THE STUDY OF ANCIENT PRINTS.*
FIVE hundred pages about the study of old prints !—that will be itself a revelation to many of us of the existence and importance of an almost ignored art. But that is nothing to the volumes of Bartsch, the volumes of Passavant, the volumes in which Dumesnil has done for France what Bartsch did for Germany, the Low Countries and Italy, the volumes in which Charles Blanc has completed for Rembrandt that which had been begun for this- greatest master of etching by Dalby, Claussin, and Wilson. These other works—ten or a dozen, say, numbering between them some forty volumes—are the sources from which Dr. Willshire has drawn. His own observation and experience have gone for much, but no observation and no experience could have enabled a man to write the book before us. These have modified the conclusions at which earlier writers had arrived : they have now enabled him to confirm and now to contradict that which earlier specialists in his subject have said long ago.
Much of Dr. Willehire'e book is necessarily devoted to technical questions of greater interest to the collector than to the simple
* An Introduction to the Study and Collection of Ancient Prints. By W. H. Willshire M.D. (Edinburgh). London: Ellis and White. 1874... -student. That is a part of the book with which we shall not be much occupied, as collectors who are beginning their pursuit will -get the book for themselves and let it supersede the older Maberly. 'Collectors who are themselves far advanced in knowledge will -neither require the book itself nor any quotations from it. And -the mass of those who read this criticism, being, presumably, -neither beginners in " collecting" nor accomplished connoisseurs, -wi I thank us for dwelling less on technical matters than upon -what there is of general intellectual interest in the art of which Dr. Wilshire writes :— " The commencement of the art of engraving," says Vasari, "springs 'from Maso Finiguerra, a Florentine, about the year of grace 1460, since this artist, from all his works which be engraved on silver, to be after- wards filled up with niello, obtained from them impressions in clay, and -having poured liquid sulphur on these, they became imprinted and -charged with smoke. Whence by means of oil they gave out the same
• effect as did the silver. And this he did again with damp paper, and with the same tint, exerting pressure gently all over it with a round roller, which made it appear not only as if printed, but as though drawn with the pen."
The impressions thus taken on paper by Maso Finiguerra were -taken, it is conjectured, not so much for their own sakes, as to -see what might be the effect in the finished silver. Ten years, says Dr. Wilshire, had to pass before another Florentine—Baccio 33aldini—conceived the idea of applying the procedure practised -with nielli plates to the indefinite multiplication of impressions -obtained from copper plates engraved specially for the purpose of yielding them. But whether indeed the discovery was first made in Italy or Germany may still be an open question. Mr. W. Bell 'Scott—the author of the Life of Albert Diirer—claims it for the masters of Martin Schou and of Israel von Mechen. In both -countries it appears to have been made independently, and the .question of priority need not greatly concern us.
The development of engraving is a matter of higher interest, and -the varieties of method and medium in the use of colour—fresco /minting, painting in oils, painting in water-colours—may be snatched by woodcuts, the regular line engraving, engraving in mezzotint, and the now once more fashionable art of etching ; that is, of drawing on a prepared surface of a metal plate, submitting -the drawing to the action of acid, and finally with ink and a -printing-press transferring to paper the picture which thus far has been on the copper alone. On the masters of all these • different processes Dr. Wilshire bestows his best attention, or rather on the earlier masters — for before we have -done we shall have a word to say to him on the somewhat arbitrary division be has made between prints and artists it behoved him to speak about, and prints and artists it behoved him to pass over. Of wood-engraving, Albert Direr, -with his many suites of woodcuts, illustrative of many a sacred history, may be considered a typical master. He was an etcher -also, in days when the art of etching was in its infancy ; and that he was also one of the greatest of the regular line engravers 'every one must know who, without reference to the subject or the spirit, has paid his tribute to the supreme technical skill manifested in the folds of the gown of that grand woman's figure, "Melancholia," and in the chequered moving shadow of the window in his not less famous "Saint Jerome." Indeed, it is almost needless to say that his engraving upon metal is far more interesting work to see and know than his engraving upon wood. The range is greater, the force more marked, the delicacy much more delightful, and this which we say of Diirer's work on metal may be said of the work of all the greater of his brethren, when it is put beside engraving on wood. But Albert Direr, by reason perhaps of the three hundred woodcuts which have been attributed to him, may stand as a master of wood engraving, no leas than as a master of that finer -art in which, among his own contemporaries, he has for rivals Marc Antonio and Lucas van Leyden. But it was only in qualities of execution that Marc Antonio was his rival at all. Marc Antonio's work was almost wholly to reproduce and spread the work of Raphael. He did this with consummate mastery of line. In his hands you lose nothing of Raphael but the colour. Nay, while you lose that, it may even be that you gain a certain purity and distinction, a certain cool and classic grace of line, which can hardly be sufficiently apparent when you see it along with all the charm of a supreme colourist. But whatever you have in Marc Antonio, you certainly do not have invention. It is this man's greatest praise that, living in the time and under the influence of a supreme master, he was content merely to reproduce him ; but Also, it was this man's good fortune that in his epoch there Jived a 'master whom it was so well worth while to give the labour of one's life to reproduce, and in some sense to popularise.
But, on the whole, a more complete rival of Albert Diirer's was Lucas van Leyden, who crowded into a short life the work of a
long one, and died when he was thirty-nine, having by that time achieved all that an artist of his gifts and of his epoch could by any possibility have achieved. Direr met him at Antwerp, when the great painter of Niiremburg made that disastrous expedition to win the favour of the Court, and wrote of him in his diary, "Master Lukas has invited me to eat with him." "He is the engraver on copper," Direr adds : "a little man here at Antwerp for pleasure" — and indeed "for pleasure," he was often elsewhere — "having come from his own town, Leyden, in Holland I have portrayed Master Lucas of Leyden with the point " And afterwards the two men exchanged prints, and bore away friendly memories of each other's character and work. We have said that Lucas van Leyden achieved all that it was possible to him to achieve. It must be remembered that, like Direr, he lived where the element of grace, if he wanted it for his work, had to be sought elsewhere than among the women. He lacked—as Direr and Rembrandt lacked —the sight of the beauty that inspired Raphael, and delighted Titian, and gave an added grace to our Sir Joshua. But unlike Direr, be was not insensible to outward beauty, and to beauty in other forms than the forms of womanhood, youth, and childhood. First, there is in his grouping of figures a very genuine feeling for loveliness of line,—see his Adam and Eve in the "Temptation," and his picture of our first parents mourning over the prostrate form of Abel in another print of the same well-known series. And secondly, in both these prints there is a naturalistic feeling for the beauty of form in trees ; beauty of form entirely distinct from the often over-praised beauty of foliage; and again, in "The Lady in the Wood" there is much sense of beauty of movement,— a walk which indeed is neither majestic nor simply pretty, but has about it something of the indefinable charm and grace of our own last-century art.
In due time we come to Etching, and Dr. Willshire, while pro- perly referring the collector to the monographs of Wilson and Charles Blanc, draws attention to the chief prints of Rembrandt, which have won the admiration of connoisseurs ; but space would not allow us to follow him at length, and to touch on the subject of Rembrandt's work more briefly would be only to repeat what was said here last summer, in an article on the Prints exposed to view in the King's Library of the British Museum. Coming to Claude—some of whose forty-two etchings fulfil all the conditions which a great art can fulfil, when it is used by a man of unique, if once somewhat over-estimated genius — Dr. Willshire is assuredly on the right side, when, siding with Dumesnil and with Hanierton, he contradicts the statement of Wilson that Claude's etchings "are by no means so abundant in talent as we should expect from so great a master," and declares that " Le Bouvier" is unsurpassed,—" stands almost peerless and alone." The truth is that in Claude's long life the work of etching did not play a very important part. He lived eighty years, and produced forty-two plates, while Rembrandt produced seven times as many in a life sixteen years shorter. And in some effects which etching is capa- ble enough of rendering, Claude undoubtedly failed,—notably in the effects of storm. But see his sunsets, over land or water, and you will see something in which he is supreme. By the side of "Le Bouvier " put the " Coucher du Soleil " (Dumesnil, No. 15), or, for freedom of outline, the "Shepherd and Shepherdess."
The early masters of the art of mezzotint Dr. Willshire speaks of sufficiently, but he neglects the later, and it is with the indication of this neglect that we must end a criticism otherwise of neces- sity favourable. The study of prints is not a subject that stops naturally in the middle of the last century, as with a hard-and- fast line drawn there. Dr. Willshire's line is drawn arbitrarily ; that is the greatest fault which we find with his book. The culti- vated student of this very great and far too-little known art—we are not speaking of those who study for the mere facilitating of their curiosity-hunting—is interested in the course of art from the beginning until now ; and there is no reason why a book like that before us (which is not devoted to one man or to one time) should atop short at the dawn of a period not the least interesting or important in the history of the art. By doing so we are deprived of informa- tion on the interpreters of Reynolds—the men whose mezzotints are among the very finest in existence—and on the characteristics of Turner's greatest serial work, engraved in part by his own hand and in part under his constant and devoted supervision. Liber Studiorum —a combination of etching and mezzotint—begun in 1808, and arrested (one cannot say "finished") in 1819, is now an important and ever-valuable feature in our "study of ancient prints." Beyond the world of collectors and cultivated enthusiasts it has scarcely yet received due recognition, though that recog- nition has been constantly increasing. Its money value is, of course, great, but its artistic value a hundredfold greater. The time must .come when some really qualified critic shall do for Liber Studiorum what Monsieur Blanc has done so completely for the work of Rembrandt. Each " study " must be commented upon, and each " state " discriminated.
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