The drawback of such pastimes, innocent enough in themselves, was that they degraded art into a frivolous amusement, and promulgated a false view of its capabilities and real object. This is what very generally happens when, on the strength of a certain degree of taste, mistaken for talent, people aspire to compass, without reflection or study, results only to be attained by knowledge and experience. The authors of such hasty work think art easy, because they are ignorant of its essentials; and the public, in its turn mistaken as to these, accepts appearances for reality, becomes accustomed to the pretence of merit, and loses all taste for true superiority. Every art may be thus perverted; and in our own days, amateur water colours, statuettes, and waltzes are as injurious to painting, sculpture, and music, as in former days, the amusement of print-making was to engraving.
Moreover, it was not art only that these prints began to injure. Prompted by gallantry, as understood by the younger Crébillon and Voisenon when they wrote their experiences, they often presented to the eyes of women scenes to the description of which they would not have listened: as a certain lady is reported to have asked Baron de Besenval, during the relation of an embarrassing adventure, to "draw a picture-puzzle of what he couldn't tell her." Often, however, engraving, as practised in the salons, appealed to quite another order of passions and ideas. In support of the great cause of the day – philosophy – all weapons seemed fair, and the needle was used to disseminate the new evangel. When Mme. de Pompadour, in her little engraving, the proofs of which were fought for by her courtiers, attempted to show "The Genius of the Arts Protecting France," she set no very dangerous example, and only proved one thing – that the said Genius did not so carefully protect the kingdom as to exclude the possibility of platitude. But when the habitués of Mme. d'Épinay and D'Holbach set themselves in their little prints to attack certain so-called mental superstitions, they unconsciously opened the door to people of a more radical turn of mind. Before the end of the century prints a good deal more crudely energetic appeared on the same subject; and the pothouse engravers, in their turn, illustrated the Père Duchêne, as the drawing-room engravers had illustrated the "Essai sur les Mœurs" and the "Encyclopédie."
Although the engraving of illustrations, or at least "light" subjects, was, in the eighteenth century, almost the only sort practised in France, even by the most eminent artists, some of these imparted to their productions a severer significance, and an appearance more in harmony with that of former work. Several – pupils of Nicolas Henri Tardieu, or of Dupuis – resisted with much constancy the encroachment of the fashionable style, and passed on to their scholars of all nations those teachings they had received in their youth. The Germans, Joseph Wagner, Martin Preisler, Schmidt, John George Wille; the Italian, Porporati; the Spaniards, Carmona and Pascal Molés; the Englishmen, Strange, Ingram, Ryland, and others, came, at close intervals, for instruction or improvement in this school. In Paris they published plates of various degrees of excellence; but, in the greater part of these, the nationality and personal sentiment of their authors are obliterated in acquired habits of taste and handling.
Wille's prints, for instance – those even which have most contributed to his fame, "Paternal Instruction," after Terburg, or the "Dutchwoman Knitting," after Mieris – might just as well, for anything one sees to the contrary, have been the work of a French engraver of the same period. They only differ from plates bearing the name of Beauvarlet or of Daullé in a certain Teutonic excess of coldness in the handling; in a somewhat staid, and, as it were, metallic stiffness of arrangement. Carmona's "François Boucher," and his "Colin de Vermont," after Roslin, and Porporati's "Tancrède et Clorinde," after Carle Vanloo, have still less of the stamp of originality.
Finally, with the exception of Ryland, by reason of the particular process he employed, and of which we shall presently have to speak – and especially of Strange, who has his own peculiar mode of feeling, and a sort of merit peculiar to himself – none of the English engravers trained in the French school fail to show the signs of close relationship. Engravers of more original talent must be looked for neither amongst historical nor portrait engravers, nor even amongst engravers of genre. For information as to the state of the art outside of France, and apart from the French school, we must rather turn to the illustrations of books and almanacs engraved by Chodowiecki at Dantzic or Berlin, or to the vast plates from ancient Roman monuments etched – not without a certain rhetorical emphasis – by Piranesi.
As for other second or third rate foreign engravers of the period, as for those ragionevoli (as Vasari would have called them) whose work, if undeserving of oblivion, is likewise undeserving of attentive examination, we shall have done our part if we mention certain amongst them: as J. Houbraken, who worked at Dordrecht; Domenichino Cunego, of Rome; Weirotter, of Vienna; and Fernando Selma, of Madrid.
Meanwhile, in France and other countries, by royal command, or at the expense of rich amateurs, important series of prints were being published in commemoration of public events, or in illustration of famous collections of painting and sculpture. The first of the latter order was the "Galerie de Versailles," begun by Charles Simoneau, continued by Massé, and only finished in 1752 after twenty-eight consecutive years of labour. It was speedily succeeded by the "Cabinet de Crozat" and the "Peintures de l'Hôtel Lambert;" and a little later the example of France was followed by other countries, and one after the other there appeared, in Italy, Germany, and England, the "Museo Pio Clementino," the "Dresden Gallery," the catalogue of the Bruhl collection, and the publications of Boydell – all such magnificent works as do honour to the second half of the eighteenth century. Finally, thanks to Vivarès and Balechou, the engraving of landscape began to rival historical engraving, to which it had before been considered as merely accessory. The honour of having created it belongs to the French. It is too often forgotten that they were the first to excel in it, and that but for the practice of Vivarès, England to whom the merit of initiative is usually attributed might never have boasted of Woollett and his pupils.
Since Claude Lorraine and Gaspard Dughet, the French school had produced few painters of pure landscape – none of first-rate ability. The first to restore to the neglected art a something of its pristine brilliance was Joseph Vernet. An observer, but one rather clever than sincere, he is certainly wanting in the strength and gravity which are characteristics of the great masters. In his work there is more intelligence than deep feeling, and more elegance than true beauty. Like the descriptive poetry of the time, it shows us Nature a trifle too sleek and shiny, and a little over-emphasised; she is rather a theme for discourse than a model to be lovingly studied as a source of inspiration. Yet even where the truth is thus arbitrarily treated, it retains under Vernet's brush sufficient charm, if not to move, at least to interest and to please; so that the success of this brilliant artist, and the influence he exerted on the French school and on public taste, are easily understood.
In the lofty position which his talent had won him, Joseph Vernet was more capable than any other painter of giving a happy impulse to the art of engraving; and, indeed, the landscape engravers formed by him were masters of the genre. We have mentioned Balechou and Vivarès. The former, at first a pupil of Lépicié, began by engraving portraits, the best known of which, a full-length of Augustus III., King of Poland, brought upon its author the shame of a fitting punishment. Convicted of having detained a certain number of the first proofs for his own profit; Balechou was struck off the list of the Académie, and obliged to retire to Arles, his native town, and thence to Avignon, where he took to landscape engraving. There it was that he executed after Joseph Vernet his "Baigneuses," his "Calme," and his "La Tempête." In his latter years he returned to history, and executed after Carle Vanloo his tiresome "Sainte Geneviève," which was once so loudly vaunted, which even now is not unadmired, and which really might be a masterpiece, if technical skill and excessive ease of handling were all the art. Though, unlike Vivarès, he did not teach the practice of landscape in England, Balechou contributed enormously by his works to the education of the English engravers; and the best of them, Woollett, confessed that he produced his "Fishing" with a proof of the Frenchman's "La Tempête" always before his eyes.
As for Vivarès, he engraved in Paris a number of plates after Joseph Vernet and the Old Masters, and then, preceding De Loutherbourg and many others of his nation, he migrated to London. He took with him a new art, as Hollar had done a century before, and founded that school of landscape engravers whose talents were destined to constitute, even to our own time, the chief glory of English engraving.
But before his pupils and imitators could take possession after him of this vast domain, engraving in England had developed considerably, in another direction, under the influence of two distinguished artists, Hogarth and Reynolds, born at an interval of twenty-five years from one another. The son of a printer's reader, who apprenticed him to a goldsmith, William Hogarth spent almost all his youth in obscurity and poverty. At twenty he was engraving business cards for London tradesmen; some years later he was sign-painting, and was wearing himself out in work entirely unworthy of him, when he forced the attention of the public by the publication of a satirical print, the heroes of which were well known and easily recognised. His success being presently confirmed by other compositions of the same sort he profited by the fact to apply his talent to more serious work. He soon acquired a reputation, enriched himself by marrying the daughter of Sir James Thornhill, the king's painter, and remained till his death (1764) one of the most eminent men of his country.
Both as painter and engraver Hogarth was a deep student of art, on which he has left some commendable writings; but he never succeeded in fulfilling all its conditions. Extravagantly pre-occupied with the philosophical significance with which he purposes to endow his work, he does not always see when he has gone far enough in the exposition of his idea: he darkens it with commentary; he becomes unintelligible by sheer insistence on intelligibility. There are allegories of his in which, still striving after ingenuity, he has piled detail upon detail till the result is confusion worse confounded.
But when no excess of analysis has decomposed his primary idea to nothingness, by directing the attention elsewhere, Hogarth strikes home, and compasses most powerful effects. His series of prints, in which are storied the actions of one or more persons – his "Marriage à la Mode," his "Rake's Progress," his "Harlot's Progress," his "Industry and Idleness" – the last a sort of double biography representing the different lives of two apprentices, one of whom becomes Lord Mayor of London, whilst the other dies at Tyburn – all these engraved by himself, partly in etching and partly in line, are, as regards the execution, by no means irreproachable; are frequently, indeed, not even good: but in expression and gesture they are nearly always of startling truth, while the moral meaning, the innermost spirit of every scene, is felt and rendered with the keenest sagacity. At the very time when the genius of Richardson was working a like revolution in literature, Hogarth – and herein lies his chief merit – was introducing domestic drama into art. In England and elsewhere the painter-engraver and the novelist, both creators of the style in which they worked, have had a crowd of imitators; but they cannot be said to have met with rivals anywhere.
The genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds is of a totally different order. In the sense of consisting in the sentiment of effect and the masterly arrangement of tones it is essentially picturesque, and presents such a boldness of character as engravers could easily appreciate and reproduce. There is no far-fetched significance, no accessories tending to destroy the unity of the whole. On the contrary, the work proceeds by synthesis; it is all largely schemed, and built up in masses where the details are scarcely indicated. The expression lies not so much in niceties of physiognomy as in the whole attitude of the sitters and the characteristic pose and contour of the faces represented. The painter's imagination is brilliant rather than delicate; sometimes, indeed, it degenerates into bad taste and eccentricity. But far more frequently it gives his attitudes an air of ease and originality, and the general aspect of his portraits breathes a perfect dignity. The vigorous contrasts, the freedom and wealth of colour which are their primary characteristics, as they are those of Gainsborough's work likewise, are qualities to whose translation the free and flowing stroke of the graver is hardly fitted, but which mezzotint would naturally render with ease and success. And, as we have said before, it is to the influence of the famous painter that must be attributed the immense extension of the latter process in England during the latter part of the eighteenth century.
The landscape and mezzotint engravers began, therefore, to vitalise the English school: the former especially lent it real importance by their talent. From 1760 or thereabouts Woollett published, after Richard Wilson or after Claude, those admirable works which, on account of their suave harmony of effect, their transparency of atmosphere, and their variableness of colour, are less like engravings than pictures.45 Shortly afterwards he completed his fame by work of another sort: the reproduction, first, of West's "Death of Wolfe," and then of his "Battle of La Hogue," the American's best picture, and the finest historical plate ever engraved in England. Lastly about the same time, Robert Strange, a pupil of Philippe Le Bas, engraved in line, after Correggio and Van Dyck, the "Saint Jerome" and the "Charles I.;" as well as other prints after these masters, which are quite as charming, and should, indeed, be unreservedly admired if the correctness of their drawing were only equal to their elegance of modelling and flexibility of tone.
So much progress accomplished in so few years attracted the attention of statesmen and of the English Government. They saw it was time to cease from paying tribute to the superiority of French engravers, and to allow those talents to develop in London which had till then been sent to school in Paris. George III. had just founded the Royal Academy (Jan., 1769), with Reynolds for its first President. He determined still further to strengthen the impulse of art by countenancing great undertakings in engraving; and as he wished the country to reap as much commercial benefit as honour in the matter, he granted bounties on the exportation of English engravings, while the importation of French work was taxed with enormous duties.
In this way the progress of national art became a political question, and every one hastened to second the king's views. Woollett's plates had been largely subscribed for before publication, and the illustrated editions of the travels of Cook and Sir Joseph Banks were taken up in a few days. Finally, when it was proposed to engrave Copley's "Death of Chatham," the subscription at once ran up to £3,600; and when, the first proofs having been taken, the plate was returned to the engraver, he made almost as much more in less than two years. Nor did the fever of protection in any wise abate for that. On the contrary, it called a number of talents into being, and attracted to London a crowd of foreigners, all sure of the encouragement which began to fail them elsewhere. Cipriani, Angelica Kauffmann, Catherine Prestel, the Swiss Moser and his daughter, and a hundred other painters or engravers, came in one after another to contribute to the success of the school and the spread of English trade.46
Amongst these adventurers there was one – the Florentine Bartolozzi – whose works at once became the fashion, less, perhaps, for any intrinsic merit than because of the novelty of his method. The process called "stipple engraving" excluded the use of lines and cross hatchings, and consisted in the arrangement of masses of dots more or less delicate in themselves, and more or less close in order, and designed in proportion to their relative distance or nearness, to render nice gradations of tone, depth of shadow, and even completeness of outline.
Speaking exactly, this was but an application to the general execution of a work of a process adopted long before by etchers and line engravers as a means of partial execution. Jean Morin, Boulanger, Gérard Audran himself, and many others, had habitually made use of dots to supplement the work of the burin or the needle, or to effect transitions between their lights and shadows, or the larger of their outlines and subtler details of their modelling. Moreover, before their time, Jan Lutma, a Dutch goldsmith, invented a method of "engraving in dots," which, produced by means of his etching needle and aquafortis, were deepened and enlarged with chisel and hammer: whence the name of opus mallei bestowed on his results. Bartolozzi, therefore, and the English engravers who, like Ryland, made use of stippling, did but revive and extend in their own way the boundaries of a method already known. They displayed remarkable skill, it is true, but their work, like the rest of its kind, displays a feebleness of form that is almost inevitable, and is touched with a coldness inherent in the very nature of the process.
In stipple engraving, the burin and the dry point are used alternately, according to the degree of vigour or delicacy required. The parts that are to come light in proof are done with the dry-point; while those to come dark are covered with dots ploughed deeper with the burin. Round the edge of these, by the mere act of ploughing, there is raised a rim, or rampart – technically called a "burr" – which the engraver, to regain the ground thus lost, has to rub down with the burnisher. In this way he goes on dotting and burnishing till he gets a close enough grain.
Immensely successful during the last years of the eighteenth century, stipple engraving soon went out of fashion, not only in France, where it scarce survived the first attempts of Copia, but even in England, where the example of Bartolozzi and Ryland had been followed with such eager diligence. Such, too, somewhat later, was the fate of a somewhat similar process – the "crayon engraving," of which Gilles Demarteau, born in Liège, but bred and trained in Paris, may be considered, if not the inventor, at least the most active, skilful, and popular practitioner.47
The object of crayon engraving is to imitate the effect of red or black chalk on a coarse-grained paper, which, by the very roughness of its surface, retains no more than an uneven, and as it were a disconnected, impression of the strokes or hatchings laid upon it. In common with stipple engraving, it renders the loose and broken lines of the originals by substituting a mass of dots for the ordinary work of the burin or the needle. It differs, however, from stipple engraving in the method of working, and even in the nature of the tools employed. The outlines are traced on the varnished copper with a toothed or multi-pointed needle, while the inner hatchings are made either with the needle in question, or with what is called a roulette, which is a steel cylinder bristling with small, jagged teeth, and running on a fixed axis. The roulette, which is provided with a handle, is so directed that the teeth are brought to bear directly, and with more or less effect, on the varnished copper. Then the plate is bitten in; and when the aquafortis has done its part, the work, if necessary, is resumed with the same tools on the bare metal.
The first specimens of crayon engraving were presented in 1757 to the Académie Royale de Peinture, which, an official document informs us48 "highly approved of the method, as being well fitted to perpetuate the designs of good masters, and multiply copies of the best styles of drawings." For the reproduction of drawings, the new process was certainly better than etching, at least as practised to that end by the Count de Caylus and the Abbé de Saint-Non. The misfortune was, that in the eighteenth century as in the first years of the nineteenth, the crayon engravers appear to have thought far less of "perpetuating the designs of good masters" than of suiting their choice of originals to the prevailing fashion. As a matter of fact, however skilful they were in execution, the only cause served by Demarteau's innumerable fac-similes was that of the Bouchers and Fragonards, and of kindred experts in "the most distinguished school of drawing." Reproduced by engraving, the crayon studies of these persons became the ordinary means of instruction in academies and public schools; and from the first the popularity of these wretched models was such that, even after the revolution effected in art by David, on through the Empire, and as late as the Restoration, art students generally remained subject to the regimen adopted for their predecessors in the days of Louis XV. and XVI.
Then lithography made its appearance, and in no great while was applied to the production of drawing-copies, once the monopoly of crayon engraving. Nor was this the only quarter from which the method of François and Demarteau was assailed. By degrees it fell out of use for the production not only of drawing-copies, but of fac-similes of drawings by the masters for artists and amateurs; or, if occasionally practised, it was – as in the subjects engraved some thirty years back from drawings in the Louvre and the Musée de Lille – with so many modifications, and in combination with such a number of other processes, as reduced it from supremacy to the rank, till worse should befall, of a mere auxiliary. In our own time it has had its death-blow in the advance of photography; and as, after all, its one object was the presentation of an exact likeness, the absolute effigy, of its original, the preference of a purely mechanical process of reproduction is, if we consider the certainty of the results, no more than natural. In proportion as, by its very nature, photography is powerless to take the place of engraving, when the work to be reproduced, be it picture or mural decoration, presupposes in the interpreter, in whatsoever degree, the power of translating what is before him, just so far is it capable of fulfilling the one condition imposed upon the copyist of a drawing or an engraving – that of perfect fidelity in imitation.
The object attempted by François, Demarteau, Bonnet, and others – the production by engraving of a sort of optical illusion, the exact fac-simile of a drawing – had been started before them by Jean Christophe Leblond, an artist born of French parents at Frankfort, who, moreover, had sought to extend to the imitation of colour what his successors were content to restrict to the imitation of monochrome. Very early in the eighteenth century, Leblond succeeded in producing prints in several tints, by a method which he called "pastel engraving," and to which custom has given the more general name of "colour engraving." For the second half of this title, it might, perhaps, have been better to use the word "printing." What is called "colour engraving" is not really a special engraving process. Its whole originality consists in the production of a single proof from several plates (generally four), in the preparation of which the rocker, the roulette, and sometimes even the burin, have been used. From these plates, each inked with a single colour, the effect of which is relieved or modified by the subsequent addition of those tints with which the other three are covered, there results in the proof, by the use of points of correspondence, an ensemble in colour which is similar in appearance to that of painting in pastel, in water-colour, or in gouache. This was pretty much the process, and the results were in some sort comparable with those obtained by chromo-lithography. The older method had, however, the advantage of the other in that, by the very variety of the preparation to which the plate was subjected, its results were not so liable to present the appearance, either coarse or dull, of common hand-tinted work.
Some of Leblond's engravings, particularly a large, half-length "Louis XV.," enable us to estimate to the full the capacities of his invention. Leblond, indeed, must be counted an inventor, inasmuch as it was his to discover a secret which, before him, had been only dimly foreseen, or at most half-guessed. Still, the essays in the first years of the seventeenth century of the Dutchman Lastmann, and a little later of Seghers the Fleming, should not be completely overlooked; nor would it be just to refuse recognition to the practical improvements made in colour engraving, after Leblond, by Gautier Dagoty, in Paris, and by Taylor, in London. In proportion to the relative importance of the two discoveries, Leblond played the same part in the history of the colour process as Daguerre in the history of heliography. They each effected so great an advance as to close the period of groping and darkness, and to some extent determine the course of progress. But it does not follow, therefore, that they owed nothing to the attempts of their predecessors; and if their claim to inventors' honours is fairly established, it is because they solved a problem they were by no means the first to attack.
Leblond, indeed, got nothing from his discovery but the honour of making it. He sought in vain to turn it to account in London, and succeeded no better in Paris. In the latter city he lived for some years in great distress, and in 1741 he died there, in the hospital.
Some years after the invention of colour engraving, another sort of engraving, or rather another sort of pictorial reproduction, the method called "au lavis," was invented, and very skilfully used from the outset, by Jean Baptiste Leprince; and in no great while the series of innovations in the practice of the art, from the end of the seventeenth century, was completed by the invention of aquatint.
The first of these two processes is apparently of extreme simplicity. The line once engraved and bitten in, as in ordinary etching, it only consisted in brushing the plate with acid, as a draughtsman washes in on paper with sepia or Indian ink. The preliminary work, however, required a great deal of care and skill, and even a certain amount of scientific knowledge. The particular quality of the copper, the composition of the varnishes and acids, and many other conditions impossible to discuss in detail, made the new process somewhat difficult of employment; and before long the ardour of those practitioners who had essayed to imitate Leprince's results was very sensibly diminished.
In spite of the value of these results, and the personal skill of the inventor; in spite, too, of the technical explanations contained in the "Plan du Traité de la Gravure au Lavis" presented by him (1750) to the Académie Royale, it was evident that the French engravers thought lightly of Leprince's discovery, and did not care to investigate its capabilities. It only got a fresh start in France when, notably modified and improved by the initiative of foreign engravers, it had been transformed in London into what is known as aquatint engraving. Then, however, in the hands of Debucourt49 and of Jazet later on, it acquired a popularity all the greater that its productions, by their very nature and quality, were more intimately in harmony with the inspiration and style of fashionable art. Jazet, for instance, contributed greatly to the triumph of aquatint in France, by applying it, from the first years of the Restoration, to the interpretation of the works of Horace Vernet. Such plates as "Le Bivouac du Colonel Moncey," the "Barrière de Clichy," the "Soldat Laboureur," and many others, were tolerated among Frenchmen for the sake of the associations they awakened at least as much as for their artistic merit.
It is possible that since then the engraver has reckoned a little too much on the world-wide reputation of his painter; or it may be that he has been somewhat too conscious of the advantages of a rapid and facile method, and has sacrificed the ideal of delicacy and correctness to the enhancement of a reputation for fertility. Certain it is that Jazet, as is proved by his early engravings, and especially the "Barrière de Clichy," was more capable than any one else of raising work in aquatint to the level of art; and it is much to be regretted that his somewhat careless ease should have hindered the full development of his talent. It is still more to be regretted that, in spite of the laudable efforts of Messrs. Prévost, Girard, and others to maintain the process in the better way, it should have been dishonoured and deprived of all but a purely commercial importance by the production of multitudes of plates, whose only merit is their cheapness. If we consider the so-called Biblical scenes done in aquatint for exportation, the heroines of romance, the half-naked women described (by way of commentary) as "Love," "Souvenir," "Pleasure," "Desire," and all the terms of the erotic vocabulary, it is hard to say whether the intention or the execution is the more unpleasant. What is certain is that such things have nothing to do with art except as examples of its degradation and destruction. That section of the public sensible of their charm is certainly not that which is impressed by beauty, and it is useless to care about winning its approbation; but when ugliness is everywhere it is to be feared that everybody may grow used to the sight, and forget to look elsewhere. The danger to which pure line engraving is thus exposed by the deplorable exigencies of competition is not the only one which threatens the art. A glance at its several phases since 1800 and at its present state is enough to show that the line of talents has never once been interrupted; that those of to-day are every whit as vigorous and accomplished as those of the past; but that for opportunities of displaying their full power, and being appreciated at their true worth they have not seldom to wait in vain.