Part 4

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. And certainly the public choice in this instance lighted upon work that was admirable and accomplished, spontaneous and effective--work not a little akin to that in Seymour Hade admirable “Water-Meadow,”

work not proceeding to a conscious elaboration, yet not stopping short of the point at which even for the many it may be expressive. Its quality, however, good as it is, does not really give it a unique place in the list of Gof labours; other plates--some that would be considered very humble ones--show virtues quite as valuable. Few etchers are Gof equals, fewer still go beyond him, in composition of line, in arrangement of light and shade; and as he firmly possesses this science, it is natural that very many of his plates, and not only one or two of them, should satisfactorily display it. “Norfolk Bridge, Shoreham”--of which a reproduction is given here--displays it delightfully. The unity of impression is complete; the grouping well-nigh faultless--there is the light arch of the bridge and the dark mass of clustered town behind it; church and houses and timbered sheds set amidst the winding of tidal waters; muddy shores, from above whose low sky-line there rises now and again the mast of a fishing-smack.

In “Winchester”--a little plate of great simplicity and reticence--there is the note of a mood and of an hour, as well as of a place. 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 a whit less admirable--a complete and satisfying picture, wrought with strength and delicacy--is “Pine Trees, Christchurch.” Then there is the peace of “Itchen Abbas Bridge”--the little dry-point with the mille house, the waving poplar, the granary, and the slow stream. In another plate, less personal, and perhaps less happy, but still good, there is the picturesqueness of the Lewes street; in the “Ford, Shoreham,” complex activity, fullness of theme. In the “South Cone,” the great broad waves that swing about the base of Brighton Pier, not only suggest the wind and moving waters that the title implies, but have a certain decorative quality, possible only when the process of “selection” has been just, and the visible labour somewhat sternly simplified. “The Chain Pier, Brighton,” combines in high degree the charms of elegance and mystery. See the foreshortening of the steep, high wall, the delicacy of the Chain Pier and little fleet of skiffs, the reticent, suggestive touch in those grouped houses by the “Albion.” “Charing Cross Bridge,” by reason of its subtle arrangement, its victory over difficult material--more even than the “Métropole,” with the dark cliff of masonry and the lighted lamps along the Brighton “front”--is perhaps the best of all the several plates which are deliberately devoted to the treatment of such things as

seem prosaic to the person whose poetry is conventional.

Most of Gof plates give proof of thorough draughtsmanship, to the discerning; though nowhere is such draughtsmanship paraded or made obvious. In one most recent plate, however, devoted to a subject of which the inartistic, unimaginative mind, and the insensitive hand, would have made mere pattern--I mean the etching of the bared boughs of a weird apple tree--the draughtsmanship is, of necessity, and happily, conspicuous. But the thing is not pattern at all, and though we follow with delight the intricate line, there is the charm of an impression as well as the fidelity of a record. There is accent about the etching; emphasis, vitality; an atmosphere plays, as it were, amongst the boughs; the tree is not the tree only, but a part of Nature and the day.

Gœthe said to that disciple to whom he most fully unveiled himself,--to the privileged Eckermann,--“_All_ my poems are ‘occasional’ poems.” In that resided their freshness, and Gœthe knew it well. “All my etchings are ‘occasional’ etchings,” could be said by nearly every fine etcher, too wise to set forth upon the picturesque tour with the deliberate resolution to perpetrate particular prints. For the art of etching, if it is to yield you its peculiar charm, must have been exercised--I cannot say this thing too often--only upon spontaneous promptings. There are very few exceptions. Méryon himself--that greatest genius, perhaps, in original engraving whom our Nineteenth Century has known, and one of the most elaborate of artists,--was not really an exception; for, slow as his work must have been, the unity of impression preserved throughout so long a labour--the original impulse--was there, which the circumstance created. The spontaneity is essential. And few men better than Colonel Goff have executed spontaneous work with the resources of a firmly-held knowledge.

XVIII.

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. Yet I cannot feel that any great proportion of his work, thus far, has quite enough originality or freedom; and if he is to live and last as an original engraver--as I believe he may--he will have to acquire these virtues in yet larger measure. Meanwhile, here are a few comments on certain of the best of his most studiously wrought pieces, of which even the least attractive do not lack a workmanlike accomplishment.

“The Arch,” a composition of curious shape--a tall, narrow plate--is a performance of solidity and brightness, although it shows that Mr. 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!” you say. “The Palace, Stirling”--a dark forbidding interior--has certainly about it a grim Celtic imagination, and is individual in that. The oppositions of light and shade are at once strongly marked and skilful--their distribution quite successfully studied--in “White Horse Close.” “The Dolphins” (1892) is full of vigour and vitality. Even better, perhaps, is “St. John Street, Stirling;” because its draughtsmanship is at once freer and more hesitating--not fixed and petrified, that is, but trembling with the semblance of life. And in the background of “A Rembrandt Farm,” Mr. Cameron has wonderful reminiscences, both of the maste touch and of his way of looking at the wide-stretched landscape that he cared for the most. Nor does the plate suffer perhaps from being for once a deliberate imitation, successfully accomplished. Yet I admire Mr. Cameron more--my hope for his Future is more certain--when I hold in my hand a good impression of his “Border Towers”--a composition of his own North country--a thing in which the inspiration has been very personal, and the fine work of detail has been obtained at no sacrifice of noble breadth.

XIX.

PENNELL.

Mr. Pennell is an extremely clever, energetic, dexterous American, who has found profitable employment in our English land. He has shown himself to be a ready journalist in draughtsmanship. Drawing architecture and the scenes of the street, he has produced not a little art that is at once popular and tolerable; and he has even written about Art, dealing sometimes with far profounder people than his own order of mind permits him thoroughly to fathom. “Critic,” therefore, I cannot call him, but able draughtsman, in a limited field, he unquestionably is.

A somewhat small proportion of Mr. Pennel work has consisted of etching, and in this he has shown, first, it appears, the influence of Seymour Haden, and next, the influence of Whistler. Had he but brought a personality to be enriched and fructified by great traditions! That, however, has been denied him; and, possessed

well of the grammar of his art, and of some of the best of its methods, he yet, as his own work reveals him, is, at times, uninteresting, since he is always unimaginative. Vista he has none. Yet, how good can his work be when the subject comes easily to help him! Nor is that seldom. The plate of “Le Puy en Velay,” of which I give a reproduction, and which I like so much, recalls a noble Dürer background--takes our thoughts to those great elder masters who, from certain remarks that he has made about them, I judge that Mr. Pennell scarcely likes at all. It is the irony of circumstance.

XX.

MENPES.

Though Mr. Mortimer Menpes had etched not a few coppers before he gave us the long series which recorded his impressions of Japan--and though, no doubt, he has etched from time to time since then--it is by the forty plates which constitute that Japanese set that he establishes his best claim to be regarded as an artist, serious and interesting. Traces of the Whistlerian vision, if not of the Whistlerian method, are perceptible in these memoranda of the people and the theatre, and of the long and low-built towns that stretch themselves sometimes along the edge of sleeping waters. But the art of Mr. Menpes is not all of it derivative. Something there is that is of himself alone, in the impression received and in the manner of its registration. He has economy of means, and yet abundance of resource. He is not merely a draughtsman

who has chosen to etch: he is an etcher whose feeling for the capacity of his particular medium has in it much that is instinctive.

XXI.

RAVEN-HILL.

Mr. Raven-Hill--the artist who adds piquancy to comic newspapers--is little known as an etcher; but his work upon the copper is delicate, rightly precise and rightly free--it is in the best etche manner--and if it is as yet so little recognized, that is only because it is so scanty and has been so seldom exhibited. From several points of view the small array of Mr. Raven-Hil etched work is interesting and valuable; it is, almost invariably, observant record and admirable craftsmanship; and not the least legitimate of its sources of interest lies in the fact that in it the presence of the refined artist, as distinct from that of the smart comic illustrator, is markedly asserted. Hereafter it may be that Mr. Raven-Hill will choose to etch, and to etch ably, scenes from the life of which, in other mediums, he has been, deservedly, a popular exponent. Tom, Dick, and Harry--Harriet,

too, by all means--will then have their day upon the copper, nor will clown and _cabotin_ be left out of the account. But, hitherto, the best of Mr. Raven-Hil few etchings record scenes Whistler might have chosen, and do so with a touch and choice of line which, it may well be, that master might not desire to disown.

XXII.

MACBETH AND HERKOMER AND AXEL HAIG.

So much said, and yet nothing said of men a dozen times more popular than the generally single-minded etchers are wont to be, of whom in chief I have spoken. But to the large public, Macbeth and Herkomer and Axel Haig appeal without need of introduction--Macbeth and Haig appeal especially by treatment, and Herkomer especially by subject. 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; nor is there reason to think that the plate, the needle, and the aquafortis constitute in any special way his proper

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. These, or the effects of them, elaborate and interesting, he reproduces, as far as may be, in the print. For nearly twenty years he has, from time to time, etched his own conceptions, and during much of this long period the public has surely benefited by his able, dexterous translations of great or charming masters, from Velasquez to Mason. A certain proportion of his original work upon the copper was performed--and not indeed unnaturally--before Mr. Macbeth became familiar with the technical resources of the craft. Thus, the “Potato Harvest”--an interesting subject, and treated, as to its composition, very characteristically--is, as an etching, grey and colourless. “The Cambridgeshire Ferry” (of 1881), with that free, swinging, rustic girl he likes to paint, has excellent points about it, and would be called “important” by a dealer. Later, “A Cast Shoe” is luminous as well as elaborate. “Flora”--a print of 1882--is very spirited and rich, and has the sentiment of the morning. But I am not sure whether the purist in the etche art would not like most of all the rapid and indicative sketch of “A Flood in the Fens.” It is a slight study, with the rare note of action and of tragedy--a free dramatic record.

Mr. 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. His intelligence, alas! is well-nigh unnecessary. And yet, as you look at the long record of buildings whose aspect has been grasped and presented by Mr. Haig with diligence and skill, you must respect, in the artist, much of his craftsmanship, and his great German quality of untiring and sagacious effort.

XXIII.

SOME OTHER ETCHERS.

I cannot pretend that the artistic individuality of Elizabeth Armstrong and Minna Bolingbroke (now Mrs. Stanhope Forbes and Mrs. C. J. Watson) is yet sufficiently marked to allow either to be the subject of a critical essay; but in the record of an Art in which--as in so many others--it seems generally to be decreed to women, “Thus far, and no further,” it is useful and satisfactory to note the closeness of observation and the skill of hand possessed by these two ladies. In Miss Armstrong the world some time ago recognized a particularly dainty draughtswoman; and the little print which is submitted here as an example of her talent, is a refined Genre picture. To Genre, too, belongs that which, so far as I have had the opportunity of knowing, is the happiest effort of Miss Bolingbroke. It is singularly good; the subject chosen pluckily, where only a Modern would have ventured to find it; and then the theme pictorially conceived, in the true etche spirit--this admirable little dry-point is a vision of the factory, broad, luminous, and rich. One or two other dry-points by the same artist--dry-points of plump birds, and live stock of the farmyard--suggest the possibility that in her quest for themes Miss Bolingbroke may follow in the track of a great Frenchman, and may meet with a success akin to some extent to that of Bracquemon masterpiece, “Le Haut n battant de Porte.”

Mr. Percy Thomas--a graceful draughtsman of ancient English buildings, and of the incidents of the River--must be reckoned almost as of the Old Guard, amongst the etchers of the present generation. He etched before Etching became fashionable; and now that he has long been beset with friendly and accomplished rivalry, he yet proceeds to make additions to the bulk, and perhaps even to the range, of his labours. An inequality more marked than any we are wont to perceive in the work of an important master, tells, perhaps, to some extent, against his position. And though his manner is often pretty, and is generally refined, it is but seldom distinguished. He has worked, it may be, too much, and, it may be, not always in obedience to the spontaneous prompting. Yet his methods

have ever been legitimate, and he has attained grace. His “Dorking”--with its long perspective of the sunny street in some hour of the summer afternoon--is a piece of agreeable and capable, and even of elaborate, sketching; and his “Old Lighthouse, Hastings”--one of the most entirely satisfactory of his coppers--has the charm of an admirable composition conveyed by simple and certain means.

Among the other aquafortists practising from time to time amongst us--not to speak of the more recent of the promising recruits to the Society of Painter-Etchers, who have yet to make their history--mention should not be altogether omitted of Mr. W. L. Wyllie, whose popular marine subjects need evoke no opposition, even where, as exhibitions of the etche art, they scarcely deserve to attract.

Again, there is Dr. 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 of his placid, sympathetic observation of the ordinary land, and of his ability to record the charm he was not tardy in feeling. The etched work of Mr. Holmes May is, most of it, I think, more recent. It is a vigorous, independent sketching of landscape. It notes tree-form with energy and sky effects with refinement.

That potent, brilliant, but eccentric Spaniard, fashionable naturally among the younger men for his unquestioned audacity of talent--I mean, of course, Goya--has been, it would appear, the chief inspirer of a few clever prints done recently by Mr. Rothenstein, in frank, fantastic illustration of Voltair “Pucelle rléans.” In Mr. Rothenstei few things--too few as yet to permit us to really judge him as an etcher--we see, along with some inventiveness which is the artis own, not only Goy style, but Goy method--an effective, dexterous mingling of the etched line with aquatint.

Again, the Whistlerian spirit finds appropriate expression in the vivacious prints of Mr. Walter Sickert and of Monsieur Roussel--many of them engaging, interesting, and unconcealed impromptus, towards which any word of adverse criticism would be but ill-addressed. And, lastly, ere I turn to treat at greater length the work of one who is a born etcher, and an etcher

chiefly--Monsieur Paul Helleu--let there be brief recognition of the true artis instinct which caused Mr. Alfred East, our admirable landscape painter, to record, with the solidity and massiveness so possible to dry-point, his impression of “A Hurrying Wind.”

XXIV.

HELLEU.

The copper on which some master of etching will, sometimes in an hour, engrave in dry-point the latest of his conceptions, the newest impression he has received from the world, is, like the pages of a draughtsma sketch-book, the revelation of just that thing that strikes him the most. 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; for he has been

inspired by the material that he was readiest to receive. And so in the work of that brilliant artist in dry-point to whom I turn last of all, there is evident the sign of his own leanings, the engaging suggestion of those things in his daily life which he most sympathetically notes. And M. Helleu is, above all things, the recorder of the beautiful or the refined interior, with its charm of artistic and harmonious detail--its charm, above all, of feminine life, or of the life of children.

It is as an artist working in pastels that M. Helleu--a man still in young middle age--happens to have been longest known. And his pastels have, not unnaturally, been for the most part portraits. In them he has evinced, and more, it may be, than in his latest portraits in dry-point, the skill of the likeness-taker. 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. He has found in England much appreciation; he has worked here to some extent; and his contributions to the Society of Painter-Etchers have been frequent as well as delightful.