THE BEGINNING OF LINE ENGRAVING AND ETCHING IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND. FIRST ATTEMPTS AT MEZZOTINT. A GLANCE AT ENGRAVING IN EUROPE BEFORE 1660.

The French were unable to distinguish themselves early in the art of engraving, as the conditions under which they laboured were different from those which obtained in Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries: the homes, all three of them, of schools of painting. From the thirteenth century onwards, the architects and sculptors of France had produced an unbroken succession of good things; but the origin of her school of painting is not nearly so remote, nor has it such sustained importance. Save for the unknown glass-painters of her cathedrals, for the miniaturists who preceded and succeeded Jean Fouquet, and for the artists in chalks whose work is touched with so peculiar a charm and so delicate an originality, she can boast of no great painter before Jean Cousin. And the art of engraving could scarcely have flourished when, as yet, the art of painting had scarcely existed.

Wood-cutting, it is true, was practised in France with a certain success, as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, and even a little before that. The "Danses macabres"—those aids to morality so popular in mediÆval times—the illustrated "Books of Hours," and other compilations besides, printed with figures and tail-pieces, in Lyons or Paris, give earnest of the unborn masterpieces of Geofroy Tory, of Jean Cousin himself, and of sundry other draughtsmen and wood-cutters of the reigns of FranÇois I. and Henri II. But, as practised by goldsmiths, such as Jean Duvet and Étienne Delaune, and by painters of the Fontainebleau school like RenÉ Boyvin and Geofroy Dumonstier, line engraving and etching were still no more than a means of popularising extravagant imitations of Italian work. The prints of Nicolas Beatrizet, who had been the pupil of Agostino Musi at Rome, and those of another engraver of Lorraine, whose name has been Italianised into NiccolÒ della Casa, appear to have been produced with the one object of deifying the spirit of sham, and converting French engravers to that religion to which French painters had apostatised with so much ill-fortune under the influence of the Italians brought in by Francis I.

During the whole of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries the French school of engraving had neither method nor bent of its own; but meanwhile it was a whim of fashion that every one should handle the burin or the point. From the days of Henri II. to those of Louis XIII., craftsman or layman, everybody practised engraving. There were goldsmiths like Pierre Woeiriot, painters like Claude Corneille and Jean de Gourmont architects like Androuet du Cerceau; there were noblemen; there were even ladies—as, for instance Georgette de Montenay, who dedicated to Jeanne d'Albret a collection of mottoes and emblems, partly, it was said, of her own engraving. All the world and his wife, in fact, were gouging wood and scraping copper. It must be repeated that the prints of this time are for the most part borrowed—are copies feeble or stilted, or both, of foreign originals. Not until after some years of thraldom could the French engravers shake off the yoke of Italian art, create a special style, and constitute themselves a school. The revolution was prepared by Thomas de Leu and LÉonard Gaultier, engravers of portraits and of historical subjects; but the hero of the French school is Jacques Callot.

There are certain names in the history of the arts which retain an eternal odour of popularity; we remember them as those of men of talent, who were also in some sort heroes of romance, and our interest remains perennial. Jacques Callot is one of these. He is probably the only French engraver29 whose name is yet familiar to the general public. That this is so is hardly the effect of his work, however excellent: it is rather the result of his adventures; of his flight from home in childhood; his wanderings with the gipsies; and the luck he had—his good looks aiding—with the ladies of Rome, and even (it is whispered) with the wife of Thomassin his master.

We have said it is Callot's merit to have lifted the French school of engraving out of the rut in which it dragged, and to have opened for it a new path. He did not, however, accomplish the work with an entire independence, nor without some leanings towards that Italy in which he had been trained. After working in Florence under Canta-Gallina, whose freedom of style and fantastic taste could not but prove irresistible to the future artist of Franca Trippa and Fritellino, he had been obliged to return to Nancy. Thence he escaped a second time, and thither was a second time brought back by his eldest brother, who had been despatched in pursuit. A third journey took him to Rome; and there, whether glad to be rid of him or weary of debate, his family let him remain.

It is probable that during his expatriation30 Callot never so much as dreamed of learning from the Old Masters; but he did not fail to make a close study of certain contemporaries who were masters so called. Paul V. was Pope; and the age of Raphael and Marc Antonio, of Julius II. and Leo X., was for ever at an end. The enfeebling eclecticism of the Carracci, and the profitless fecundity of Guido, had given currency to all sorts of second-rate qualities, and in painting had substituted prettiness for beauty. The result was an invasion of frivolity, alike in manners and beliefs, which was destined to find its least dubious expression in the works of Le JosÉpin and later on in those of an artist of kindred tastes with the Lorraine engraver—the fantastical Salvator Rosa. When Callot settled in Rome in 1609, Le JosÉpin had already reached the climax of fame and fortune; Salvator, at an interval of nearly thirty years, was on the heels of his first success. Coming, as he did, to take a place among the dexterous and the eccentric, it seems that Callot could not have chosen a better time. It was not long before he attracted attention; for when he left Rome for Florence, where he produced some of his liveliest work, his name and his capacity were already in repute.

At Florence his capacity was perfected under the influence of Giulio Parigi; and, thanks to the favour of Duke Cosmo II., which he easily obtained, his name soon became famous in the world of fashion as among connoisseurs. Unlike his countrymen, Claude Lorraine and the noble Poussin, who, some years later, were in this same Italy to live laborious and thoughtful lives, Callot freely followed his peculiar vein, and saw in art no more than a means of amusement, in the people about him only subjects for caricature, and in imaginative and even religious subjects but a pretext for grotesque invention. Like another French satirist, Mathurin Regnier, who had preceded him in Rome, he was addicted to vulgar types, to rags and deformities, even to the stigmata of debauchery. Thus, the works of both these two men, whom we may compare together, too often breathe a most dishonourable atmosphere of vice. With a frankness which goes the length of impudence, they give full play to their taste for degradation and vile reality; and yet their vigour of expression does not always degenerate into cynicism, nor is the truth of their pictures always shameless. The fact is, both had the secret of saying exactly enough to express their thoughts, even when these were bred by the most capricious fancy. They may be reproached with not caring to raise the standard of their work; but it is impossible to deny them the merit of having painted ugliness of every kind firmly and with elegant precision, nor that of having given, each in his own language, a definite and truly national form to that art of satire which had been hardly so much as rough-hewn in the caricatures and pamphlets of the League.

Etching, but little practised in Germany after the death of DÜrer, had found scarcely greater favour in Italy. As to the Dutch Little Masters, spoken of in the preceding chapters, the time was not yet come for most of their charming works. Claude Lorraine's etchings, now so justly celebrated, were themselves of later date than Callot's. The latter was, therefore, the real author of this class of work. In his hand the needle acquired a lightness and boldness not presaged in previous essays, which were at once coarse and careless. In his suggestions of life in motion, he imitated the swift and lively gait of the pencil, whilst his contours are touched with the severity of the pen, if not of the burin itself. In a word, he gave his plates an appearance of accuracy without destroying that look of improvisation which is so necessary to work of the kind; in this way he decided the nature and special conditions of etching. It was owing to his influence that French art first attracted the attention of the Italians: Stefano della Bella, Cantarini and even Canta-Gallina (who did not disdain to copy the etchings of his old pupil), Castiglione the Genoese, and many others, essayed, with more or less success, to appropriate the style of the master of Nancy; and when he returned to establish himself in France, where his reputation had preceded him, he found admirers, and before long a still greater following of imitators.

He was presented to Louis XIII., who at once commissioned him to engrave the "Siege of La Rochelle," and received at Court with remarkable favour, which was, however, withdrawn some years later, when he was bold enough to oppose the will of Richelieu. After the taking of Nancy (1633) from the Duke of Lorraine, Callot's sovereign, the great Cardinal, to immortalise the event, ordered the engraver to make it the subject of a companion print to that of the "Siege of La Rochelle," which he had just finished; but he was revolted by the idea of using his talents for the humiliation of his prince, and replied to Richelieu's messenger, "that he would rather cut off his thumb than obey." The reply was not of a kind to maintain him in the good graces of the Cardinal, and Callot felt it. He took leave of the king, and soon after retired to his native town, where he died at the age of forty-three.

Really introduced into France by Callot, etching had become the fashion there. Abraham Bosse and Israel Silvestre helped to popularise it, the latter by applying it to topography and architecture, the former by using it for the illustration of religious and scientific books, and the embellishment of the fans and other elegant knick-knacks then selling in that "Galerie Dauphine du Palays" which is figured in one of his prints, and from which a play of Corneille's derives its name. He published besides an infinite number of subjects of all sorts: domestic scenes, portraits, costumes, architectural ornaments, almost always engraved from his own designs, and sometimes from those of the Norman painter, Saint-Ygny.

Abraham Bosse is doubtless a second-rate man, but he is far from having no merit at all. He is an intelligent, if not a very delicate observer, who knows how to impart to his figures and to the general aspect of a scene an appearance of reality which is not altogether the truth, but which comes very near to having its charm. He certainly possesses the instinct of correct drawing, in default of refined taste and feeling; and finally, to take him simply as an engraver, he has much of the bold and firm handling of Callot, with something already of that cheerful and thoroughly French cleverness which was destined to be more and more developed in the national school of engraving, and to reach perfection in the second half of the seventeenth century.

To Abraham Bosse are owing decided improvements in the construction of printing-presses, the composition of varnishes, and all the practical parts of the art; to him some technical studies are also due, the most interesting of which, the "TraitÉ des ManiÈres de Graver sur l'Airain par le Moyen des Eaux-fortes," is, if not the first, at least one of the first books on engraving published in France. We may add that the works of Abraham Bosse, like those of all other etchers of his time, show a continual tendency to imitate with the needle the work of the graver: a tendency worth remarking, though blamable in some respects, as its result is to deprive each class of work of its peculiar character, and from etching in particular to remove its appearance of freedom and ease.

We have reached the moment when the French school of engraving entered the path of progress, no more to depart from it, and when, after having followed in the rear of foreign engravers, the French masters at length began to make up with and almost to outdistance them. Before proceeding, we must glance at the movement of those schools whose beginnings we have already traced.

The line of really great Italian painters went out with the sixteenth century. Domenichino, indeed, Annibale Carracci, and a few others, glorified the century that followed; but their works, although full of sentiment, skill, and ability, are quite as much affected by the pernicious eclecticism of the period and by the general decline in taste. After them all the arts declined. Sculpture and architecture became more and more degraded under the influence of Bernini and Borromini. Athirst for novelty of any kind, people had gradually come to think the most extravagant fancies clever. To bring the straight line into greater disrepute, statues and bas-reliefs were tortured as by a hurricane; attitudes, draperies, and even immovable accessories were all perturbed and wavering. The engravers were no better than the painters, sculptors, and architects. By dint of exaggerating the idealistic creed, they had fallen into mere insanity; and in the midst of this degradation of art, they aimed at nothing save excitement and novelty, so that their invention was only shown in irregular or overlengthy lines, and their impetuosity in bad drawing. Daily wandering further from the paths of the masters, the Italian engravers at last attained, through the abuse of method, a complete oblivion of the essential conditions of their art; so that with few exceptions, till the end of the eighteenth century, nothing is to be found save barren sleight-of-hand in the works of that very school, which, in the days of Marc Antonio and his pupils, had been universally triumphant.

After the Little Masters, inheritors of some of the genius, skill, and renown of Albert DÜrer Germany had given birth to a fair number of clever engravers, the majority of whom had left their country. Some of them, indistinguishable to-day from the second generation of Marc Antonio's disciples, had, as we said, abandoned the national style for the Italian; others had settled in France or in the Low Countries. The Thirty Years' War accomplished the ruin of German art, which before long was represented only in Frankfort, where Matthew MÉrian of Basle, and his pupils, with certain engravers from neighbouring countries, had taken refuge.

Whilst engraving was declining in Italy and Germany, the English school was springing into being. Though at first of small importance, the beginnings and early essays of the school are such as may hardly pass without remark.

For some time England had seemed to take little part in the progress of the fine arts in Europe, except commercially, or as the hostess of many famous artists, from Holbein to Van Dyck. There were a certain number of picture-dealers and print-sellers in London, but under Charles I. her only painters and engravers of merit were foreigners.31 The famous portrait painter, Sir Peter Lely, whom the English are proud to own, was a German, as was Kneller, who inherited his reputation, and, as was Hollar, an engraver of unrivalled talent.32 And while a few pupils of this last artist were doing their best to imitate his example, the taste for line engraving and etching, which processes were being slowly and painfully popularised by their efforts, was suddenly changed into a passion for another method, in which the principal success of the English school has since been won.

Prince Rupert, so renowned for his courage and his romantic adventures, had the fortunate chance to introduce to London the process of engraving which is called mezzotint. In spite, however, of what has been alleged, the honour of the invention is not his. Ludwig von Siegen, a lieutenant-colonel in the service of the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, had certainly discovered mezzotint before the end of 1642, for in the course of that year he published a print in this style—the portrait of the Princess Amelia Elizabeth of Hesse—the very first ever given to the public. Von Siegen for awhile refused to divulge his secret. "There is not," he wrote to the Landgrave of Hesse concerning this same portrait, "a single engraver, nor a single artist, who knows how this work was done."

And, indeed, no one succeeded in finding out, and it was only after a silence of twelve years that Von Siegen consented to reveal his mystery. Prince Rupert, then at Brussels, was the first initiated. He, in his turn, chose for confidant the painter Wallerant Vaillant, who apparently did not think himself bound to strict silence, for, soon afterwards, a number of Flemish engravers attempted the process. Once made public, no one troubled about the man who had invented it. He was, in fact, so quickly and completely forgotten, that even in 1656 Von Siegen was obliged to claim the title, which no one any longer dreamed of giving him, and to sign his works: "Von Siegen, the first and true inventor of this kind of engraving." It was still worse in London when the plates engraved by Prince Rupert were exhibited, and when the English artists had learnt how they could produce the like. They set themselves to work without looking out for any other models, and were much more taken up with their own results than the history of the discovery, the whole honour of which was attributed to Rupert, the man who in reality had only made it public.

The talent of Rupert's first imitators, like that of the originator himself, did not rise above mediocrity. Amongst their direct successors, and the successors of these, there are few of much account; but in the eighteenth century, when Sir Joshua Reynolds undertook, like Rubens at Antwerp, to himself direct the work of engraving, the number of good English mezzotint engravers became considerable. Earlom, Ardell, Smith, Dickinson, Green, Watson, and many others deserving of mention, greatly increased the resources of the process, by applying it to the reproduction of the master's works. Mezzotint, at first reserved for portraits, was used for subjects of every sort: flower pieces, genre, even history; and step by step it attained to practical perfection, of which, at the beginning of the present century, the English still had the monopoly.

The methods of mezzotint differ completely from those of line engraving and etching. With the graver and the needle the shadows and half-tones are made out on copper by means of incised lines and touches; with the mezzotint tool, on the contrary, the lights are produced by scraping, the shadows by leaving intact the corresponding portions of the plate. Instead of offering a flat, smooth surface, like the plates in line engraving, a mezzotint copper must be first grained by a steel tool (called the "rocker"), shaped like a chisel, with a semicircular blade which is bevelled and toothed. Sometimes (and this is generally the case in the present day) the "rocking" of the surface, on which the engraver is to work, is produced, not by a tool, but by a special machine.

When the drawing has been traced in the usual way on the prepared plate, the grain produced by the rocker is rubbed down with the burnisher wherever pure white or light tints are required. The parts that are not flattened by the burnisher print as darks; and these darks are all the deeper and more velvety as they result from the grain itself—that is to say, from a general preparation specially adapted to catch the ink—and are by no means composed, as in line engraving, of furrows more or less crowded or cross-hatched.

Mezzotint engraving has, in this respect, the advantage of other processes; in all others it is decidedly inferior. The rough grain produced on a plate by the rocker, and the mere scraping by which it is obliterated or modified, are technical hindrances to decided drawing: only with graver or point is it possible to make outlines of perfect accuracy. Again, precision, delicacy of modelling, and perfect finish in detail are impossible to the scraper. Mezzotint, in fine, is suitable for the translation of pictures where the light is scarce and concentrated, but is powerless to render work quiet in aspect and smooth in effect.

English engravers, then, had begun to rank as artists. Callot, and, after him, other French engravers already remarkably skilful, had succeeded in founding a school which was soon to be honoured by the presence of true masters; Italy and Germany were deteriorating steadily. Meanwhile, what was going on elsewhere? In Spain there was a brilliant galaxy of painters, some of whom, like Ribera, have left etchings; but there were few or no professional engravers. In Switzerland, Jost Amman of Zurich (1539–1591) was succeeded by a certain number of illustrator-engravers, heirs of his superficial cleverness and of his commercial rather than artistic ideas: engravers, by the way, who are commonly confounded with the German masters of the same epoch. Lastly, the few Swedes or Poles who studied art, whether in Flanders or Germany, never succeeded in popularising the taste for it in their own countries; only for form's sake need they be mentioned.

The first of the two great phases of the history of engraving ends about the middle of the seventeenth century. We have seen that the influence of Marc Antonio, though combated at first by the influence of Albert DÜrer, easily conquered, and prevailed without a rival in Italy, Germany, and even France, until the appearance of Callot and his contemporaries. Meanwhile, in the Low Countries the art presented a physiognomy of its own, developed slowly, and ended by undergoing a thorough, but brief, transformation under the authority of Rubens. The Flemish school was soon to be absorbed in that of France, and the second period, which may be termed the French, to begin in the history of engraving.

Were it permissible, on the authority of examples given elsewhere, to compare a multitude of men separated by differences of epoch and endowment, we might arrange the old engravers in the order adopted for a group of much greater artists by the painters of the "Apotheosis of Homer" and the "Hemicycle of the Palais des Beaux-Arts." Let us regard them in our mind's eye as a master might figure them. In the centre is Finiguerra, the father of the race; next to him, on the one side, are the Master of 1466, Martin Schongauer, and Albert DÜrer; on the other, Mantegna and Marc Antonio, surrounded, like the three German masters, by their disciples, amongst whom they maintain an attitude of command. Between the two groups, but rather on the German side, is Lucas van Leyden, first in place, as by right, among the Dutchmen. Below these early masters, who wear upon their brows that expression of severity which distinguishes their work, comes the excited crowd of daring innovators, whose merit is in the spirit of their style—Bolswert, Vorsterman, Pontius, Cornelius Visscher, Van Dalen, and their rivals. Rembrandt muses apart, sombre, and as though shrouded in mystery. Lastly, in the middle distance, are seen the merely clever engravers: the Dutch Little Masters, Callot, Hollar, and Israel Silvestre.

If, on the other hand, we must abandon this realm of fancy for the regions of fact, we might sum up the results of past progress by instancing a few prints of perfect beauty. Our own selection would be Mantegna's "Entombment;" Marc Antonio's "Massacre of the Innocents;" the "Death of the Virgin," by Martin Schongauer; DÜrer's "Melancholia;" the "Calvary" of Lucas van Leyden; Rembrandt's "Christ Healing the Sick;" Bolswert's "Crown of Thorns;" the "Portrait of Rubens," by Paul Pontius, or the "Gellius de Bouma" of Cornelius Visscher; and finally, Callot's "Florentine Fair," or "Garden at Nancy," and the "Bouvier," or, better still, the "Soleil Levant" of Claude Lorraine. Happy the owner of this selection of masterpieces: the man who, better inspired than the majority of his kind, has preferred a few gems to an overgrown and unwieldy collection.

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