Sir Frederick Wedmore

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Only a critic whose intelligence gave form and definiteness to the impressions of senses preternaturally acute, could have given quite adequate expression to Jacquemart’s dealings with beautiful matter—to his easy revelry of colour and light over lines and contours of selected beauty. Everything that Jacquemart 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 work represents his strength, and hardly ever betrays his weakness. ”

“ Etching is for the vigorous sketch—and it is for the exquisite sketch likewise. It is for the work in which suggestion may be ample and unstinted, but in which realisation may, if the artist chooses, hardly be pursued at all. To say that, has become one of the commonplaces of criticism. We are not all of us so gifted, however, that commonplaces are to be dispensed with for the remainder of time.
Of the great bygone masters of the art, some have pursued it in Mr. Haden’s way, and others have made it approach more nearly to the work of the deliberate engraver. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It has the variety of tone, the seeming fragility of texture and ornament, the infinity of decoration, the rendering of the subtle curvature of a flower, and of the transparency of the wing of a passing insect. It has everything but the roundness—everything but the quality that is the easiest and the most common. But so curious a deficiency, occasionally displayed, could not weigh against the amazing evidence of various cleverness, and Jacquemart was shortly engaged by the publishers and engaged by the French Government. ”

“ These two admissions made, there is little of just criticism of Seymour Haden’s work that must not be admiring and cordial—the record of enjoyment rather than of dissatisfaction—so much faithful and free suggestion does the work contain of the impressions that gave rise to it, so much variety is compassed, so much are we led into unbroken paths, and so much evidence is there of eager desire to enlarge the limits of our Art, whether by plunge into a new theme, or by application of a new process. ”

“ Placed by him in their best lights, they revealed their finest qualities. He loved an effective contrast of them, a comely juxtaposition; a legitimate accessory he could not neglect—that window, by which he sat as he worked, flashed its light upon a surface that caught its reflection; in so many different ways the simple expedient helps the task, gives the object roundness, betrays its lustre. Some people bore hardly on him for the colour, warmth, and life he introduced into his etchings. ”

“ Whistler to see whether the place had yet some aspects which his etching could record—an impression, not a reproduction: that was all that could be looked for. And Mr. Whistler etched his impressions with curious uncertainty and curious inequality. He was now adroit, now wavering. He took from London to Venice his happy fashion of suggesting lapping water. He looked at Venice as a whole, keenly, delicately, but never in detail—we had bird’s-eye views of it. It had been interesting to wonder what would be the vision granted to a fantastic genius of a fantastic city. ”

“ In them, though the treatment of delicate distances is not evaded, there is especial opportunity for strong and broad effects of light and shade. Perhaps it is to these that a man travels as his work continues, and as, in continuing, it develops. At least it may be so in landscape.
Here, for the present, is arrested the etched work of an artist thoroughly individual, thoroughly vigorous, but against whom I have charged, by implication, sometimes a lack of exquisiteness, the only too frequent but not inevitable drawback of the quality of force. ”

“ The ghostliness of the foreground figures demands an ingenious theory for its justification, and this theory no one has advanced. But the solidity of the buildings introduced into this plate—the clock-tower and the houses upon the quay—are a rare achievement in etching. For once the houses are not drawn, but built, like the houses and the churches and the bridges of Méryon. The strength of their realisation lends delicacy to the thin-masted fishing boats with their yet thinner lines of 38cordage, and to the distant bridge in the grey mist of London, and to the faint clouds of the sky. ”

“ 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 ”

“ And in some of the Nocturnes the absence, not only of definition, but of gradation, would point to the conclusion that they are but engaging sketches. In them we look in vain for all the delicate differences of light and hue which the scenes depicted present. Like the landscape art of Japan, they are harmonious decorations, and a dozen or so of such engaging 29sketches placed in the upper panels of a lofty apartment would afford a justifiable and welcome alternative even to noble tapestries or Morris wall-papers. ”

“ Whistler, even in his earlier manhood, when those of the Thames etchings which are the fullest of detail were wrought with sureness and precision of hand, never betrayed either the capacity or the will to reproduce the charm of delicate architecture. Yet in an art to which colour is denied, the charm of delicate architecture must be the charm of Venice. ”

“ And the art that asks, as one of its conditions, that it shall be swift, not only because swiftness is sometimes effective, but because the steadiness of sustained effort has a difficulty of its own—that art, to use an illustration from poetry and from music, takes up its place, voluntarily, with the lyrists, and with Schubert, as we knew him of old—foregoes voluntarily all comparison with the epic, and with Beethoven. ”

“ One counts the touches, and one sees how soon and how strangely he has got the power of suggesting all that he does not actually give, of suggesting all that is in the object by the little that is in the etching. On such work may be bestowed, amongst much other praise, that particular praise which, to fashionable French criticism, delighted especially with the feats of adroitness, and occupied with the evidence of the artist’s dexterity, seems the highest—Il n’y a rien, et il y a tout. ”

“ And the best results of the life-long study which, by his own account, he has given to the arrangement of colour are seen in the work that is purely, or the work that is practically, decorative—the work that escapes the responsibility of a subject. And the best results of the study of the arrangements of light and shade are seen in a dozen etchings, most of which—but not The Kitchen and not the Vieille aux Loques—belong to that series in which the artist has recorded for our curious pleasure the common features of the shores of the Thames. ”

“ The Egham subject has the silence of the open country; the Water Meadow is an artist’s subject quite as peculiarly, for “the eye that sees” is required most of all when the question is how to find the beautiful in the apparently commonplace.
Next year, amongst other good work, we have the sweet little plate of Combe Bottom, which, in a fine impression, more than holds its own against the Kensington Gardens, and gives us at least as much enjoyment by its excellence of touch as does the more intricate beauty of the Shore Mill Pond, with its foliage so varied and so rich. ”

“ Whistler has decorated, has shown that a long and concentrated effort at the solution of the problems of colour is not beyond the scope of an artist who has rarely mastered the subtleties of the intricate human form. It has shown, moreover, that his solution of such problems can be strikingly original. As a decorative painter—as a painter of large or brilliant sketches—Mr. Whistler has had few superiors in any time or land. ”

“ Whistler’s figure-pieces, executed with the etching-needle, and offered to the public indiscreetly, the commonness and vulgarity of the person pourtrayed find no apology in perfection of pourtrayal—the design is uncouth, the drawing is intolerable, the light and shade an affair of a moment’s impressiveness, with no subtlety of truth to hold the interest that is at first aroused. ”

“ Whistler is an impressionist—he is an impressionist in etching, but etching permits the record of the impression only, while painting demands at all events the occasional capacity to realise with weeks of labour what a few hours might happily enough suggest. Moreover—and the circumstance is odd and noteworthy—it is in his etchings that Mr. Whistler has reached realisation the best, and he has reached it, in the earlier Thames-side work of twenty years ago, with no sacrifice whatever of freedom and of frankness in treatment. ”

“ By temperament and instinct he was as much etcher as painter, perhaps even more. The process of etching being—always in skilled hands, of course—perhaps the readiest for the rendering of impressions and the expression of artistic thought, it is natural that Legros, whose art, whatever it may lack in immediate attractiveness, is one undoubtedly of impressions and of thoughts, should have turned to this process. ”

“ Notorieties of the moment may always be counted by the score, but fame remains so rarely for the most popular, that the serious student of the work of a master in any art has no reason to question his own judgment when it points him to admiration, merely because the object of his admiration is not to be counted among the immediate successes of the hour. ”

“ A book of larger aim, on Etching in England and France, might justifiably have given almost as much importance to Macbeth and Tissot here, and to Bracquemond there, as has been given in the annexed pages to Haden, Whistler, Jacquemart, and Legros. But Macbeth and Tissot belong to a younger generation than do any of my four masters. Much of what the art of etching could do in modern days was already in evidence before their work began. My four masters are four pioneers. ”

“ But at other times, in which the artist is dealing with landscape charged for him with no especial meaning, his very observation of it seems to have been lacking in interest and acuteness, as in the broad slope of grass by the stream-side in his big print Les Bûcherons—a whole surface of ground that is treated mechanically and without any worthy apprehension. And yet this print, despite certain unpleasantness, contains in the heads of the 46woodcutters some of his finest work. A much more sketchy subject, Paysage aux Meules, has greater unity of impression. ”

“ Strange that the very quality first taught to, and first acquired by, the most ordinary pupil of a Government School of Art should have been wanting to an artist often as adroit in his methods as he was individual in his vision! ”