“ An accident in the biting apparently is the cause of an aquatint-like broken tone of gray in the sky above the mill; but it comes with congruous effect, and is rather a beauty than a blemish.
In the little Amsterdam, as in nearly all these etchings, the sky is left absolutely clear and empty. And how far more truly it suggests to us the brightness of a cloudless day than the most successful of plein-air painting in vivid color, which stops the imagination instead of leaving it free and active! This little plate is filled with air and sun. ”

“ As in the case of most of Morin’s portraits, it is hard to gaze upon them without experiencing that peculiar sensation of familiarity with the human being represented, without being convinced that here is the bare truth just as an intelligent and thoroughly sincere nature beheld it, without feeling that some of the model’s soul has passed into the canvas. It could not be otherwise with the work of an artist who had toiled so earnestly to follow an ideal, and who himself had been visited by so much affliction. ”

“ This strong sense of appropriate and austere design, supported by such an easy grace of handling, is unusual in any age, and especially in our own, when grace and austerity find it almost impossible to live together in one man’s work.
Turning away from these subjects, in which nature presents a wide range to the artist and inspires him to breadth and dignity of treatment, to the quaint and touching subjects drawn from peasant life in the Vendean homes, we find beneath the admirable form of Lepère’s expression thoughts tender and merry and filled with sympathy for common experience. ”

“ With the spirit which animates all periods of great art, they considered no object too insignificant to be made lovely by their talent. They decorated theaters and houses, designing furniture, clocks, vases, and every article of daily life; filling them all with the consummate, delicate art that remains the despair of all who have followed. If, therefore, as is to be supposed, they underwent Piranesi’s influence while in Rome, it would have made itself felt, through them, in all the decorative arts of France. ”

“ It was Rembrandt, unquestionably, who helped him to a vision of nature that reduced itself to the principle of light and dark; but from nature herself he gained corroboration of the essential truth of such a vision. How true it is the artist of the present day has learned from Goya. Like the latter, he sees color in nature not as positive hues, but as a complex weave of varying intensities of light and shade that play over and transform the hues. ”

“ The French peintre-graveurs proved how effectively color could be translated into black and white, and by revealing the true relation of engraving to painting shared the fame of their contemporaries in the other arts.
It is not possible for the lover of prints to glance at this interminable gallery and not be amazed at the number of portraits which show much originality in their treatment and infinite skill in their execution, but I defy the admirer of truth in art not to be impressed by the small number of those by other engravers which are distinguished by both simplicity and conviction. ”

“ THE etchings of Fortuny make an inviting theme, inviting in itself and doubly sympathetic because it provokes talk about Fortuny. I have always had a weakness for that endearing personality and I cannot, for the life of me, go with foot-rule and a spirit of cold analysis through the twenty-five or thirty plates—twenty-nine, to be exact—recorded in the useful compendium of Beraldi. You cannot be pedantic about an artist whose work has meant to you an early enthusiasm and a lifelong sense of gaiety and brilliance. The first work of art I ever yearned to possess was a drawing by Fortuny. ”

“ The subject will appeal most, perhaps, to those who live beneath the familiar shade of these monstrous habitations, with their hundreds of staring eyes; but the ordinary man, though he may find it strangely uninspiring and unromantic, will at any rate admire the firm decision of the drawing and welcome the slender filaments and trembling gray spirals of smoke—so difficult to express in line with a point of steel—that cast a veil over the sordid reality of the scene. Though Webster carried that one plate to a finish, he was still obsessed by all sorts of doubts. ”

“ Anything original that the cutter puts in, any swerving that accident or clumsiness permits him to make from the line fixed by the painter’s pen for him to follow, is a blemish, and the best woodcuts of Dürer, Holbein, Baldung, Cranach, Burgkmair and the rest of their generation have no such blemishes. They are strictly autographic: the lines that the artist’s pen has traced remain and are immortalized by the printing-press; the white spaces, also limited by his controlling will and purpose, result from the mere mechanical cutting away of blank wood that any neat-handed workman can perform. ”

“ Each of these masters seems to have seized an essence which no one not born of the soil, however enamoured of a land’s beauty, can quite possess and make his own.
What is it that gives these landscapes their enduring charm, and why do we rank them so high? Many a later etcher has had equal skill with needle and acid; some have had even greater. Whistler is more delicate, perhaps, more exquisite, more unexpected in his gift of spacing. Yet neither Whistler nor any other master of etching has the secret power of Rembrandt. ”

“ NO other artist in black and white has ever exhibited such tremendous vitality as Goya. Look back along the line, and there is no maker of prints who has put into them the same exuberant, full-blooded delight in life. For sheer physical strength Mantegna only may be compared with him. And, strangely, with this often almost delirious overflow of animal spirits there is the most remarkable sensitiveness to the significance of gesture. ”

“ With Rembrandt landscape was a kind of interlude and holiday from more serious design. We feel it in the sunny temper which pervades the majority of the etchings. But how far superior he is to all the rest in his sensitiveness to beauty! As we have seen, he is not greatly interested in the details of landscape form. We find scribbles and shapelessness in his foliage and plants; but his grasp of essential truths overrides all criticism of this kind, and always and everywhere we feel his intense joy in expressing light. ”

“ Photography is a reproduction; it becomes a betrayal. What is the copy interpreted by this betrayal? How can one extract the character of anything if the true model is not there?
“Here, then, is our engraver obliged to copy with his precise art from something quite vague. Photography sees the globs of color, the accidents of a picture, with as much interest as the most beautiful design. ”

“ It is this light return stroke, exactly in the manner of Mantegna’s pen drawing, which gives the wonderfully soft quality to the early impressions. But it is so delicate that comparatively few printings must have worn it down, and the majority of impressions that come into the market show little but the outline and the stronger lines of shading. Even so these Mantegna prints do not lose the splendidly vigorous character of their design, but it is of course the fine early impressions which are the joy and allure of the true connoisseur. ”

“ The element of drama is added by the turmoil of little [Pg 234] figures in shadow at the base of the cathedral, seen in minute detail through the translucent darkness and agitated by their human accidents and emotions. The whole spirit of France, its imperishable monuments, its sparkle of sunshine, its reasonable architecture, its vivid life, may be inferred from this remarkable plate.
Very different in sentiment and less close to perfection in the relation of the parts of the design to the whole, is La Chûte de Ballon; yet this also is a beautiful plate. ”

“ There are wonderfully few etchers whose work strikes a note of imagination and individuality, and appeals by its force and directness, its decisions and its smacks. One of that small company is Mr. Herman A. Webster.
An artist’s life is written in his work, and the cold facts of his biography are of little real importance. To some extent, however, they act as a commentary upon his productions, and at the worst they serve to satisfy the not unpardonable curiosity which impels all of us to inquire into the age and life-history of any man whose pictures or prints awaken our instant sympathy. ”

“ The Omval shows a different kind of composition; the willow at the edge of a thicket, in whose shadow two lovers are embowered, divides the plate; the right and larger part is all light and open—a river-bank on which a man moves down to the ferry, and the broad sunny stream, and houses, masts, and windmills across the water—a picturesque river-side such as Whistler and Haden loved to etch. ”

“ In both we find the artist becoming more adept in using broad and balanced disposition of light and shade to give not merely chiaroscuro but the suggestion of actual color, and more skilled in adding exquisiteness of detail to refined truth of visual impression. Les Blanchisseuses, in particular, with its rich mystery of shadow, with its sunshine falling on white walls and lighting the seamed interstices of plaster and timber, has an indefinable charm that, for myself at any rate, makes it a high-water mark in Mr. Webster’s art. ”

“ Webster’s work is well able to speak for itself. But there is one noteworthy feature, common to all his plates, that claims attention, and that is his power of rendering sunlight. If he loves dark and dingy thoroughfares with dilapidated roofs and moldering plaster, it is for the sake of those quaint shadows that peep from their recesses and climb the high walls, and still more for the patches of brilliant, quivering sunlight to which the shadows give so full a value. ”

“ Now Adam, a man of unusually alert mind and delicate taste, was a poor architect, with a most defective sense of proportion in the composition of a building as a whole, who nevertheless possessed unusual and distinctive talent as a decorator. His fine taste led him to cover his work with detail executed and often conceived by remarkable persons, so that much of the credit for originality and delicacy given to him is due, as with so many an architect, to the artists whom he had the cleverness and good fortune to employ and the ability to direct. ”

“ To be sure, he has the same love of bold contrasts of light and shade as had the master of Amsterdam, without the romantic glamour of the dreamy Dutchman. This modern Swede is more direct, more incisive, his line has something of the penetrating and biting analysis of a page from Strindberg, and not infrequently, as in the case of his haunting portrait of the besotted poet Paul Verlaine, there is discernible a sort of ironic humor that throws a revealing light upon his sitter. ”

“ It is the note of the whole series—the criminal horror of war, and its futility. Nowhere else is the element of the macabre in his genius more fully revealed. The designs are in no sense illustrative; they are visions of his own brooding, projected against darkness and emptiness. Yet, just as in the Caprices he gave bone and flesh to the eery fabrics of his imagination, so by the magic of his needle his abstract imaginings of the enormity of war became visualized into concrete actuality.
Of Goya’s lithographs it must suffice here to mention the set of four prints, The Bulls of Bordeaux. ”

“ Who, except Hokusai, has ever expressed, in black and white, weight—the heaviness of tired bodies, the leaden fall of an unconscious woman’s arm, or the buoyancy of excitement—as this Spaniard? Who has ever made motion so moving—made young limbs so supple, elastic, and graceful? His every line is kinetic—he does not relate motion, he exhibits it—and in art as elsewhere deeds are worth more than words. ”

“ The first may be known by the opposition they arouse in the sacred sanctums of mediocrity and by their final but reluctant acceptance by the self-appointed custodians of the Hall of Fame whose business it is to exclude genius until Time shall have tempered all its buoyant, youthful enthusiasms, which are the very signs and tokens of those starry creatures whom the gods have blessed. Youth and all its amazing prodigality are of the very essence of genius, and it is by virtue of this exuberant overflowing of the spirit that the works of Anders Zorn make their vital appeal. ”

“ Here we see in the truest light the divine monarch, the arrogant noble, the worldly prelate, the serious man-of-letters, and the humble commoner who fill all the French memoirs of the seventeenth century.
It is indeed high time that the artist who has been called “the Louis XIV of engraving” came into his own again, or that he at least be accorded some of the immense popularity which he enjoyed during the palmy days of the grand siècle. ”

“ His chief [Pg 243] delight is in the nooks and corners of old-world thoroughfares and culs-de-sac, where deep shadows lurk in the angles of time-worn buildings, and sunlight ripples over crumbling walls, seamy gables, and irregular tiled roofs. Of such is a series of subjects found in old Rouen—the St. Ouen; the Rue du Hallage, where the cathedral spire towers high above old timbered houses; and that charming plate with the title Old Houses, Rouen, a quaint corner of tenements whose high-pitched roofs stand propped against one another for all the world like a castle of cards. ”

“ The most superficial study of his modeling of that side of the face which is in full light, for instance, will reveal the supreme delicacy, the never-failing tact, with which he carries out this most difficult part of the work. His burin is as light as a feather, there is not a line too many, and he knows the exact value of each and every tone. ”

“ During the eighteenth century, when Piranesi lived, the whole of Italy had sunk to depths of degradation such as few great races have ever known, not because the people were hopelessly decayed, for their great spirit never died, but lived to flame forth in 1848 and create that marvelous present-day regeneration of Italy, which is perhaps the most astonishing example of the rebirth of a once great but apparently dead nation that the world has yet seen. ”

“ If organization of line and space, ability to establish in each of his compositions a decorative scheme adequate to support easily all the delightful episodes and figures which he chooses to introduce, is the most important element in Lepère’s artistic equipment, the next in significance is the clarity and precision of his utterance. There is no vapor in his imagination; he is a poet as well as an artist, with a poet’s sensitiveness to definition of form. All that he lacks is the intensity of emotion that sweeps away interest in everything but the personal feeling. ”