In the collecting of Prints—of prints which must be fine and may most probably be rare—there is an ample recompense for the labour of the diligent, and room for the exercise of the most various tastes. Certain of the objects on which the modern collector sets his hands have, it may be, hardly any other virtue than the doubtful one of scarcity; but fine prints, whatever School they may belong to, and whatever may be the money value that happens to be affixed to them by the fashion of the time, have always the fascination of beauty and the interest of historical association. Then, considered as collections of works of art, there is the practical convenience of their compactness. The print-collector carries a museum in a portfolio, or packs away a picture gallery, neatly, within the compass of one solander-box. Again, the print-collector, if he will but occupy himself with intelligent industry, may, even to-day, have a collection of fine things without paying overmuch, or even very much, for them. All will depend upon the School or master that he particularly affects. Has he[Pg 10] at his disposal only a few bank-notes, or only a few sovereigns even, every year?—he may yet surround himself with excellent possessions, of which he will not speedily exhaust the charm. Has he the fortune of an Astor or a Vanderbilt?—he may instruct the greatest dealers in the trade to struggle in the auction-room, on his behalf, with the representatives of the Berlin Museum. And it may be his triumph, then, to have paid the princely ransom of the very rarest “state” of the rarest Rembrandt. And, all the time, whether he be rich man or poor—but especially, I think, if he be poor—he will have been educating himself to the finer perception of a masculine yet lovely art, and, over and above indulging the “fad” of the collector, he will find that his possessions rouse within him an especial interest in some period of Art History, teach him a real and delicate discrimination of an artist’s qualities, and so, indeed, enlarge his vista that his enjoyment of life itself, and his appreciation of it, is quickened and sustained. For great Art of any kind, whether it be the painter’s, the engraver’s, the sculptor’s, or the writer’s, is not—it cannot be too often insisted—a mere craft or sleight-of-hand, to be practised from the wrist downwards. It is the expression of the man himself. It is, therefore, with great and new personalities that the study of an art, the contemplation of it—not the mere bungling amateur performance of it;—brings you into contact. And there is no way of studying an art that is so complete and satisfactory as the collecting of examples of it. And then again, to go back to the material part of[Pg 11] the business, how economical it is to be a collector, if only you are wise and prudent! Of pleasant vices this is surely the least costly. Nay, more; the bank-note cast upon the waters may come back after many days. The study of engravings, ancient and modern—of woodcuts, line engravings, etchings, mezzotints—has become by this time extremely elaborate and immensely complicated. Most people know nothing of it, and do not even realise that behind all their ignorance there is a world of learning and of pleasure, some part of which at least might be theirs if they would but enter on the land and seek to possess it. Few men, even of those who address themselves to the task, acquire swiftly any substantial knowledge of more than one or two departments of the study; though the ideal collector, and I would even say the reasonable one, whatever he may actually own, is able, sooner or later, to take a survey of the larger ground—his eye may range intelligently over fields he has no thought of annexing. From this it will be concluded—and concluded rightly—that the print-collector must be a specialist, more or less. More or less, at least at the beginning, must he address himself with particular care to one branch of the study. And which is it to be? The number of fine Schools of Etching and Engraving is really so considerable that the choice may well be his own. This or that master, this or that period, this or that method, he may select with freedom, and will scarcely go wrong. But the mention of it brings one, naturally, to the divisions of the subject, and the[Pg 12] collector, we shall find, is face to face, first of all, with this question: “Are the prints I am to bring together to be the work of an artist who originates, or of an artist who mainly translates?” Well, of course, in a discussion of the matter, the great original Schools must have the first place, whatever it may be eventually decided shall be the subject of your collection. You may buy, by all means, the noble mezzotints which the engravers of the Eighteenth Century wrought after Reynolds, Romney, and George Morland, but suffer us to say a little first about the great creative artists, and then, when the possible collector has read about them—and has made himself familiar, at the British Museum Print-room say, with some portion of their work—it may be that though he finds that they are nearly all, however different in themselves, less decorative on a wall than the great masters of rich mezzotint, he will find a charm and spell he cannot wish to banish in the evidence of their originality, in the fact that they are the creations of an individual impulse, whether they are slight or whether they are elaborate. The Schools of early line-engravers, Italian, Flemish, German, are almost entirely Schools of original production. I say “almost,” for as early as the days of Raphael, the interpreter, the translator, the copyist, if you will, came into the matter, and the designs of the Urbinate were multiplied by the burin of Marc Antonio and his followers. And charming prints they are, these Marc Antonios, so little bought to-day. Economical of[Pg 13] line they are, and exquisite of contour, and likely, one would suppose, to be valued in the Future more than they are valued just now, when the rhyme of Mr. Browning, about the collector of his early period, is true no longer— “The debt of wonder my crony owes Is paid to my Marc Antonios.” That in the main the earlier work is original, is not a thing to be surprised at, any more than it is a thing to lament. The narrow world of buyers in that primitive day was not likely to afford scope for the business of the translator; the time had not yet come when there was any need for the creations of an artist to be largely multiplied. That time came first, perhaps, in the Seventeenth Century, when the immediately accepted genius of Rubens gave ground for the employment of the interpreting talent of Bolswert, Pontius, and Vosterman. Again, there was Edelinck, Nanteuil, and the Drevets. It need scarcely be said that extreme rarity is a characteristic of the early Schools. The prints of two of the most masculine of the Italians, for instance, Andrea Mantegna and Jacopo de’ Barbarj, are not to be got by ordering them. They have, of course, to be watched for, and waited for, and the opportunity taken at the moment at which it arises. In some measure there will be experienced the same engaging and preventive difficulty in possessing yourself of the prints of the great Germans and of the one great Flemish master,[Pg 14] Lucas of Leyden. And if these, in certain states at least, in certain conditions, are not quite as hard to come upon as the works of those masters who have been mentioned just before them, and of their compatriots of the same period, that is but an extra inducement for the search, since there is, of course, a degree of difficulty that is actually discouraging—a sensible man does not long aim at the practically impossible. Now, in regard to the early Flemish master with whom Dürer himself not unwillingly—nay, very graciously—exchanged productions, there are yet no insuperable obstacles to the collector gathering together a representative array of his work; it is possible upon occasion even to add one or two of his scarce and beautiful and spirited ornaments to the group, such as it may be, of subjects based on scriptural or on classic themes. To be a specialist in Lucas van Leyden would be to be unusual, but not perhaps to be unwise; yet a greater sagacity would, no doubt, be manifested by concentration upon that which is upon the whole the finer work of Albert Dürer. Of late years, Martin Schöngauer too, with the delicacy of his burin, his tenderness of sentiment, and his scarcely less pronounced quaintness, has been a favourite, greatly sought for; but, amongst the Germans, the work that best upon the whole repays the trouble undertaken in amassing it, is that of the great Albert himself, and that of the best of the Little Masters. And who, then, were the Little Masters? a beginner wants to know. They were seven artists, some of them Dürer’s direct pupils, all of them his direct successors;[Pg 15] getting the name that is common to them not from any insignificance in their themes, but from the scale on which it pleased them to execute their always deliberate, always highly-wrought work. There is not one who has not about his labour some measure of individual interest, but the three greatest of the seven are the two brothers Beham—Barthel and Sebald—and that Prince of little ornamentists, Heinrich Aldegrever. Nowhere was the German Renaissance greater than in its ornament, and the Behams, along with subjects of Allegory, History, and Genre, addressed themselves not seldom to subjects of pure and self-contained design. Rich and fine in their fancy, their characteristic yet not too obvious symmetry has an attraction that lasts. Barthel was the less prolific of the twain, but perhaps the more vigorous in invention. Sebald, certainly not at a loss himself for motives for design, yet chose to fall back on occasion—as in the exquisite little print of the Adam and Eve—upon the inventions of his brother. There is not now, there never has been, very much collecting here in England of the German Little Masters. Three pounds or four suffices, now and again, to buy at Sotheby’s, or at a dealer’s, a good Beham, a good Aldegrever. In their own land they are rated a little more highly—are at least more eagerly sought for—but with research and pains (and remembering resolutely in this, as in every other case, to reject a bad impression), it is possible, for a most moderate sum, to have quite a substantial bevy of these treasures; and though large indeed in their design, their real art quality, they[Pg 16] are, in a material sense, as small almost as gems. Mr Loftie, who made a specialty of Sebald Behams, was able, I believe, to carry a collection of them safely housed in his waistcoat-pocket. If we pass on from the Sixteenth to the Seventeenth Century, we have the opportunity, if we so choose, of leaving Line Engraving, and of studying and acquiring here and there examples of the noblest Etching that has been done in the world. For the Seventeenth Century is the period of Rembrandt—the period, too, of that meaner but yet most skilful craftsman, Adrian van Ostade, and the period of the serene artist of classic Landscape and Architecture, who wrought some twenty plates in aquafortis—I mean Claude. In an introductory chapter to a volume like the present, there is time and space to consider only Rembrandt. And it cannot be asserted too decisively that in the study and collection of Rembrandt, lies, as a rule—and must, one thinks, for ever lie—the print-collector’s highest and most legitimate pleasure. And even a poor man may have a few good Rembrandts, though only quite a rich man can have them in great numbers and of the rarest. Rembrandt is a superb tonic for people who have courted too much the infection of a weakly and a morbid art. Not occupied indeed in his representations of humanity with visions of formal beauty, his variety is unsurpassed, his vigour unequalled; he has the great traditions of Style, yet is as modern and as unconventional as Mr Whistler. Of the different classes of Rembrandt’s compositions, the sacred subjects perhaps—at least some minor[Pg 17] examples of them—are the least uncommon; and in their intimate and homely study of humanity, and often too in their technique, the sacred subjects prove themselves desirable. Never, however, should they be collected to the exclusion of the rarer Portraiture or of the rarest Landscape. A Lutma, a De Jonghe, in a fine state and fine condition, a Cottage with a Dutch Haybarn, a Landscape with a Tower, attain the summit of the etcher’s art, and, both in noble conception and magical execution, are absolutely perfect. Why, such impressions of the Rembrandt landscapes as were dispersed but two or three years since, when the cabinet of Mr Holford passed under the hammer, appeal to the trained eye with a potency not a whit less great than can any masterpiece of Painting; and, to speak in very soberest English, no sum of money that it could ever enter into the heart of the enthusiast to pay for them would be, in truth, a too extravagant, a too unreasonable, ransom. In the Eighteenth Century original Etching falls into the background, and the skill of the engraver, in those lands where, in the Eighteenth Century, it was chiefly exercised—in France, that is, and England—is devoted in the main to no spontaneous creation, but to the translation of the work of painters. In two mediums, thoroughly opposed or thoroughly contrasted, yet each with its own value, the engraver’s labour is executed; there flourished, side by side, the delicate School of Line Engraving and the noble School of Mezzotint. Reproductive or interpretive Line Engraving had done great[Pg 18] things a generation or so earlier, and even Mezzotint was not the invention of the Eighteenth Century, though it was then that the art discovered by Von Siegen, and practised with a singular directness by Prince Rupert, was brought to its perfection. But the Eighteenth Century—even the latter half of it—was certainly the period at which both arts were busiest; and not so much the professed collector as the intelligent bourgeois of the time gathered these things together—in England chiefly Mezzotints, in France chiefly Line Engravings—and a very few shillings paid for the M‘Ardell or the Watson after Reynolds, and later for the Raphael Smith or the William Ward after George Morland. Often the engraver was a publisher of his own and other people’s prints. That was the case in Paris as much as in London; and in Paris, in the third quarter of the Eighteenth Century, the line engravers issued for a couple of francs or so—and the Mercure de France was apt, like newspapers in our own day, to notice the publication—those admirable, and still in England, too little known prints which record the dignified observation, the sober, just suggested comedy of Chardin. There were exceptions, of course, to the common rule that in the period of our first Georges, and of Louis the Fifteenth, engraver’s work was translation. Hogarth, in the first half of the century—about the time when the French line engravers were occupied with their quite exquisite translations of the grace of Watteau, Lancret, and Pater—wrought out on copper with rough vigour his original conceptions of the Rake’s[Pg 19] and of the Harlot’s Progress, and not a few of his minor themes; but when it came to the rendering into black and white of those masterly canvases of Marriage à la Mode, professional engravers, such as Ravenet and Scotin, were employed to admirable purpose, and a little later the very colours of the canvas seemed to live, the painter’s very touch seemed to be reproduced, in the noble mezzotints of Earlom. And the immense successes of this reproductive engraving, with the art of Hogarth, brings us back to the truth of our earlier proposition; the period was a period of interpretation, not of original work, with the engraver. The whole French Eighteenth Century School, from Watteau down to Lavreince, is to be studied, and collected, too, in Line Engraving. The School is not invariably discreet in subject: Lavreince has his suggestiveness, though rarely does he go beyond legitimate comedy, and Baudouin, François Boucher’s son-in-law, has his audacities; but against these is to be set the dignified idyl of the great master of Valenciennes; the work of Watteau’s pupils, too; the works of Boucher; Massard’s consummate rendering, in finest or most finished line, of this or that seductive vision of Greuze; the stately comedy of Moreau le jeune; and, as I have said already, the excellent interpretations of the homely, natural, so desirable art of Chardin. Mezzotint really did for all the English painters of importance of the Eighteenth Century, and in a measure for certain earlier Dutchmen, all that Line Engraving accomplished for the French. “By these men I shall[Pg 20] be immortalised,” Sir Joshua said, when the work of M‘Ardell and his fellows came under his view. Gainsborough, it is true, was not interpreted quite so much or quite so successfully. But Romney has as much justice done to him in later English Mezzotint as the luxurious art of Lely and Kneller obtained from one of the earlier practitioners of the craft—John Smith. Morland’s continued and justified popularity in our own time is due to nothing half as much as to the mezzotints by Raphael Smith, and Ward, and Young, and others of that troop of brethren. And it was mezzotint, in combination with the bitten line for leading features of the composition, that Turner, early in our own century—in 1807—decided to employ in the production of those seventy plates of Liber Studiorum upon which, already even, so much of his fame rests. Liber Studiorum occupies an interesting and a peculiar position between work upon the copper wholly original and work wholly reproductive. Turner etched the leading lines himself. In several cases he completed, with his own hand, in mezzotint, the whole of the engraved picture; but generally he gave the “scraping” to a professional engraver, whose efforts he minutely supervised and most elaborately corrected. In recent years, almost as much, though not quite as much sought for as the Liber plates of Turner, are certain rather smaller mezzotints which record the art of Constable; but Constable himself did nothing on these plates, though he supervised their production by David Lucas. Turner’s connection with professional[Pg 21] engravers was not confined to the priceless and admirable prints of the Liber. He trained a school of line engravers, welcoming at first the assistance of John Pye and of George and William Cooke. These two brothers were the engravers mainly of his Southern Coast, and nothing has been more manly than that; but the work of William Miller, in the Clovelly of that Southern Coast, and in a subsequent series, interpreted with quite peculiar exquisiteness those refinements of light which in Turner’s middle and later time so much engaged his effort. With Turner’s death, or with the death of the artists who translated him, fine Line Engraving almost vanished. It had all but disappeared when, nearly fifty years ago, there began in France and England that Revival of Etching with which the amateur of to-day is so rightly concerned. A few etchings by Bracquemond—of still-life chiefly—a larger number by Jules Jacquemart, of fine objects in porcelain, jewellery, bronze, and noble stones, are amongst the more precious products of the earlier part of the Revival of Etching, and they are so treated that they are inventions indeed, and of an originality that is exquisite. But the greatest event of the earlier years of the Revival was the appearance, as long ago as 1850, of the genius of Méryon, who, during but a few years, wrought a series of chefs-d’œuvre—inspired visions of Paris—and died, neglected and ignored, in the great city to which it is he who has raised, in those few prints of his, the noblest of all monuments. [Pg 22] Two other men of very different genius and of unsurpassed energy we associate with this revival of Etching. Both are yet with us in the fulness of their years; and both will occupy the collector who is wise in his generation, and will be, one may make bold to say, the delight of the far Future as well as of the Present. I mean Sir Seymour Haden and Mr. James Whistler. The prints of Seymour Haden shame no cabinet; the best of Whistler’s scarcely suffer at all when placed beside the master-work of Rembrandt. But it is dangerous treating much of contemporaries when one’s task is chiefly with the dead; and though I might mention many other not unworthy men, of whom some subsequent historian must take count—nay, who may even be referred to at a later stage of this volume—I will confine myself here, in this introductory chapter, to just the intimation that Legros and Helleu are, next after the etchers I have already named, those probably who should engage attention...FROM THE BOOKS.