Part 3

With Mr. 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; and the picture which his hand fashions--the hand with reverie behind it--is one which travel will help no one to encounter, and experience help no one to realize. Yet it has its own value.

Before I leave this deeply interesting and so original artist, I will add that in the “Catalogue Raisonné de uvre gravé et lithographié lphonse Legros,” compiled by Messieurs Thibaudeau and Poulet-Malassis in 1877, there are chronicled 168 pieces, but that, writing to me ten years later, M. Thibaudeau was able to tell of nearly ninety additions to the list. Since then the number has been yet further extended, for Legros, to this day, has not ceased to etch.

XII.

WILLIAM STRANG.

Professor, during something like a score of years, at the Slade School in London, Legros had then a dominating influence upon many amiable followers who will hardly hereafter be heard of, and upon two or three clever people with a future in Art. Among these latter--if, for our present purpose, we disregard men who are painters exclusively, like Tuke and Gotch--the most conspicuous are William Strang and Charles Holroyd. Strang is the senior. He has thus far, naturally, been much the most prolific. He is also the most technically accomplished, and, more than any younger etcher of the day--almost as much, indeed, as Monsieur Legros--he has shown himself possessed of the vital gift of imagination. Like Legros, he has looked immensely at Old Masters--at the Italian Primitives and at Rembrandt--and has seen Nature in great measure through their eyes, and this as much when Humanity as when Landscape has been the object of his gaze. In Stran case, too, to these accepted and avowed Old Masters, there has come to be added another Old Master--I mean, Alphonse Legros.

Strang is a Scotsman. That devotion to the weirdness and the uncanny, which is a note of the full Celtic temperament, is shown amazingly in his selection of subject; he is, perhaps, most of all contented with himself when he sets himself to illustrate a ballad of the supernatural, written in a dialect into the last recesses of which I--who love best the English tongue--lack, I confess, the energy to penetrate. His imagination, however, is far from being exercised alone on these themes of the supernatural. It is occupied, not seldom, with as great a power, upon modern incidents treated with quaintness and intensity--the meditations of a jury, the expositions of a preacher, the rescue of the drowned from some dark river, the ill-bred hysteria of the Salvation Army. In portraiture, while it is yet visible, and even valuable, it is controlled sometimes by sense of Style, and then we have, as in the almost Vandyke-like portraits of Mr. Sichel, and of Jan Strang--the nearest approach which Mr. Strang suffers himself to make to the wide domain of beauty. His customary indifference to charm of form, to charm of

expression, to that which is agreeable and comely, to that which the natural man would voluntarily look upon, is yet more marked--a hundred times more marked--than Mr. Legro. Grace, elegance, personal distinction, the freshness of youth, the winsomeness of girlhood, the acceptability of the English upper classes--these things are far from him: he wots not of them, or but rarely. He likes poor folk, enjoys the well-worn clothes, the story of the poor fol work and poor fol trouble. For that I do not blame him. But, like Ostade and Brouwer, he likes the cottager best when he is stunted, and is most interested in him when he is gnarled.

For all the absence--an absence frequent, not continuous--of local colour, the scenes Mr. Strang depicts arrest you. You remember them because he has himself remembered that which was most important in the making of them. Essentials have not escaped him. The “realism” he has attained has been at least something much deeper than that which prides itself on the correct portrayal of the obvious. In great themes and little themes he has been alike vivid. There may be something that is squalid and something that is ignoble in “The Last Supper” as he can conceive it; but, at all events, a genuine human emotion is not banished from the scene. He is Von Uhde-like in that. And here and there, in brief suggestive studies of contemporary existence, an imaginative light is flashed upon the page, a touch of romance suggested, as where, in the curious little etching of a Bohemian wayfarer--a someone who has lost caste probably, whose pence and whose friends are few--lighting his pipe at a flaring gas-jet over some street bookstall on a Saturday night, you feel that for a moment there has sprung into your vision a fellow-creature with a history, whose mysteriousness you will not solve. Out of the darkness he has emerged for an instant, and into it he returns again.

This very remarkable artist has already executed not less than two hundred and fifty etchings.

XIII.

CHARLES HOLROYD.

A residence of two or three years in Italy--where he enjoyed the Slade School Travelling Studentship--has vied with the tuition of Mr. Legros in influencing that more than promising etcher, Mr. Charles Holroyd. A sense of dignity and Style, and, with this, some direct personal inspiration, lift Mr. Holroy work entirely above the level of the commonplace and the ordinary. In sense of line, indeed, he not seldom makes approach to the classic. He has affinity with Claude and with George Barret.

Several of the best of Mr. Holroy not yet very numerous prints--each one of which is well-considered, thorough and serious work--deal worthily, truly that is, and yet imaginatively, with the lives of ecclesiastics, among the cypresses and olive woods and pine-trees of Monte Oliveto, and in the gaunt and spacious chambers of the remote and hillside monastery, in which Mr. Holroyd, with his love of Italy and of its graver life, was sometime minded to abide. Thus, in the Monte Oliveto series, we have the sombre yet pictorial incident of “Midnight Mass,” and, again, the “Ladies’ Guesthouse,” with its Tiepolo-like charm.

The homeliness of subject in his “Farm behind Scarborough” does not forbid the display of certain of Mr. Holroy virtues. Yet perhaps more characteristic is the “Round Temple,” or that “study of line” suggested by the noble and free beauty of the Borghese Gardens. “Round Temple” is the fuller, the more realized. “Borghese Gardens” consciously and inevitably abandons much that is wont to attract, but it retains the thing for which it has existed--dignified and expressive rhythm of line. And this justifies it, and permits it to omit much, and only to exquisitely hint at the thing it does not actually convey.

XIV.

FRANK SHORT.

Amongst the original etchers remaining to be discussed I place Frank Short almost at the top of the tree. Some people will say that Shor true place would be with copyists or interpreters rather; but that is only because they do not know his original work--the very limited issue of his original plates having withheld from them a publicity won already indeed by many of his brilliant interpretations of the pictures or the drawings of long-accepted artists. No one--not even Mr. Wehrschmidt or Mr. Gerald Robinson--has done as much as Frank Short for the modern revival of mezzotint. It is more perhaps by mezzotint than by any other medium that Mr. Short has effected his delightful translations of Turner, of Constable, of Dewint, and of Watts. But if not one of these things existed--if he had never wrought those exquisite interpretations, for example, of a sketch by Constable, belonging to Mr. Henry Vaughan, and of a Dewint drawing, “A Road in Yorkshire”--if nothing of this work whatever had been done by Mr. Short, then would he still have cause to be remembered and valued by reason of the beauty and the technical virtues of his original prints.

Frank Shor original prints are, indeed, of all the greater merit because, just as Mr. Whistler himself, he has disregarded in them, from beginning to end, the taste of the everyday public. This delicate array of exquisite etching--very little of it merely tentative; most of it of complete accomplishment, if of limited aim--has been called into being, as Mozart said of his “Don Giovanni,” “for himself and two friends.” 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.

But the two classes of subject with which one has been wont to identify him are subjects of the English coast and of the English manufacturing districts; and, in a certain sense, even these two subjects are one, and this one theme may be described--not too imaginatively, I think, if we look into the heart of the matter--as the complete acceptance of all that is considered unpicturesque in modern life: in the manufacturing districts, the factory chimneys, the stunted, smoke-dried trees, the heavy skies, the dreary level water, along which barges make their monotonous way (see the interesting dry-point, “Wintry Blast on the Stourbridge Canal”), and, on the English coast, the massive stone pier, the harbour muddy at low tide, the tug, the sheds, the warehouses, or it may be perhaps the wooden fences that protect and preserve the foreshore--the beauty of the whole, which is unquestionable, being obtained by a particularly subtle arrangement of line, a perfect sense of proportion, a perfect delicacy of handling. Coarser people, of more ordinary vision, addressing themselves, as by a _parti pris_, to these themes, have treated them with brutality. But, on these themes, it is the distinction of the treatment of Mr. Short that in rendering them with fidelity and patience--even with love--he yet somehow, in the brief phrase of Robert Browning--

“Put colour, poetising.”

Yes, a certain measure of poetry must certainly be claimed not only for the “Evening, Bosham” and the “Sleeping till the Flood,” but for the “Stourbridge Canal,” which has been mentioned already, and for the print of “Ry Long Pier”--this is called indeed, poetically enough in its suggestiveness, “Low Tide and the Evening Star”--and for the curiously clever little plate, “Wrought Nails,” a scene of the Black Country, which shows the sheds of the workers, and little trees untended and decaying, and a bit of waste land, ragged and dreary, with nothing of Nature left, but only the evidence of me grimy labours, of their hard, monotonous life. And, though up to the present, or until very lately, the field of Mr. Shor own observation of the world may seem to have been limited, it is plain to any qualified student of his prints that he has gained the effects he wanted by a fine sketche economy of means, by a thorough capacity of draughtsmanship, much sense of design, and a very exceptional control over the technical resources of the etche art.

XV.

C. J. WATSON.

The work of Mr. C. J. Watson is nearly always absolutely sturdy and sterling. It has tended, too, to become delicate; and when one compares it with Mr. Shor, very likely the only thing which puts it at an obvious disadvantage is that (though one can hardly explain the matter) it has an air of being less personal. That, I admit, is no small affair. Judging from the work alone--and no one would desire to make the comparison except from the work only--one would say, “Here is a strong and capable hand, stirred to expression by a nature much less sensitive than that which reveals itself in the etched lyrics of Frank Short.” Mr. Short records facts--not great and doleful dreams, like Mr. Strang or Mr. Legros--but he records facts poetically. More absolutely matter-of-fact is Mr. Watson, who (I am speaking of him, of course, apart from his agreeable gift of colour) so far portrays things realistically that the personal, the individual, is comparatively absent, and his art can hardly be described in the phrase which does define Art generally--Nature beheld “à travers n tempérament.”

But Mr. Watson, who has long been interesting, has of late years become within certain limits a first-rate craftsman, albeit still a little wanting in vivacity. It may be that his individuality--such individuality as he possesses--has to be sought for in the soundness of his technique, and in the ripe judgment which he shows in treating subjects which at least are true etche subjects. Practising his art during early manhood in Norwich, and being himself, with his sturdy realism, as it were, a last echo of that “Norwich School” in which only Cotman was essentially and primarily poet--and Cotman could be realistic, too--Mr. Watson came, a few years since, to London, and here he has developed his powers a stage further, there is no doubt; producing, in the first instance--since his residence in town, with its wider associations and its greater activities--plates admirable for directness and certainty, such as “The Mill Bridge, Bosham,” and then the “Chartres,” its gabled and dilapidated houses, rather; the back of Chartres--Chartres on the wrong side--and then the “St. Etienne du Mont,” its west front--that is, the front of one of the most curious and characteristic of the churches of Paris--and then the “Ponte del Cavallo,” a refined, if scarcely individual vision of Venice.

Some greater delicacy and flexibility of method than were before possessed, or than were even desirable, perhaps, for the subjects to which Mr. Watson in his earlier days addressed himself, are evident in the “Chartres;” but they are yet more marked in the “St. Etienne” etching, which no true lover, no properly equipped student, of the achievements of the great original aquafortists will be able to examine without some thought of the wonderful plate of Méryon which bears the same title. Of the relative correctness of the two presentations--not, in my opinion, an all-important, though still an interesting matter--I will say nothing, or at least very little; possibly it was Watson who had looked the hardest at the actual façade of which it was his one business to convey the impression. 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 character, had it been his aim. He had other aims, and this detail accordingly had to be at times subordinated; for him there was not the church alone, but the Collège de Montaigu and the corner of the Panthéon, and the weird shadows and the passing women, and the dark mystery of the Paris street. In a word, there was his genius and his message--fancy or fantasy. For Mr. Watson there was “land, the solid and safe,” as Mr. Browning moralizes; the solid earth, or what the architect had put there--nothing else. And what the architect had put there Mr. Watson noticed--portrayed it with strength--portrayed it, too, as afterwards the “Ponte del Cavallo,” with perhaps unwonted flexibility.

In simpler subjects than the “St. Etienne du Mont,” Mr. Watson shows as well as, or better, than there, a quality very characteristic of the truest of modern etchers--of Mr. Whistler and Mr. Short particularly--I mean, in what is more or less architectural draughtsmanship, after all, an enjoyment of the evidences of construction. Very likely it may be said that that is a quality belonging to him as a good draughtsman, whether, at the moment etching happens to be, or happens not to be, the medium of his work. I think not. There is something in the etched line that reveals especially the presence of this enjoyment--that calls for the certain display of it.

XVI.

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. Mr. Hal object is more likely to be a tree than a church. Architecture he does not attack, and his rare figures are but the figures of the landscape-painter. He labours amongst sylvan and amongst pastoral scenes that are not strikingly picturesque; and in method, as well as often in theme, he suggests Seymour Haden.

Mr. Hall has not yet wrought very many plates; they number, it may be, two score. He is not, in his work, always faultless, and perhaps he is not thus far very varied. But he is in the right track, and has shown no disposition to leave it. He has done beautiful things--the “Coniston Hall” one of the finest of them. He is a vigorous, frank, free sketcher, often sketching “effects,” as well as forms that vanish less quickly; and, in the realm of effects, the very spirited etching, “A Windy Day,” is perhaps the best of that which he has done. It is a scene on Angerton Moss, a stretch of open country rising to the right; the scattered trees and clustered farm buildings on the horizon line; and they are wind-swept, and wind is in the sky.

XVII.

GOFF.

The two contemporary etchers who interest me most, among those I have not had occasion, yet, to write of, are two men unlike, perhaps, in nearly everything except in their possession of the essential quality of impulse--I mean the Frenchman, Monsieur P. Helleu, and our fellow-countryman, Colonel Goff.

No--when I said they were unlike in nearly everything but the essential quality of impulse, that was clearly an exaggeration. Another thing they have in common besides impulsiveness of temperament and spontaneity of effort--a love of beautiful and of free “line.” Goff will show that in his studies of the hillside, of the shore, of foliage, of the tall grasses of the water-meadow, and of the winding stream; Helleu will show it in his studies of the most modern humanity, of the “Parisienne de Paris”--all that is most completely of the capital, subtle, refined, over-refined--but with how extenuating an elegance!--or, now again, of the young grace of well-bred girlhood, as in a certain “Etude de Jeune Fille,” with its wonderful union of Nineteenth-Century vividness with the grace of Reynolds or Gainsborough. And yet one other thing belongs to them in common--to these two men whose work presents, most certainly, in method as in subject, many a point of contrast. Both, being artists essentially, rather than merely skilled practitioners in a particular medium, swear no unbroken constancy to the art of the etcher--cannot avoid the keen perception and keen enjoyment of those “effects” and combinations for which it is not etching that affords the readiest or most appropriate means of record. And accordingly we have from Monsieur Helleu, pastels; from Colonel Goff, water-colour, wash heightened with pen-work, or pencil drawings, marked sometimes with a strong accent, at others blond and suave as silver-point itself.

Third-rate professional artists, and idle folk, or folk so busy that they have not had time to notice what good work has been done in Etching, and who it is that has done it, will at once discount Colonel Gof labours because I call him “Colonel.” But when I declare that he is, in the character of his work and in the fidelity and enthusiasm with which for years he has pursued it, no more of an “amateur” than is Sir Seymour Haden, he will be, I trust, even by the most commonplace of judges, forgiven the accident of military rank--his greatest crime being, after all, only that of having served in the Coldstream Guards. The offence may be condoned. Or, to speak seriously, I believe that military discipline, like the training of a surgeon bent on excellence in his own art, is, in truth, only an advantage. 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. 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.

Ten years of frequent “joyful labour”--Macduf inestimable phrase--in the art of 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; but in landscape, in marines, in town subjects, in subjects which involve now the expression of the passion of Nature, now the frankest introduction of every kind of modern detail of construction that is supposed to be ugly, and that the sentimental brushman declares to be “unpaintable,” Goff is thoroughly at home.