Part 2

Mr. Whistle scarcely sympathetic attitude towards his kind may be occasioned in part by the conviction that it is his kin most urgent business to be concerned with his prints, and his knowledge that this conviction of his own--if thus I dare to call it--has not, until the last few years, been largely shared by other people. Popular he could not be; or scarcely in his own time. A Sarasate, with his music, attracts the world; but in pictorial art of every sort the _virtuoso_ appeals only to his brethren. His “brethren”--his real brethren--are quite as likely indeed to be connoisseurs as fellow-workmen. But “brethren” shall be the word. And it is such who--some of them for more than thirty years, and some of them since yesterday--have recognized the genius of Whistler.

Our admirable comedian, Mr. Toole, is--if I may recall the saying of one of his fellow artists--commonly supposed to have been born in every town of the English provinces, in which the receipts, when he visits it, do their part to justify that town in claiming him as a native. Not quite for the same reason there are towns which dispute with Baltimore the honour of having given birth to the artist of the “French Set,” the “Thames Set,” and the “Twenty-Six Etchings.” Mr. Whistler was born, anyhow, of American parents--I like Baltimore so much, that I hope it is only Baltimore that can fairly claim him--and it is stated to have been in July, 1834, that he came into the world.[2] American then by birth, or family association, he is to a great extent French by education, and his first dated etchings, of the year 1857, were wrought when he was a student in Paris. Along with a popular English draughtsman of Society, he was in the studio of Gleyre, and to Gleyre, for all that I know, he may owe something; but no debt is apparent in his work. A few etchings wrought in Paris, and a few during a journey in Alsace and Lorraine, and then in 1859 we find Whistler settled in London and busy with the laborious series of etchings of the Thames.

He was himself almost from the beginning, though it is possible to trace the influence of even minor Dutch etchers, or Dutch painters at all events, in such a tentative little work as “The Dutchman Holding the Glass,” and though in the nobler plates known as the “Rag-Gatherers,” “La Vieille aux Loques,” “La Marchande de Moutarde,” and “The Kitchen,” it is clear that Whistler in his conception of a subject was scarcely without reverent thought of the great masters of pathetic suggestion and poetic chiaroscuro--Rembrandt, De Hooch, and Nicholas Maes. But by the time he executed the most justly famous etchings of the Thames set--the most famous of the “Sixteen Etchings,” such as “Black Lion Wharf,” “The Pool,” and “Thames Police”--he was himself, wholly. He was in full possession of what may be called his earlier manner. Nay, in December, 1859--not many months after these things had been wrought with a minuteness of detail which the art of Van der Heyden or of Hollar could not have

excelled--we find in one unfinished plate of extreme interest and extraordinary rarity (“Paris: Isle de la Cité”) some union of his earlier realization with his later suggestiveness.

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. And, elaborate as the work is, it is never for a moment either fatigued or mechanical: it preserves inviolate the freshness and vivacity which it is the province of the etching to retain. Nor does the work of Whistler, either at this period or later, ever lose sight of that which, again, it is the etche special business to cultivate--the value of pure “line.” By “pure,” I do not mean Classic (Classic line has other functions): I mean the line that is expressive--that is set with a purpose; that, being laid, is not interfered with--the line that lives and that tells its story.

By 1863--as is shown by the exquisite “Chelsea Wharf,” with its quiet of the suburban afternoon, and by the admirable “Amsterdam,” with its houses, its shipping, its thin line of long flat coast under a wildish sky[3]--Whistler had thoroughly entered upon the work of his middle period. A manner more suggestive to the expert, and more economical to the artist, though received less readily by the first-comer, was by this time clearly upon him; and, with certain modifications, it has continued to this day. Perhaps it is most distinctly marked in that Leyland period--a period of the rare dry-points of the Leyland family--which, after a little interval, succeeded the period of the “Chelsea Wharf” and the “Amsterdam.” It is in its perfection in “The Model Resting” (1870), in “Fanny Leyland” (1873), and in “Dam Wood” (1875)--all of them rare, desirable, notable plates of the true Leyland period, in most of which, as in some of his later work, Mr. Whistler would seem--if I may put it so--to have painted upon the plate as much as drawn: to have sought, that is, painte as well as draughtsma qualities.

I endeavour to note the distinctions, but after some fourteen years of close study of Mr. Whistle works--and of fruitful enjoyment of their possession--I must still guard 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.

In 1879, the great etcher went to Venice, at the instance of the Fine Art Society, and there, in line extraordinarily expressive and vivacious, he recorded, not so much the recognized beauties of the town, as the vividness and variety of his personal impressions. That was his true business. Some of these etchings were exhibited before they were properly finished--finer effects remained, I mean, to be obtained from the plates. Hence they were received, perhaps, with more than customary coldness, though the fairy-like “Little Venice,” nearly perfect to begin with, was always an exception to the rule. There is nothing of Rembrand, there is nothing of Méryo, besides which this diminutive masterpiece may not most fitly be placed. Power of selection, power of composition, delicacy of handling, all say their last word in the “Little Venice.” Art does not go any further.

Since 1880, when they were first exhibited, many of the plates done in Venice have been taken up and perfected. The “Piazzetta,” for instance--unattractive at first: a ragged thing, or a skeleton--has somewhat lately been brought to the highest level that is attained by any etche art. And, several years ago, Mr. Whistler perfected for the limited issue by the Messrs. Dowdeswell, the “Twenty-six” plates--most of them Venetian in theme--which had, fortunately, been bought by hardly anybody (I may suppose) until, in 1886, their excellence was achieved. In this set, the entrancing freedom and inexhaustible suggestiveness of “The Balcony” and “The Garden” demand note: the balcony that, with drapery flung upon it, hangs over and overlooks the Grand Canal: the garden which passing humanity peers into, and peering, perhaps reflects with the Greek poet whose youth was gone:

“Spring for the tree and herb; no spring for us.”

It was in 1886 that I published my “Whistle Etchings: a Study and a Catalogue.” About two hundred and fourteen etchings had then been executed; and these--the work of what must necessarily be the better part of Mr. Whistle lifetime--were carefully described as well as appreciated. I hope the book was not

without effect, in England and America, on the demand for Mr. Whistle prints, many of which, however, were already unobtainable, so narrowly limited had been their issue, and so various, during all those years, the fortunes of the plates. But if old etchings were difficult to get, new ones were not wanting. There cropped up, under my notice, ingenious but insignificant _croquis_, declared by dealers, interested in them, to be valuable, because they were “undescribed.” Why were they “undescribed?” Because, it seems, they had only at that moment been done. Plates with a few scratches on them--clever, since they were Whistle, but each plate less important than the last--passed quickly into the hands of men who had, presumably, much money and only a little knowledge.

During the last five or six years, with a creditable and natural reaction from what would seem to have been a fever of immature fruitfulness--in the midst of which, after all, this exquisite and ever dainty artist did, of course, nothing ugly, though much that was rather provokingly thin--Mr. Whistler has, from time to time, produced a few new plates of serious interest and of finest accomplishment. The Brussels group belongs, in spirit, if not precisely in fact, to these latest years; and charming is the seeming intricacy, yet assured lightness, of the Whistlerian treatment of Flemish house-front. Again, there are delightful little things wrought in the country of the Loire: not solid records, but, as it were, fleeting visions of its architecture, and very fascinating. But the best of all the later work, and it is among the very latest that has yet been seen, is the quite admirable “Zandaam,” over whose stretched line the breeze from across dyke and fen and Zuyder Zee, stirs here, stirs there, stirs everywhere, the wings of the windmills of Holland.

X.

SEYMOUR HADEN.

Several years before Mr. Whistler etched at all--in 1843 and 1844 indeed--a now veteran artist, President “_de sa propre Académie_,” who has been famous surgeon as well as famous etcher--founder of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, energetic advocate, by speech and writing, of the art he loves--drew delicately upon six tiny plates what were meant to be the beginnings of landscapes in mid-Italy. As rare as anything in Mr. Whistle long _œuvre_--though, as their author knows, in themselves far less desirable--are the impressions of those little plates, which few have seen, but which I beheld, perhaps ten or twelve years ago, strengthened here and there with pencil-work, yet even then only feebly holding their own, among the abundant treasures of an upper chamber in Hertford Street--the almost unknown initial chapter, they, in the sturdy and now celebrated volume of Seymour Hade etched work.

The days when they were executed were about the days of the Etching Club, a body which in its turn was followed by the Junior Etching Club. These clubs left us no legacy we care to inherit; their productions were for the most part fidgety, prim, at best desperately pretty and ridiculously elaborated, so that there was practically nothing in them of visible and expressive line. A little--just a little--of that visible line there was--there actually was, even in an unenlightened period--in those few trifling plates of Seymour Hade on which his first work was accomplished. He wrought nothing for many years afterwards. Then, in 1858, when Whistler, by this time his brother-in-law, was already busy, Seymour Haden--urged thereto by the knowledge of good work executed in France at that moment, and by a fitting reverence for the master etchings of Rembrandt--took up some coppers seriously; and he set down upon them, in this and the few following years, with an appreciation not less certain and immediate than Mr. Whistle of those laws to which etchings should conform, his powerful and personal impressions of English landscape, of the trout stream, and the stately river, of forest trees, a sunset over the Thames, of the yews and cedars of an English country-house (“Mytton Hall”), of the reflections, in some quiet

water, of the homely buildings of a little whitewashed town in Wales (“Kidwelly Town”).

A few years later, when the achievements of Haden had grown numerous, the intelligent French critic, Monsieur Philippe Burty (whom the revival of etching greatly interested), praised and chronicled them in the “Gazette des Beaux-Arts.” There were fifty or sixty prints by that time. This was in 1864. And in 1865 and 1866, about thirty of them--including the minor but still attractive plates used as “head” or “tail-pieces”--were formally published in Paris, with a French text which consisted in part of an excellent analytical and didactic letter, written in the foreign tongue, by the artist to Monsieur Burty.

1864 and 1865 were years of great productiveness, and among educated lovers of Art, at home and in France, popularity, hitherto denied to the etcher--for Whistler was little appreciated and Méryon was starving--courted Haden with its blandishments, or threatened him with its dangers. Of the “Shere Mill Pond” Mr. Hamerton spoke in “Etching and Etchers” in terms of what I cannot but think was somewhat exaggerated praise. In 1870, the large and impressive plate of “The Breaking up of the ‘Agamemnon’”--“large” I say; not “huge,” for “the huge plate is an offence”--put the coping-stone upon that edifice of Seymour Hade celebrity to which the writings of Mr. Hamerton (in the now standard volume I have already referred to) had contributed an important storey. Mr. Hamerton, at that period, there can be little question, did not fully appreciate Mr. Whistler. I am not certain that he ever did. He already wrote of him--need I say?--with intelligence and interest, but his enthusiasm was reserved, so far as the moderns are concerned, for Méryon and for Haden.

Save for an exceptional activity in the year 1877--the year of the Dorsetshire dry-points and of the Spanish etchings--the productiveness of Seymour Haden, since 1869, began visibly to slacken. In 1879 it stopped. The 185 etchings chronicled by Sir William Drake in “A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Francis Seymour Haden” had all been executed; and soon afterwards--either during Seymour Hade visit to America or during a visit of Mr. Keppe to these shores--the veteran artist said to the New York print-dealer: “I shall etch no more.” I imagine Mr. Keppe countenance of surprise and regret, and Seymour Hade interested observation of it. But the incident was not over. The artist brought out his etching-needle; looked at it; placed it gravely in

Mr. Keppe hands. It was presented to him as a sign that that which had been spoken would surely be fulfilled, and the etcher would etch no more. Like Madame Arnould-Plessis, like Macready, too, but like how few of his fellows in any department of public effort, this artist withdrew himself from productiveness before ever the quality of his production had visibly failed.

Perhaps I shall do well, in one or two last paragraphs about him, to name, for convenience sake, a few of Sir Seymour Hade most excellent and most characteristic works--prints in which his vivid impression of the object or the scene before him has been most vividly or, it may be, subtly conveyed--prints, perhaps, which have his most distinguishing qualities of directness and vigour. The etchings of Seymour Haden are deliberately arrested at the stage of the frank sketch; but it is the sketch conceived nobly and executed with impulse. It is not the sketch upon the thumb-nail; it is not the memorandum that may be made upon a ma shirt-cuff at dinner-time, in the interval between the soup and the fish.

The tendency of his work, as time went on, was, as is usual, towards greater breadth; but, unless we are to compare only such a print as “Out of Study-Window,” say (done in 1859), with only the most admirable dry-point, “Windmill Hill” (done in 1877), there is no greatly-marked contrast, no surprise; there is but a steady and slow and apparently inevitable development. This I in part attribute to the fact that when Seymour Haden took up etching seriously in 1858, he was already middle-aged. He had lived for years in frequent intercourse with noble and accomplished Art; his view of Nature, and of the way of rendering her, or letting her inspire you, was large, and likely to be large, almost from the beginning. Yet, as time went on, there came, no doubt, an increasing love of the sense of spaciousness, of breadth, and of potent effect. The work was apt to become more dramatic and more moving. The hand asked the opportunity for the fuller exercise of its freedom.

“Sawley Abbey,” etched in 1873, is an instance of this, and I am glad to mention it, not alone for its merits, but because, like a certain number of its fellows among the later work, it is etched on zinc--a risky substance, which succeeds admirably when it succeeds, and when it fails, as Sir Seymour tells me, fails very much. “Windmill Hill,” “Nine-Barrow Down,” “Wareham Bridge,” and “The Little Boathouse,” and, again, that “Grim Spain” which illustrates my “Four Masters of Etching,” are the prints which I should most choose to possess

amongst those of Seymour Hade later time; whilst, going back to the period of 1864 and 1865, “Sunset on the Thames” is at the same time popular and strong, and “Penton Hook” remarkable for its draughtsmanship of tree-trunk and stump. Yet earlier--for they belong to 1860 and 1859--“Combe Bottom” is unsurpassed for sweetness and spontaneity, “Mytton Hall” for its full share of that element of Style which is never wholly absent from Seymour Hade work, and “The Water Meadow” is to be studied and enjoyed as an extraordinarily happy transcript of a sudden rain-storm in the Hampshire lowlands, where poplars flourish and grass grows rank.

XI.

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. Simple, serious, austere, highly refined, yet with curious tolerance of physical ugliness, and curious indifference to the beauty, at all events, of women, Monsieur Legros has conveyed to us, in his own leisurely and economical fashion, any time these thirty years, his vision of a world not ours, or

rather, very often, his vision of the deeper realities which underlie whatever may attract us on the surface.

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. Gambetta, too, and Sir Frederic Leighton, and Cardinal Manning--who, if he appealed to him at all, must have appealed to him on the side of austerity alone--have been the subjects of Legro etched portraiture. To each portrait he has given, though in very different measures, according as the subject wanted it, a nobility and dignity supplied by his own art and temperament, and by a sense of Style nourished upon the study of the Renaissance and of Rembrandt. And, on the other hand, upon each selected model whom he has treated in those other etchings which are not confessedly portraiture, he has bestowed the grave veracity, the verisimilitude of the portrait.

Hardly any of Legro work is dated, and, as time has passed, the changes in his method have not been very marked, though it is hardly to the earliest etching that we must go for his most trained draughtsmanship and most accomplished technique. On the other hand, the early work has about it a sometimes savage earnestness, a rapid and immediate expressiveness, a weirdness also, which are immensely impressive. 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. In its visible dignity, its true but limited _camaraderie_, in its monotony and quietude, in its magnificence of service and symbol, the life of the priest, and of those who serve in a great church, has impressed Legros profoundly, and he has etched these men--one now reading a lesson, one waiting now with folded hands, one meditative, one observant, and now one offering up the

Host, and now another bending over the violoncello with slow movement of the hand that holds the bow. Dignity and ignorance, pomp and power, weariness, senility, decay, and almost squalor--nothing has escaped him. In Literature, only a Balzac could have done equal justice to that which attracts, and to that which must needs repel.

Realist, but always poet, in his treatment of these themes--and in the treatment of such a dramatic plate as “ncendie,” such a nobly imaginative plate as “La Mort et le Bûcheron”--Legros, when he betakes himself to landscape, is realist no longer, or, rather, his realism here is shown only in his contentment with the homely scene, the most everyday material. 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. And out of the glance, and out of the memory, and out of the artis genuine sympathy with humble and monotonous days, there has grown a homely poem.