfulness and dignity of these men when they are at their best. ”

“ But it is not pure realism, for she holds an arrow—suggests some light allegory, as much, save for her imperfections, as some nudity of Titian’s or Tintoret’s—just that touch of the Classic, that one remove from the actual, Rembrandt’s tribute to an art inspired by higher thought, by fancy more elegant, than any that it was the privilege, generally, of the art of Amsterdam to show. ”