Sir Frederick Wedmore

“ One not unwieldy volume—that “Liber Studiorum,” which, in the year 1838, Cotman brought together, not perhaps without thought of Turne accomplished triumph—contains two score or so of plates which show much, not only of Cotma capacity as a draughtsman, but of his genius for ideal composition, of his faculty for dignity of line, and for so disposing masses of light and shade that they should be not only significant, but impressive. ”

“ CAMERON. THE amateur has had the opportunity of looking lately a good deal at the prints of a young Scottish artist, Mr. D. Y. Cameron, who has himself, to do him justice, looked long and much at the prints of the masters. Though young, he has already been prolific, and has wrought not only many plates, but in various methods. Of course, I like his work as against that of men who, however gifted in other mediums of expression, are not essentially etchers. For Mr. Cameron is essentially an etcher—a fine engraver on the copper, above all things. ”

“ Generally, on impression of his landscape is that it is built to some extent upon the memories of his youth; that, since then, a little observation has gone a long way—that he has cared to dream and fancy rather than to actually notice. Here and there, in his etchings, one maybe reminded of the uplands around Dijon, or of the chalk hills of the Boulognais, with its wide fields and haystacks, its gaunt outhouses—a land which rumours of “high farming” have never reached. As the railway train swept under the hillside, Legros, one thinks, may have profited by a glance from the windows. ”

“ Legros has been concerned—and best of all concerned in etching—with many departments of Art. Like Mr. G. F. Watts, he has been fascinated, here and again, and very specially, by masculine intellect and character; masculine kindness, goodness, genius, energy. Of Mr. Watts himself—and fortunately in the medium of etching—he has made the happiest of all possible portraits, finding in the theme a gravity of manly beauty, a charm of approaching age, to which he has always been intensely sympathetic. ”

“ The early detail of Whistler, in the Thames etchings, is never for a moment dull. He puts down for us on the copper endless results of endless and interesting observation. The life of the River, “below bridge,” and the life of riverside London is all there—barge and bargee, crane and warehouse, wharf and chimney, clipper and wherry, and the sluggish stream, the flat horizon, the distant river-curve, the tower of Rotherhithe Church, rising perhaps from out of the remote and low-lying roofs. ”

“ Poetic and pathetic is it besides, sometimes to the last degree. “Les Chantres Espagnols,” for example, is the creation of a great artist: a most penetrating and pathetic study of physical and mental decay. It represents eight priestly singing men lifting up what hoarse and feeble voices they may be possessed of, in the hushed choir, by the uncertain light of torches, in the nigh most mysterious and most ominous hour.
Several among the more fascinating of these somewhat early etchings and dry-points record the life of the priesthood. ”

“ Their movements, whatever they are, are made with the immediate freedom, the complete absence of self-consciousness, of well-bred, natural folk—the folk whose presence, even when they are not actually handsome, or when no personal affection binds them to you, gives a legitimate charm to the passing hour. The spectacle of the world is pleasanter when it is they who are on its stage.
Helle etchings prove him to be in sympathy with the most alert, which is often also the most dignified and distinguished of modern youthful beauty. ”

“ Tissot, with all his virtues of independence and vigour, has shown little of this economy, nor has he displayed the peculiar refinement which counts for so much in M. Helle charm. Briefly, this is a case in which the pupil—if pupil you can call him—has improved upon the master. It has been given to M. Tissot to have some share in the formation of a craftsman more subtle, a poet far more sensitive, than himself.
Up to the present time, some seventy or eighty plates have been executed by the brilliant and delightful sketcher, M. Tissot to some extent formed. ”

“ The character—in a sense, the temperament—of the artist is betrayed or hinted at by his selection; notwithstanding that the selection, if the man is wise at all, owes something to his knowledge of what are the bounds of his capacity. The work of the great etchers—Rembrandt apart, and he was practically unlimited—shows this. The subtleties of the figure interested Sir Seymour Haden less than the curve of a great stream, the light and shade in an old garden, or the broken surface of a Dorset heath. It is, at least, not emotional incidents that have been the mainspring of the art of Mr. Whistler ”

“ Herkome theme is generally a dramatic one, and into it he introduces such obvious interest of line and of expression as may be found in a woman with the picturesqueness of age, a man comely and vigorous, a girl with Anne Pag “eyes of youth.” Mr. Herkomer has a story to tell us—sometimes the story of a life as it is told in portraiture, and he tells it with no absence of ability. But attractive as he well may be, clever as he most surely is, he rarely reaches exquisiteness ”

“ Cameron is apt to finish to the corners with a thoroughness too uniform or obvious—to be, indeed, like Mr. C. J. Watson, a little too positive and too material. In the “Flower Market,” with its fleeting lights and shades, he leaves in part this positiveness. He makes an interesting experiment, but, after all, recalls the theme to which he addresses himself, only enough to assure you that the experiment has not been made in the medium that is fittest for it. “Colour, colour, colour!” ”

“ ALPHONSE LEGROS. MORE than one of the great etchers who must in fairness be treated with the British school are of foreign origin. Born at Dijon in 1837, and trained chiefly in Paris—painter, of course, as well as etcher—Alphonse Legros came to London when he was quite a young man. He has been amongst us since 1863. It was in Paris, about 1857, that he did his first etchings, and his surprising originality was declared from the beginning. The trivial, the accidental even, had no attractions for him. Even the quiet humour which one recognizes in his character, has no place in his work. ”

“ The etcher whose employment of the etching-needle is confined wholly, or confined in the main, to the work of realizing and translating the conceptions of another, is, like the reproductive line-engraver, or the reproductive engraver in mezzotint, little more than the dexterous instrument which carries anothe message. ”

“ Yes, it is only fair to distinguish, when we talk about the “amateur”—and no one has less tolerance for the feeble amateur than I have—it is necessary to distinguish between the mind of the dilettante, of the idler, of the wishy-washy person who, from the high realms of an unbroken self-satisfaction, condescends occasionally to an art, and the mind of the trained and exact, and therefore of presumably the strenuous. ”

“ Behind the flat meadows and the nameless stream that small trees bend over, there is the long line of the cathedral; and one feels over all the quiet of Autumn. Not{126} a whit less admirable—a complete and satisfying picture, wrought with strength and delicacy—is “Pine Trees, Christchurch.” ”

“ The “two friends” must be taken—one need hardly protest—cum grano salis; they represent the rare connoisseur, the infrequent person who enjoys and understands.
Two classes of subjects have hitherto to a great extent engrossed Mr. Frank Short in his original work, and to these there must now be added a third; for within the last year or so, following in the wake of his friend Mr. C. J. Watson, he has visited the land of Rembrandt, and has done charmingly suggestive and vivacious sketches of quaint town and long-stretched shore. ”

“ HUBERT HERKOMER, R.A. “GWENDYDD.{155}{154}”
medium. Still, one who is, as everybody knows, so spirited and energetic an artist—the author of so many a valiant experiment, the winner of an occasional triumph in the art of Painting, from the day of the “Pensioners” to the day of the “Burgomasters”—can be a graceful sketcher on the copper, when he likes, or from time to time, at all events.
Robert Macbet inventive work in etching does not want originality; but it is not the originality of an etcher, in method or vision of the world, but rather the originality of his own painted pictures. ”

“ But likeness-taker merely he has never aimed to be; the artist has invariably asserted himself, and, if in nothing else, at least by this or that dexterity of craftsmanship—fine jugglery of execution. Only four or five years ago did it occur to M. Helleu to turn to the processes of the engraver, and to sketch rapidly on copper—he turned to dry-point. ”

“ Ten years of frequent “joyful labour”—Macduf inestimable phrase—in the art of{122} Etching have resulted in making Colonel Goff the author of some seventy plates, of which, to the outsider at least, the first characteristic will seem to be, the range and variety of their themes. The key to this lies in the sensitiveness of the artist, in his width of appreciation, in his reasonable enjoyment of scenes and subjects that have little in common, that present the piquancy of change. It is only figure-subjects proper that have scarcely ever been attempted by him ”

“ The strenuousness, the thoroughness, of good professional work, whether it be done in barrack or in hospital, in a city ma office or in the study of a writer, gives some guarantee of at all events the spirit in which the new work, the pictorial work, will be undertaken—a guarantee lacking in the case of the small professional painter, whose discipline in the arts of Life I must account to have been generally less complete. ”

“ Arthur Evershed, a ready and sensitive draughtsman with the needle, whose “Marsh Farm” is only one out of a score of evidences of his refined enjoyment of the quiet lines of uneventful lowland landscape. Sir Charles Robinson and Dr. Propert need by no means be forgotten. Mr. J. P. Heseltine has not perhaps exhibited much of late; but he, as long ago as when he wrought that series of Etchings Mrs. Noseda published—it was some twenty years since—gave ample proof{166} of his placid, sympathetic observation of the ordinary land, and of his ability to record the charm he was not tardy in feeling. ”

“ Whistler, on the rare occasions on which he has treated it in his mature art (in the rare “Dam Wood” especially) , Landscape becomes Decoration. With Sir Seymour Haden, landscape is a matter that must be energetically observed. Swift, skilful memoranda are taken of it—memoranda which are not the less scientific because they may be dramatic besides. With Legros, the landscape must submit to change, to simplification, to abstraction, generalization even, in the processes of his mind ”

“ Still, the immense solidity of Méryo etching gives it a realism as much its own as is all the wealth of its poetry. The very simplification of the facts must have been deliberate, and it accomplished its end. It would be ridiculous to suggest that a draughtsman of architecture so patient and thorough as Méryon, could not have set forth each detail, as well as the general{106} character, had it been his aim. ”

“ Whistle works—and of fruitful enjoyment of their possession—I must still guard{37} myself against expressing any marked preference for one period over another. The work of each period has its own qualities, and, since all Art is concession and compromise, the work of each period may have likewise its own deficiencies. Practically there has been no “bad time;” but at more times than one there have been—even from this gifted hand—unsatisfactory, unworthy prints. ”

“ Hence, perhaps, the sense of spontaneity in all the work—the sense, when you have looked through his plates, that you have been living in the intimacy of charming people who in their daily ways turn this way and that, stoop, stretch themselves, smile, get suddenly grave, dress themselves, lift their eyes inquiringly, or toss the great long hair upon their shoulders. ”

“ OLIVER HALL. MR. OLIVER HALL, a young and, until lately, a comparatively little-known but a distinctly interesting and strongly gifted etcher (who paints, he tells me, a good deal in water-colour) , has next to be spoken of; and if his work has one characteristic more than another—though grace and freedom are its characteristics too—the one that is most its own is the continual evidence his plates afford of his enjoyment of growth and building up—his pleasure in the traces of the way by which the object before him became the object that it is. ”

“ Axel Haig, the third of these popular and long accepted artists, has no painted pictures by whose method he may be inspired—he is unlike Robert Macbeth in this respect—but his able etchings of architectural subjects are nearly all of them, nevertheless, finished up to the corners. So much is actually set forth, with such elaborate and skilled pains—all the work being perfectly evident, no labour of omission having been undertaken, and little labour of choice—that the imagination of the spectator has hardly a chance of exercising itself. ”

“ Goff is thoroughly at home.
Next to mere prettiness or “strikingness,” what the public likes best in Landscape Art is not the record of Landscap happy accident or of its intricate and balanced line, but the intelligible presentation of natural effects. That probably is why, among Gof etchings, the “Summer Storm in the Itchen Valley” has thus far been the most popular. ”