Part 6

The medium most particularly fostered in England is mezzotint engraving; originary from Germany, it found in the island kingdom a happy soil for its speedy growth. When Lely, Kneller, Gainsborough, Reynolds, and all that famous group of painters gave to the world their magnificent array of portraits, there existed no school of line engravers in England, no group of masterly engravers or etchers such as those of the Netherlands or of France. The field, therefore, was clear for mezzotint, and it seems as though no other process could have more adequately interpreted the achievements of the great portraitists. Their prevalent breadth of treatment, devoid of small, niggling detail, their numerous women’s portraits, with soft, rounded forms, subtle transitions of tone, sparkling accents of light and blending depths of shadow, were admirably suited to the “black art.” Hence the rise, during the eighteenth century, of a large school of mezzotint engravers, who attained great perfection in their chosen medium, progressing from prints of a sooty, black appearance to plates of clear, fine texture, like the portrait of Mrs. Carnac here reproduced, an engraving by John Raphael Smith. One is apt, quite naturally, to accord to engravings like this the credit due to the painter for his graceful composition. Quite aside, however, from matters of composition and beauty of subject, the mere charm of intense shadow and brilliant high light, with transitions of breath-like delicacy, rendered with the velvety richness peculiar to mezzotint, will readily explain the vogue and costliness of such prints. No half-tone reproduction, however good, can convey an idea of the texture of mezzotinting. An examination of good, early impressions of mezzotint portraits by such men as McArdell, Watson, Ward, Green, Reynolds, or other notables of the scraper, will prove their merits much more convincingly than words.

While portraiture is the field _par excellence_ of mezzotint achievement, other possibilities of the process are evidenced by plates like the flower and fruit piece here shown, in which Richard Earlom proves himself a gifted interpreter of Huysum. The varied surfaces, the delicate bloom on the fruit, and all those little touches dear to the Dutch painter--sparkling dewdrops, insects, the velvety underside of an overturned leaf--are faithfully reproduced. We almost seem to see the actual colors of the painting, so carefully have the values been gauged. In no other process could the painting have been transcribed more pleasingly. The mention of Earlom as the engraver of a large series of landscape plates, the “Liber Veritatis,” after sketches by Claude Lorrain, leads us to J. M. W. Turner, to whom these plates suggested the well-known “Liber Studiorum,” but of this more in our review of the nineteenth century.

In the matter of woodcut, little need be said in this brief outline, aside from Jackson’s _chiaroscuros_, until we come to Thomas Bewick and with him to an important revival of the relief process in modified form. Bewick recognized the possibilities of the wood block, if cut across the grain, instead of plank wise as used for the old woodcut. The plank block necessitates the use of the knife; a cross-grain block of boxwood on the other hand, permits the use of that king of instruments, the graver. Wood-engraving once established by Bewick, and elaborated by his followers, rapidly spread over Europe, ultimately to reach its highest form of technical perfection in the United States.

IX

THE UNITED STATES

In early days, the American colonies were indifferent if not inhospitable to the fine arts. Only portraiture and expressions of patriotism found a welcome, both in painting and engraving. These, with some maps, diagrams, and views, gave partial employment to a few engravers, with such additions to their number as landed from time to time from Europe for a sojourn more or less prolonged. Prominent among early arrivals was Peter Pelham, an artist of good abilities, who portrayed in mezzotint a number of New England ministers.

Passing on to the Washington period, we find in Charles Willson Peale an American painter-engraver of merit. Such mezzotint portraits as General and Lady Washington, Lafayette, Franklin, and others easily rank among the best native productions of that period. David Edwin, an immigrant from England, brought proficiency in stipple engraving. His merits can be judged from the best of his plates, the portrait of Thomas Jefferson, appropriately simple and dignified in execution. With the advancing nineteenth century, engraving becomes plentiful in this country. Publishers require many portraits, views, subjects of all kinds, nor must we forget the important and flourishing branch of bank-note engraving. This teeming activity brings with it a commercial sameness of execution, a workmanlike, metallic sleekness, not quite absent even in the charming vignettes of John Cheney, which adorn the gift-books of the forties and fifties. A portrait of Chief Justice Marshall, engraved by Asher Brown Durand, after Inman’s painting, is shown as an illustration of good nineteenth-century work. Generally speaking, portrait engraving had fallen into a rut, suggested by the tonality of photographs, a development shared by wood-engraving.

The ingenious innovation of the Englishman Thomas Bewick--which rejuvenated and refined the mishandled and discredited woodcut, by substituting cross-grained blocks of boxwood and the graver, for planks and the knife--was championed in America by Dr. Alexander Anderson. None of the early American wood-engravers were endowed with great artistic gifts, but ere long the steady demand by publishers brought to the fore men of acknowledged ability. Their achievements are plentifully illustrated in books and magazines; the “Still-life with the Peacock,” engraved by W. J. Linton, a well-known writer on wood-engraving, is reproduced here as a reminder of their skill. Originally the tendency of wood-engraving, or white-line engraving, as it is sometimes called, had been to obtain effects by white lines (the natural expression of the graver on the black surface of the block) and by black and white masses. As the wood-engraver grew proficient in his technique, he widened his field by imitating the effect of etching or engraving on copper, in rivalry with this form of illustration. In this he succeeded so well that the other, more expensive modes of adornment were largely driven from the field of book illustration. With the advent of photography, the design could be fixed upon the wood block mechanically, accurately, without the trouble of a careful drawing. The values of tone in the photograph relieved the engraver from the work of translating color-values into black and white. The blending half-tones of the photograph invited close imitation, and thus _tone-engraving_ developed, with its masses of fine lines, close together, merging into tone. Beautiful results were achieved in this way by men like Jüngling, French, Timothy Cole, Wolf, and many other engravers; but soon the human hand was dispossessed altogether by the half-tone plate which makes the photographic image printable by mechanical means alone.

The great European revival of etching extended to the United States in the seventies. It proved a fruitful period, with names like the Morans, Ferris, Farrar, Duveneck, Charles Platt, and many others which might be mentioned. The vogue of etching, it will be remembered, was short because mediocrities soon glutted the market and sent purchasers to other fields for a while. Interest in the process has awakened again of late, but that is matter of too recent date to be discussed in these few pages.

X

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

From a survey of prints in their varying national aspects, we have arrived now at that vast period of an art increasingly cosmopolitan, the nineteenth century. In these last hundred years nationality has blended together to a great extent; travel is not the serious matter of former times, a pastime rather than a venture; all races have intermingled in the great world-centers; students from far and near congregate in the centers of art. All these factors, and many others, contribute in making artistic expression individual, less and less national in character. No sudden phase, this, rather an insensible general trend toward individuality as the great requisite in an artist’s work. The masterpieces of the fine arts had been interpreted by means of prints since the sixteenth, and especially since the advent of the “classical” engravers in the eighteenth, century. The increasing number of these reproductive prints made it ever easier for an artist to acquaint himself, in a way, with the great achievements of the past. Finally photography, and in its wake the photo-mechanical processes, brought a flood of exact documents invaluable for study, a lure to imitation for the unimaginative or indolent, a spur to the real artist, helpful in forming his own powers.

Individuality seems the keynote of the nineteenth century; hence it may be as well not to bind ourselves to headings and subdivisions, but rather to roam at large through this enormous sphere. Goya, of whom we spoke in a preceding chapter, belongs here by right, and with Fortuny forms the Spanish contingent in the new awakening of the graphic arts. In England there lived, about the turn of the century, a visionary poet and great artist, William Blake, who fluently expressed himself in strangely fascinating compositions of religious or fantastic import, doubtless familiar to us all. Our concern is not with Blake’s drawings, in which he adds the charm of exquisite color to his command of expressive form. A plate taken from his remarkable series of illustrations to the Book of Job, shows his powerful, poetic conception of the beginning of life, when the world was young and the morning stars sang together. In a totally different way, illustrative of another phase of this same new awakening, the work of Daniel Chodowiecki shows a man concerned with the world which surrounds him. We see him here, at work in the midst of his family, on his little illustrations which went forth in their hundreds to embellish the bountiful stream of German literature.

Goya’s vivid, realistic allegories, Blake’s fantastic, powerful conceptions, Chodowiecki’s living portrayal of the world of his day, no longer follow the beaten track of imitative work,--all these activities point to a new phase in art. All this seems a reaction, a protest against the mental attitude, the set standards and ideals of the eighteenth century. The vignette, so gay and graceful in the hands of Eisen, Gravelot, or Moreau, had lost much of its _esprit_ in the heavier, more sober style of the Empire. The classical engraver was still in power, on the Continent as well as in England, where Boydell issued, in 1803, his monumental series of illustrations to Shakespeare’s plays in large folio plates. On the other hand, Constable had broken away from the accepted standards of landscape composition; he painted his native countryside as he saw it. England frowned upon him for this heresy, but his art was joyfully acclaimed in France. There arises everywhere a buoyant, youthful spirit, conscious of infinite possibilities, filled with unbounded aspirations. The leaders in the movement emancipate themselves from the sterile cult of precedent; they blaze new trails into the vast unknown, in their search for truth. Kant’s philosophy, Darwin’s theory of evolution, sufficiently denote the trend of the times; in literature, this is the period of Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, of Manzoni, of Goethe, of Nodier, Balzac, Victor Hugo. Barrye carries realism into his sculpture and such men as Delacroix, Decamps, and Célestin Nanteuil carry romanticism into French painting and French prints. Men, these, whose imaginative souls rebel against petrified classicism and formal, abstract beauty, and this protest of the young and ardent against the tyranny of the “old and accepted order of things” has been heard ever since,--sometimes the voice of coteries, sometimes that of individuals: Constable’s, for instance, which helped France in its remarkable awakening. His simple creed was faithfully transposed in terms of mezzotint by David Lucas. Unfortunately these effective landscape mezzotints are so fleeting in their delicate effects that they can be appreciated only in engraver’s proofs. The relative position of Constable and Turner, in English landscape, has been, not inaptly, compared with that of Van Dyck and Rubens in Flemish art. Certainly J. M. W. Turner was a sun in the English firmament, the painter of imposing canvases and water-colors of haunting loveliness; the leader likewise in a stupendous development of landscape engraving revealed in series like his “England and Wales” and his vignettes for “Roger’s Italy” among others of equal fame. Supreme among his prints stands a set known as “Liber Studiorum,” undertaken in rivalry with Claude Lorrain, whose memoranda sketches of pictures painted constitute the “Liber Veritatis,” engraved subsequently in England by Earlom. In his “Liber”[5] Turner proceeds to display his art in all its versatility, engraving some of the plates himself and closely supervising the mezzotinting of the others. This “Inverary Pier,” his own throughout, is a glorious vision of morning on the shores of Loch Fyne. The night mists are clearing in the sunlight; a luminous haze still trails along between the hills, beyond the quiet water. The scene suggests unbounded space and calm, peaceful beauty. Another plate, “Æsacus and Hesperie,” carries us into the depth of the woods. The figures are mere accessories: what we potently feel is the fragrant shade, emphasized by a slanting shaft of sunlight, which gleams on soil, branch, and leaf, and builds a pathway of light amidst the luminous shadows.

[5] A series of one hundred plates, seventy-one of which were published by the artist, then discontinued, because financially unsuccessful.

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In the early nineteenth century two new processes demand recognition: wood-engraving and lithography. The former, reviewed in the preceding chapter with reference to its development in America, speedily gained in technical perfection at the hands of English engravers. It spread far and wide in Europe, adapting itself to the charming illustrations of Ludwig Richter and doing full justice to the expressive, accurate line of Adolph von Menzel’s pen-and-ink work. Light and vivacious in the vignettes of Tony Johannot, Gigoux, Célestin Nanteuil, it grows somber in Doré’s designs for the Bible and for Dante’s “Divina Commedia.”

Shortly after the advent of wood-engraving, lithography appears, and offers the tempting inducement of utmost technical simplicity to the artist. The drawing is made on the stone or on transfer paper with lithographic ink or crayon; the transferring and preparation of the stone (or metal plate) with acid, gum, and water is left to the printer. No wonder that the process found wide favor and that it was put to a great variety of uses: innumerable portraits, endless series of views, costume plates, music titles, reproductions of pictures. In the hands of artists the process proves its merit by such prints as “Christ Disputing with the Doctors,” by Adolph von Menzel, that untiring pioneer of realism in Germany. The scene with its masterly characterization is astonishing in the play of expression on each face and figure. In France both processes burst into profuse bloom with the awakening of romanticism. The thirties and forties bring a wealth of notable lithographic productions, the work of Delacroix, Isabey, Géricault, Decamps, Diaz, and a host of other artists. Gavarni uses this easy medium to portray in thousands of sketches the life of all Paris. Daumier portrays the frailties of humanity in his cartoons for “Charivari” and “La Caricature,” or else wields his crayon as a formidable political weapon; in the print selected for illustration he shows us Louis Philippe at the death-bed of a political offender “who can now be released, being no longer dangerous.”

The fortunes of France, fraught with conquest under the first Napoleon, sink to humdrum levels with the Restoration. For years all recollection of the Emperor and his _Grande Armée_ is embittered by the final disaster. But passing years restore the luster of former great exploits, and gradually these become a favorite subject for illustration. The field is well covered by Charlet’s military scenes, though none of these approach the grandeur and skill displayed by Auguste Raffet. In his “Midnight Review” we see innumerable hosts of shades, passing in review before the phantom emperor on his white charger; an immense concourse insensibly merging into the mists of night.

In the forties there is a welcome revival of etching, Charles Jacque being one of the pioneers, skillful alike in his handling of acid and dry-point. His theme is the peasant’s life, his setting the wooded, undulating region about Barbizon: broad, sunny fields, thriving farms, pastures with cattle, sheep, and pigs, for which he shows an especial predilection. The peasant, here, is no longer the joyous, carousing, merry being of Ostade’s fancy. In the plates of Millet and Jacque we see him at his daily labors and the woman at her household tasks, as in the “Woman Churning,” by Jean François Millet, drawn in sober, telling lines, and evoking by some subtle magic a sense not only of the scene before us, but of her surroundings and her whole labor-laden life.

We must pass with a mention even such masters as Corot and Daubigny, both of whom have left us spirited examples, in etching, of their masterly interpretation of nature. The period we now reach brings a flood of etching, and it is but natural that the sketchy freedom, the suggestiveness sought by this new school, should conflict with the set, time-honored traditions of engraving. That serious old gentleman--Engraving--did not approve of the rollicking youngster who knocked at the gates of the Academy and the Institut for admission. The battle, after all, was not so much a quarrel between etching and engraving; rather a contest between formula _versus_ original thought. Both in England and France the same conflict arose, the etchers calling the other side mechanical, petrified; the engravers retorting that etching, “even in the hands of Rembrandt, is uncertain, blundering.” This dictum of Ruskin and the fiery rejoinder by Sir Seymour Haden are matters of history. Our illustration, the dry-point “Sunset in Ireland,” will sufficiently show that the president of the Painter-Etchers’ Society was as apt with the etching-point as he was formidable in debate. The painter-etcher is an originating artist, but the success of his creations on the copper depends a good deal on the skill of the printer, who can, by differences of inking, wiping, pressure, and heat make an impression hard or soft in effect, rich and dark or pale and silvery at wish. To a man of James McNeill Whistler’s exquisite sensibilities and refined taste this thought of dependence on another for his subtle effects of light and tone could not but prove unendurable. Therefore he installed a press at his home and did his own printing of choice impressions, realizing in these, to the fullest extent, the possibilities of effectiveness and beauty which we admire in his etchings. Art has been defined as a selection from the truth, and, indeed, the elimination of unimportant detail and the accenting of the essentials make for the great charm in Whistler’s etchings as well as in his numerous lithographs. From this versatile genius, delightful in his rendering of the human figure and likeness, who evokes with equal facility the shimmering vistas of Venetian lagoons or the quaintness of an old French street, who can fascinate with a fleeting glimpse of a fish-shop, or make a lovely vision of a foggy reach of the Thames, we must now turn to one who has forever fixed in his plates a truthful yet ideal likeness of old Paris. “Le Petit Pont” by Charles Meryon is a characteristic plate with heavy shadows, fine feeling for structural essentials, endless modifications of light, and with Notre Dame made duly impressive by lifting it high above the nearer buildings. Every plate has a character of its own, with here and there a weird reminder of the artist’s ultimate mental doom. Only a poet could have conceived a plate like the “Stryge,” that evil figure on Notre Dame, surveying the vast field of his conquests.

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As we survey the reproductive processes, they are drawn, one and all, into the current of new, original expression. Innovators appear even in the conservative camp of engraving; Ferdinand Gaillard, for instance, an _engraver_, in that he _uses_ the graver, though he uses it in a manner to him particular, expressive of minutest detail. “My aim,” he says, “is not to charm but to be truthful. My art consists in saying all.” And he expresses “all” in this wonderful portrait of Dom Prosper Guéranger. No detail has escaped him in his scrutiny of this strong, bright face with its searching, clear eyes. A counterpart of Gaillard--a painter-engraver similarly minute and precise with his burin--is Stauffer-Bern, a Swiss of German training.

Now, if we compare a print of the early times with the technical creations of our present day, we cannot but realize the increased demands made upon the artist. The phenomena of light must be ever studied anew, in the endeavor to attain new, effective, convincing ways of expression--not merely of color and form as heretofore, but of atmosphere, of light, of vibrating, living, I had almost said “moving,” nature. Hence impressionism; hence, also, daring experiments like this girl bathing, by Anders Zorn, the Swedish painter-etcher. Here is a distinct _outdoor_ feeling; the breeze and sun, the modeling of rock, and the softly rounded nude body against its hard face. Everything is done with long, slashing strokes, with hardly any definite outline; a wonderful display of skill. Another illustration, the “Expulsion from Paradise,” by that German master of many arts, Max Klinger, shows us an effect of most intense expression of light in the glaring foreground, where a merciless sun beats down on the first couple: a world all the more arid by contrast with the cool, shady woodland behind the huge, guarded gateway.