PEN AND INK.—I. TECHNIQUE.* [FIRST NOTICE.] PEN-AND-INK drawing, facsimiled by
process, has played a huge part in the recent multiplication of illustrations, inven- tions, caricatures, and book decorations. A second edition of the well-known book issued by Mr. Pennell in 1889, affords material for some review of results. The book appears with many differences. The shape and size are altered, the old photogravures are omitted, and some of the old process- blocks. But a great many new drawings are added in the French, German, and English sections, and a new Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian section has been included. There is a new preface and various minor alterations.
From the point of view of completeness, the French section, as Mr. Pennell explains, is the most wanting. There is no Louis Legrand, no Rope, no Anquetin or La.utrec ; the Willette is poor, the Forain very poor, the Steinlen is poor, and there are other gaps. But this section gains by the inclusion of Schwabe. The German section has been much fattened by Stuck and Klinger,—gross, fanciful, humouristic persons of the German type. Both the older and newer English schools are fuller,—the older by the addition of drawings by Rossetti, Sandys, Boyd Houghton, Millais, Borne-Jones, and others ; the newer recruited from the Daily Graphic, Pick-Me-Up, the Pall Mall Budget, and the Yellow Book. Several men in the new section, like Josselin de Jong and Tegner, are men of ability.
The book from the first was a remarkable collection of pen- and-ink work by a man qualified by an unsurpassed knowledge of the field, to arrange a representative exhibition ; and few of its readers, if they were frank, would hesitate to acknow- ledge that they had found a great deal that was new and interesting in its pages. The technical information, more- over, supplied in the letterpress, was that of an expert, and the history of recent schools was written by one who has played a part in their growth. It is probable that the book has had no small part in the instruction and guidance of the numerous young men who have thrown themselves into the practice of the art recently in this country. Mr. Pennell, however, was not satisfied to exhibit and explain and relate history ; he conceived that he had several theses
• Pen Drawing and Pen Draughtsmen. By Joseph Pennell. London and New York : Macmillan and Co. 1894.
to demonstrate. Irritated by the technical ignorance and the indifference frequently displayed by the critics of black- and-white work, he wished to make the points that the modern produces much finer pen-drawings than the ancient; that the development of pen-and-ink technique is the characteristic achievement in art of the nineteenth century; that the ease of reproduction of a pen-drawing on a printed page has led to an immense dissemination of fine art ; and that the best things thus produced, reproduced, and dis• Geminated, are the equals or superiors of the best things of other kinds and other times. Such, in summary, appear to be his points.
Mr. Pennell does well to magnify his office, but he writes often with too aggrieved and contemptuous a certainty to be persuasive; nor, apart from his manner, is his logic on many vital points convincing. Large qualifications are called for where he is sweeping ; his perspective and pro- portion are crude. Thus, to begin with the first head, the advantage he seeks to win for modern as against old pen- and-ink work, is, even on his own showing, somewhat illusory. The modern pen-and-ink drawing is frequently a more elaborate and sometimes a more serious affair than the ancient ; because the ancient artist, when he wished to make such a careful and serious drawing, made it in some fitter material. Pen-and-ink is used by the modern less for its own sake than with a view to reproduction ; it is a good medium for blocking-oat or for summarising a drawing ; it is a somewhat painful and ungrateful medium for making studious and complex drawings. The ancient (the comparatively ancient, that is), when thinking of reproduction, made an etching. And the technique of modern pen-and-ink is not really a new technique invented by the modern as a natural expression in pen and ink ; it is an imitation of the technique of etching grafted on the old pen-and-ink style. A moment's thought will show this. With a needle on copper-plate it is natural and easy to produce attenuated lines of unvarying thickness, and to cross those lines in a close network to produce spots of tone. The pen, on the other hand, is naturally flexible, widen- ing out by pressure from a fine line to a thick line, and from that to a blot. It is possible, with a fine nib, a steady hand, and care, to produce the thin equable line, and to cross-hatch without blotting ; it is possible to get as near the etching as Fortnny did, as Mr. Abbey or Vogel does. It is possible for Jacquemart to produce pen-drawings that rival his own etchings, and that are among the chief ornaments of Mr. Pennell's book. But compared with all these the etchings of Rembrandt retain their supremacy. There is little point, then, in looking out specimens of ancient pen-and-ink and comparing with them, in the technical sense, the work done now ; the latter must be compared with drawings in crayon or silverpoint, or with etchings. The truth is, that the beat modern pen-and-ink drawings, in the sense of drawings thoroughly characteristic of the medium, are very much like the ancient, depending on the summary line and blot. A sketch by Mallet or Rodin, in which a design well in band is struck out in a few vigorous traits, is a finer because more vital work of art, than the ingenious sparkle of Rico and Vierge.
It is easy, of course, to understand how pen-drawing should have come to be so largely employed and elaborated. It is a matter of reproduction for illustration. An etching will not print with type, nor will a steel-engraving. This led, in the early part of the century, to the imitation of steel-engravings by wood-engravers, who did the business most skilfully with immense labour. The drawings for them were mostly made in pencil. But photographic process rendered the interven- tion of the wood-engraver needless, if the artist made a pen- drawing that would photograph and process well. A purely technical difficulty can be overcome by large numbers of craftsmen; large numbers accordingly have learned to make pen-drawings to supplant wood-engravings. But it should be noted that to do this is itself a kind of reproductive process. Few elaborate pen-drawings are made without a studious foundation in some other material. The pen line must frequently be traced or drawn over the pencil line very much like the engraver's tool.
The point about the moderns and ancients, then, resolves itself into the imitation by the moderns in a new medium of the technique of an old. It is certain that the ancients could have performed this feat if they had chosen,—not altogether certain that they would have chosen. For, to consider those other points of reproduction and dissemination, the modern master seems to be in no greater hurry than the ancient to make use of the new facilities. When such a master does take up the pen, he handles it to much grander effect than do its devotees. Witness the lovely drawing by Corot given in Mr. Pennell's book. The development of process reproduction is, of course, too recent to allow of a conclusion on this head ; but for the most part the etcher remains an etcher, the lithographer a lithographer, and pen-drawing of the elaborate etching sort is left chiefly to what may be called the journalist illustrator. It is such illustration that is most in demand and is most fitly disseminated. It is not desirable, though it may sound heresy to say so, that fine things should be multiplied very numerously by reproduction. One would not like to find a copy of the Parthenon in every town; no more does one wish to meet a copy of the same drawing in every house. This is no collector's desire for rarity. It is the desire not to hear a fine tune repeated at every street corner. The merits, moreover, of something not first-rate are obliterated by too frequent repetition. Another point is that all work loses by incongruity of setting ; journalistic work is proper to journals ; poetic work is out of place in newspapers, jostled by adver- tisements and faits divers.
Let us turn now to the examples in the book itself. It is striking at once how few of the drawings are unmistakably pen-drawings, and nothing else. Next after the fine Yandyck of a child's head, the first drawing of the sort is the head by Raffaelli, which is executed throughout with a pen stroke. Another, much later, may be mentioned that has something of the same quality, the head by Mr. Walter Sickert. The attempt to render spaces of tone by line which we find in the restless scrabbles on the backgrounds by Fortuny, Fabres, and Casanova, gives way later to mixed methods,—washes, mechanical tones, spatter, scratch-out paper, and so forth. What reproduces in ink was frequently mixed with pencil or charcoal in the drawing. In many of the drawings there was no pen and ink at all. Menzel as a draughtsman is most addicted to crayon and pencil, and many of our best English- men have used the same materials. In recent illustrations, the (fort to obtain tone in line-work has been widely aban- doned, and a style of wash-drawing substituted, less admirable in its false completeness of tone than the pen-drawing it has superseded.
The real triumph that Mr. Pennell's book illustrates is not that of a new art, but of new methods of reproduction. As these develop, the probability is that it will be possible to reproduce drawings in any medium. Pen-drawing will then fall into its natural place. The chief drawback at present appears to be the quality of paper necessary for printing delicate process-blocks. It is not pleasant in itself, and is said not to be durable. Meantime, we may acknowledge the extraordinary technical dexterity of the school of draughts- men who have rivalled etching in the fineness of their work- manship. In another article we shall consider the artistic value of Mr. Pennell's specimens.
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