comte Henri Delaborde

“ Strictly speaking, a school of painting has only existed in England since the eighteenth century; surely its characteristics, past and present, are in nowise a spontaneous expression of national feeling? Are all its most important achievements—the portraits of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, and the landscapes of Turner—inspired by that practical wisdom, that spirit of order and love of exactness in everything, which characterise the English equally in private and in public life? ”

“ When the mind is not exercised in discerning the essential parts of an art, the eye is apt to look upon excessive neatness of workmanship as the certain evidence of perfection. As people insensible to the charm of painting fall confidingly into raptures over the pictures of Carlo Dolci, Gerard Dow, and Denner, so, it maybe, certain admirers of Ficquet esteem his talent in proportion to the exaggerated cleanness and carefulness of his plates. ”

“ Whilst Bervic was counted the greatest French engraver, Italy boasted of a man, his inferior in reality, but whom, in the existing dearth of talent, his countrymen agreed to thrust into the glorious eminence of a master. Like Canova, his senior by a few years only, Raphael Morghen had the good fortune to be born at the right time. Both second-rate artists, they would have passed almost unnoticed in a more favoured century; as it was, in the absence of contemporary rivals, their compatriots accepted their accidental superiority as a proof of absolute merit. ”

“ Whilst emulating each other's talent, all are agreed to pursue one and the same object, all are agreed as to the necessity of devotion to the study of surrounding nature and everyday truth.
Although the Dutch etchers display in the totality of their achievement the same ideal and the same tendency, each keeps, if only in the matter of workmanship, a certain distinction and character of his own. One, however, stands out from the group with matchless splendour, with all the superiority of genius over talent: that one is Rembrandt. ”

“ The importance of such an artist is in every respect that of the leader of a school and a master in the strictest acceptation of the word. Martin Schongauer in his own person, and through the talent he helped to foster, did so much, and so greatly honoured his country, that it is only just to regard him as one of the most glorious representatives of national art, and to place his name beside those of Albert Dürer and Holbein, as the three men in whom the essential qualities and characteristics of the German genius have been most typically represented. ”

“ Every part of them, even where they savour of imperfection or of extravagance, bears witness to the indomitable will and independent genius of a master. His touch imparts a passionate and thrilling aspect even to the details of architectural decoration and the smallest inanimate objects. One would suppose that, after having studied each part of his subject with the eye of a man of culture and a thinker, Mantegna, when he came to represent it on the metal, forgot all but the burning impatience of his hand and the fever of the struggle with his material. ”

“ William Blake (born 1757) , poet, engraver, and painter, stands alone. In engraving—the laborious art by which he was content to live—he has executed admirable works, apart from his own peculiar methods, both in line, as shown in the portrait of Lavater, and in stipple, as in the "Industrious Cottager," after Morland; as poet and painter he has left songs and designs which, if soaring higher than men can follow, or even his own powers of hand and mind sufficiently express, remain for ever to arouse the wonder and excite the imagination of posterity. ”

“ A mistake, all the more to be regretted as it seems to be general, gave rise to the idea that it was all over with the art of engraving, simply because, as mere copies, its products could not have the infallible fidelity of photographic images, and that, however painstaking and faithful the engraver's hand, it could never produce that exact fac-simile, that ruthless imitation of the thing copied. ”

“ That section of the public sensible of their charm is certainly not that which is impressed by beauty, and it is useless to care about winning its approbation; but when ugliness is everywhere it is to be feared that everybody may grow used to the sight, and forget to look elsewhere. The danger to which pure line engraving is thus exposed by the deplorable exigencies of competition is not the only one which threatens the art. ”

“ We have no longer here the stupid impartiality, or, if it be preferred, the unreasoning veracity of a mechanical apparatus, but the deliberate use of feeling, intelligence, and taste—of all those faculties, indeed, which mould and enter into the talent of an artist.
Now as long as there are men in the world capable of preferring idea to matter, and the art which appeals to the mind to the fact which speaks to the eyes, line engraving will retain its influence, however small it may be supposed, however limited it may really be. ”

“ If the anonymous artist called the Master of 1466 be the true founder of the German school of engraving; if he show himself cleverer than any of the Italian engravers of the period—from the point of view only of practical execution, and the right handling of the tool—it does not necessarily follow that he holds the same priority in talent as he certainly holds in order of time before all other engravers of the same age and country. ”

“ Peale was a captain of volunteers, dentist, lecturer on natural history, saddler, watchmaker, silversmith, painter in oil, crayons, or in miniature on ivory, modeller in clay and wax, engraver in mezzotint, and to crown all, as his son was wont to say, a mild, benevolent, and good man. Many also devoted their talents to bank-note engraving, a branch of the art highly cultivated in the United States, in which the skill of the inventor and mechanic has been united with the grace and genius of the artist. ”

“ Both as painter and engraver Hogarth was a deep student of art, on which he has left some commendable writings; but he never succeeded in fulfilling all its conditions. Extravagantly pre-occupied with the philosophical significance with which he purposes to endow his work, he does not always see when he has gone far enough in the exposition of his idea: he darkens it with commentary; he becomes unintelligible by sheer insistence on intelligibility. ”

“ Rembrandt's method is, so to speak, supersensuous. At times he lightly touches his plate, and at times he attacks as at a venture; at others he skims the surface and caresses it with an exquisite refinement, a magical dexterity. In his lights he breaks the line of the contour, but only to resume and boldly accentuate it in his shadows ”

“ The art of printing from plates cut in intaglio had no sooner been discovered by, or at least dignified by the practice of, a Florentine goldsmith, than upon every side fresh talent was evoked. In Italy and Germany it was a question of who should profit most and quickest by the advance. A spirit of rivalry at once arose between the two schools; and fifteen years had not elapsed since Italian art had given its note in the works of the goldsmith engravers of the school of Finiguerra, before German art had found an equally definite expression in the works of the Master of 1466. ”

“ Reboul (who afterwards married the painter Vien) , there were scores of women who amused themselves by engraving, to say nothing of the many who made it a profession.
The drawback of such pastimes, innocent enough in themselves, was that they degraded art into a frivolous amusement, and promulgated a false view of its capabilities and real object. This is what very generally happens when, on the strength of a certain degree of taste, mistaken for talent, people aspire to compass, without reflection or study, results only to be attained by knowledge and experience. ”

“ The expression lies not so much in niceties of physiognomy as in the whole attitude of the sitters and the characteristic pose and contour of the faces represented. The painter's imagination is brilliant rather than delicate; sometimes, indeed, it degenerates into bad taste and eccentricity. But far more frequently it gives his attitudes an air of ease and originality, and the general aspect of his portraits breathes a perfect dignity. ”

“ Free to impose his own system on all other artists, David might have enforced his artistic authority on his contemporaries; and even if it were beyond his power to restore the French school of engraving, he might at least have regenerated its principles, and, combining separate efforts under the synthesis of his own personal conception, have breathed into it a fresh spirit of unity. ”

“ But, whether as a vehicle for conveying an original design or translating that of another artist, etching is strictly limited in its powers; it bears the same relation to the full art of engraving as sketching or drawing does to that of perfect painting; suggestive, capable of exhibiting broad effects of light and shade, or indicative of the idiosyncrasy of the etcher, it is, of its very nature, incomplete, and acts but as herald to proclaim the greater results to be obtained by following out the art to its proper goal. ”

“ Of all the engravers who have honoured our epoch not in France alone, but also in other countries, the first in genius, as in the general influence he has exerted for nearly half a century, is certainly Henriquel—as he called himself in the early part of his career—Henriquel-Dupont in the second half. ”

“ Unlike his countrymen, Claude Lorraine and the noble Poussin, who, some years later, were in this same Italy to live laborious and thoughtful lives, Callot freely followed his peculiar vein, and saw in art no more than a means of amusement, in the people about him only subjects for caricature, and in imaginative and even religious subjects but a pretext for grotesque invention. ”

“ In his brief career Lucas van Leyden had the happiness to see his efforts rewarded and his credit universally established, and of this authority and influence he ever made the noblest use. Looked upon as a leader by the painters of his country; in friendly relations with the German engravers, who, like Albert Dürer, sent him their works, or came themselves to ask advice; possessing greater wealth than usually fell to the share of the artists of his time; he never employed his riches or his influence except in the interest of art, or of the men who practised it. ”

“ Painters of the present age ignore the engraver, and prefer the more tangible money results to be obtained from treating with a publisher for the purchase of their copyrights, adopting in this respect the teaching conveyed in the witty speech of Sir Godfrey Kneller, who, when reproached for his preference, to other branches of painting, of the lucrative one of portraiture, replied: "Painters of history make the dead live and do not begin to live themselves till they are dead; I paint the living and they make me live." ”

“ In this struggle of rival national claims the schools of the Low Countries are entitled to their share of glory. It is quite possible that their claims, so generally ignored towards the end of the last century, should in the present day be accounted the most valid of all; and that, in this obscure question of priority, the presumption may be in favour of the country which supplied an art closely connected with engraving with its first elements and its first examples. ”

“ In addition to the greater ease and rapidity with which an engraving could be made by this process, the range of effect or colour was immensely increased. All tones between pure white and the deepest black were now capable of realisation, and it is easy to see how greatly were enlarged the resources of the engraver, whose special gift and claim as an original artist—a fact too often forgotten, or rather not sufficiently recognised—consist in his power of translating into various shades of black and white the numerous colours at the disposal of the painter. ”

“ They all agree in recognising that the methods of relief engraving were practised with a view to printing earlier than the method of intaglio. What interval, however, separates the two discoveries? At what epoch are we to place the invention of wood engraving? or if the process, as has been often alleged, is of Asiatic origin, when was it brought into Europe? To pretend to give a decisive answer to these questions would be, at least, imprudent. Conjectures of every sort, and even the most dogmatic assertions, are not wanting. ”

“ In Italy alone, cards, or rather the symbolical pieces known rightly or wrongly by the name of tarocchi, possessed, from an artistic point of view, real importance from the time when engraving on metal had begun to take the place of wood-cutting. The artists initiated by Finiguerra into the secrets of the new method displayed good taste, knowledge, and skill; and in such less important work, as well as in that of a higher order, their talent at last inaugurated an era of real progress and of fruitful enterprise. ”

“ Engravers of more original talent must be looked for neither amongst historical nor portrait engravers, nor even amongst engravers of genre. For information as to the state of the art outside of France, and apart from the French school, we must rather turn to the illustrations of books and almanacs engraved by Chodowiecki at Dantzic or Berlin, or to the vast plates from ancient Roman monuments etched—not without a certain rhetorical emphasis—by Piranesi. ”

“ One might, with still greater reason, thus explain268 the mediocrity of American prints in the present day. Few as they are, they do not rivet attention as the manifestations of an art which, young and inexperienced, is yet vital in its artlessness; on the contrary, they are depressing as the products of an art fallen into the sluggishness of old age. It is as though engraving in the United States had begun in decay—or rather, it may be, negatively, with no tendency to change, and no impulse to progress. ”

“ All the same, it is commonly the case with wood engravers that, clever though they be, they are apt to deceive themselves as to the special conditions of their art, and too often to forget that it is not their province to imitate the appearance of line engraving. Instead of attempting to copy the complicated results of the graver, they should rather, in accordance with the nature of the process at their disposal, be satisfied with rapid suggestions of effect and modelling and a summary imitation of form and colour. ”

“ Taking the word in its widest acceptation, Lucas van Leyden is already engraving "portraits." It is by the careful imitation of living nature or still-life that he means to interest us: even when his models are in themselves of little worth, or, as is sometimes the case, are the reverse of beautiful. ”