THE SEINE AND THE LOIRE.*
THE reproduction by the Fine Art Society of the line-engravings after Turner of the series best known as " The Rivers of France," shows, at all events on the part of the publishers, the belief in the renewed popularity of work reproduced by this method, a belief which we think is well founded, and which we have long anticipated. Indeed, quite apart from the merits of the drawings themselves—and how beautiful they are it is diffi- cult adequately to say—illustrations of this character are, in our opinion, but poorly replaced by most of the hasty wood-engravings of the present day, or even by the elaborate photogravnree of various kinds which are at present used to decorate our most expensive books. If there were nothing else to be said for the " Keepsake " literature and art of fifty years since, it was, at all events, elaborately and carefully wrought out. But when it comes to be examined, there is a great deal more to be said for it than this. The artists of that day, and especially the landscape-artists, who were chosen to illustrate works of this kind were, with few exceptions, the best men of their time,—men who knew their business thoroughly, and for the most part practised it conscientiously as far as their lights allowed them ; and the engravers who reproduced their work, were men long and laboriously trained in the practice of this delicate art of line-engraving—and most capable in their special department. Their achievements remain to this day almost unparalleled for patience, fidelity, and skill in their minor walk of art; and though the modern engraver, notably the wood-engraver, produces results which, considering the brief time in which they are executed, are literally miracles of dexterity, their work necessarily lacks both the minuteness and the delicacy of the older and more elaborate art, and is, indeed, but a rough and ready translation of the artist's thought, rather than an exact reproduction of the minutest details of his pictures. The elder line-engravers were accustomed, as may be seen by com- paring their works with the pictures from which they were copied, to follow out to the utmost every hint of form which they found in the original submitted to them. The details of foliage, cloud-form, of rock-structure, of reflection, and such- like matters, which were in Turner's work, scarcely more than suggested with a light wash and a few scattered outlines, were in the reproduction filled up with a combination of intelligence and accuracy absolutely admirable. Where all were so excellently capable, it is perhaps invidious to point out special works. But it has been admitted that R. Brandard, Miller, and Wallis were the foremost in the rendering of landscape, and Higham was the best in the translation of architectural designs ; and those who have this series will have no difficulty in comparing the various plates, and in tracing the superior delicacy of the above-named engravers to Smith, Fisher, Willmore, and Radcliffe. Com- pare, for instance, Brandard's plate of Graville with the Tancarville of Willmore, or the Pont de l'Arche by the same artist. In the note which Mr. Mash has appended to this publication, he draws attention to the fact that the best work in line-engraving was almost exactly contemporaneous with Turner's life :—" A score of years earlier and no engraver capable of representing his works could have been found, and a quarter of a century later the school was paralysed by photography." It was not, however, the rise of photo- graphy alone which killed line-engraving, so much as the extraordinary development of illustrated periodical literature. The masses of artists who devote their time to the reproduc- tion of pictures, or, indeed, to the purposes of illustration generally, will always be attracted to that method which is most in popular demand, and most in accordance with the spirit of the age. The very spread of so-called art education, the belief that we can all understand and enjoy pictures without previous training or the slightest knowledge, has called forth a
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The Una and the Loin. By J, M. W. Turner. London: J. O. Virtue and da class of work which endeavoure to render all its subjects in a superficial and dramatic manner. The delicacy and the reti- cence of pure line-engraving are naturally unsuitable for such a purpose : they neither rouse the passer-by, please the indolent, nor amuse the superficial. What they say, rather than the manner in which it is said, is the raison Vire of modern illustrations ; and when books are multiplied to such an extra. ordinary extent, as is nowadays the case, and produced with so little care and deliberation, the length of time which was bestowed on line-engravings in the days of Turner would alone prevent them from being used to any considerable extent.
What monuments of patience they are, these now-despised illustrations!—how pleasant to look upon in comparison with the majority of modern book-plates ! No doubt much of this effect is to be attributed to the artist whose work forms the origin of these engravings ; for with all its drawbacks— and we should not seek for a moment to disguise the fact that these drawbacks were very great—the art of these elder painters possessed in its very limitations, qualities rarely to be found nowadays. These qualities are both intellectual
and artistic. Of the artistic ones, sobriety, simplicity, and the national character of the design were perhaps the most prominent ; and in artistic respects, if there was ignorance of the modern developments of painting, there was also an entire—one might almost say a blessed—absence of the scientific spirit which to-day deforms to ugliness so much of our painting. The artists did not know very much about archeology, or the scientific effects of light, or correctness of costume; they were apt to have certain conventional ideas as to the way in which their pictures should be arranged, the subjects which should be introduced, and the manner in which the paint should be laid on ; but they had this all-important, and on the whole most righteous idea, that the object of a picture was to be pictorial, was to give pleasure to the person who looked at it, and not specially to exhibit the skill of the person who made it,—was, in fact, to be made as delightful as possible to the eye and the heart, rather than entirely consistent with the understanding. "Heaven be praised !" we sometimes feel inclined to say, for these dull old men who knew their business, who sought for lovely things, and tried to make them more lovely still ; who drew our abbeys and castles, our valleys and our bills, our rivers and our sea-coasts, with simple pleasure, and did not disdain to fill up their land and sea-ecapes with peasants and sailors, waggons and ships, with tinkers going to the fair, or reapers bringing home the harvest, and, in short, with all those common daily matters which made up the rural life of England. It is difficult to say anything new that is worth the saying, in this brief space of ours, about these celebrated Turner drawings. When Mr. Ruskin has criticised them in detail, and a hundred writers of less genius have expended themselves in laudation, it is unnecessary to add to the oft-repeated praise. But it is curious to note, and perhaps worth while to remark, how very much of the attractiveness of these designs depends on the very picturesque quality which it is the tendency of Art at the present time to ignore. No doubt, Turner might have done grand work without such inspiration,—indeed some of his finest work, as, for instance, "The Frosty Morning," is almost wholly uninfluenced thereby ; but that this greatest landscape-painter that ever lived, in the utmost height of his knowledge and plenteousness of his power, should choose in nineteen cases out of twenty, to attain his end, means such ae all former artiste had made use of, conven- tionalities—if they are to be called such—of composition and subject, may well make us pause before deciding that modern artists are right in rejecting such aids. May it not be that they are altogether wrong P A photograph is not a picture ; and it is certain that if we make our pictures nothing but coloured photographs of Nature, we shall lose the old pictorial quality ; and is it not in this pictorial quality that the delightfulness of their art to a great extent consists P These are questions which our readers would do well to ponder when they walk round the newest Naturalistic Gallery, or listen to the latest development of impressionist theory. And, how- ever they deal with such theories, let them at all events remember this,—that as far as landscape art is concerned, the men who made it in England, and the men who carried it on—the artists, that is, who produced work which in its department is inferior to none the world has ever seen—all believed, roughly speaking, in this old-fashioned theory, all made use of it in their pictures, and that with the decline of the theory there has come, too, the
decline of landscape-painting. These may be coincidences ; but to Bay the least of it, they strongly suggest that there is some relation of cause and effect between the modern innovations of artists, and the slow deoline of the art with which they are concerned.
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