Engraving: Its Origin, Processes, and History

The impetus given by Lucas van Leyden to the art of engraving was seconded, even during his life, by several Dutch artists who imitated his method more or less successfully. Amongst others, Alart Claessen, an anonymous engraver called the "Maître à l'Écrevisse," and Dirck Star, or Van Staren, generally called the "Maître à l'Étoile." The movement did not slacken after the death of the leader of the school. The engravers of the Low Countries, accentuating more and more the qualities aimed at from the beginning, soon surpassed their German rivals, and seemed alone to be gifted with the knack of dealing with light. Cornelius Cort, who engraved several of Titian's works in Venice in the great painter's studio, and the pupils he educated on his return to Holland, began to exhibit a boldness of touch not to be so clearly discovered in their predecessors; but this progress, real in some respects, was not accomplished without injury to truthful study and the exact interpretation of form, and certainly not without a deplorable exaggeration in the use of means.

The workmanship of Hendrik Goltzius, for instance, and still more that of his pupil, Jan Müller, is strained and feeble owing to their affectation of ease. The constant use of bent and parallel lines unreasonably prolonged imparts to the plates of these two engravers an appearance at once dull and florid; they present something of the same aspect as those caligraphical specimens of the present day, in which the faces of Henri IV. or of Napoleon are drawn entirely with the curves of a single stroke. Still, in spite of this extremely affected workmanship, the prints of Goltzius, of Müller, and even of Saenredam, are characterised by a comparative intensity of tone, as well as by singular skill in cutting the copper. This abuse of method, however, had not yet become general in the schools of the Low Countries. Side by side with the intemperate or daring craftsmen we have mentioned, there were certain Flemish and Dutch engravers who imparted to their work a delicacy and a reticence of expression better suited to the traditions and the models bequeathed by Lucas van Leyden. These were Nicolas van Bruyn at Antwerp, the brothers Wierix at Amsterdam, and some few others, all of them disciples more or less faithful to the old teaching, and apparently more or less hostile to the effort at emancipation going on around them. When, however, Rubens took the reins, individual resistance and impulse ceased, and all controversy was at an end. Principles, method, and aim became the same for every one. Both Dutch and Flemish engravers openly set themselves to represent with the graver the infinite gradations of a painted canvas, the delicacy and the daring, the nicest punctilio and the most summary smearing, of the painter's brush.

Never was the influence of a painter on engraving so direct or so potent as that of Rubens. The great master had shown by his drawings that it was possible to be as rich a colourist with black and white alone as with all the resources of the palette. He made choice amongst his pupils of those whom he believed to be capable of following his example in this matter; he obliged them to lay aside the brush, almost ordered them to become engravers, and so penetrated them with the secret of his method, that he seems to have animated them with his own inspiration. He assembled them in the vast house which he had built at Antwerp, and which he turned into a college of artists of all sorts. He made them sometimes labour beneath his eye; he carefully corrected their work;²⁸ and in this way he taught them that comprehension of effect which was specially his, and his own incomparable knowledge of the right tones with which to lay in, or to support, a mass of light or shadow.

To recall the success of these efforts is to recall the names of Vorsterman, Bolswert, Paul Pontius, and Soutman: men boldly scientific in their art, who, at the first rush, carried to perfection that style of engraving which renders before all the relative richness and varied value of tones in a picture, and whose effects are identical in some sort with those of the painting itself. It is obvious that, in spite of its prodigious merits, this painting is not of so elevated a nature as that of Leonardo da Vinci or Raphael; but is it therefore less true that it is completely summed up, and its living image reflected, in contemporary engraving? Actuated by an idea of colour and effect analogous to that of Marc Antonio with regard to drawing, the Flemish engravers resolutely subordinated accessories to the importance and splendour of essentials; and in this way they succeeded in dissembling, by means of the breadth of the whole, the execution of details and even the laboriousness of the process. It would seem from the sparkling look and brilliant handiwork of these plates, that the engravers had thrown them off in a few hours of inspiration, so completely does their dash banish all idea of the time spent upon them, all sense of patience and toil. And yet these lights and shades, the sweep of the flesh, the sheen and shimmer of the fabrics, are all the result of lines laboriously ploughed; perhaps a thousand strokes have been needed to imitate an effect due to a single glaze, or given by two touches of the brush.

The engravings of the Flemish school in Rubens' time are still widely distributed. There are few people who have not had the opportunity of admiring the "Thomiris," the "St. Roch Praying for the Plague-Stricken," or the "Portrait of Rubens," by Pontius; the "Descent from the Cross," by Vorsterman; the "Fall of the Damned," by Soutman; and a hundred other pieces as beautiful, all engraved from the master by his pupils. And who does not know that marvellous masterpiece, the "Crown of Thorns," engraved by Bolswert from Van Dyck? and those other masterpieces of Van Dyck himself – the etched portraits of artists or amateurs, the painter's friends from the two Breughels to Cornelis, from Franz Snyders to Philip Le Roy?

The progress, however, by which the Flemish school of engraving had distinguished itself, soon had an equivalent in the movement of reform in Holland. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, and on from the beginning of the seventeenth, the Dutch engravers, by dint of insisting too strongly on the innovations of Lucas van Leyden, had almost succeeded in causing scientific ease of handling to degenerate into mere trickery, and spirit of design into inflation and turbulence. Amongst the first, and with greater authority than any, Cornelius Visscher set himself to stay the art of line engraving on its downward course.

Most of the scenes represented by Visscher are assuredly not of a nature greatly to interest the imagination, still less to touch the heart. It would be somewhat difficult to be moved to any philosophical or poetic thought by the contemplation of such work as the "Frying-Pan," or the "Seller of Ratsbane;" but these, though the ideas by which they are suggested are trivial or commonplace, are treated with a deep feeling for truth, with admirable craftsmanship, and with an amount of sincerity and boldness which makes up for the absence of beauty, whether in thought or type. Considered only from the point of view of execution, the plates of Visscher are masterpieces; are such marvels, indeed, that they cannot be too carefully studied by all engravers, whatever the style of their work.

The same may be said in another order of art for those fine portraits – of "Boccaccio," of "Pietro Aretino," and of "Giorgione" – engraved by Cornelius Van Dalen, the best of Visscher's pupils. It is also on the same ground, that, in spite of most notable differences in handling, the plates engraved by Jonas Suyderhoef, after Terburg and Theodore de Keyse, command the attention of artists and amateurs. Finally, side by side with these works, in the execution of which etching was only resorted to as a preparatory process, or sometimes was not even used at all, a number of subjects entirely engraved with the needle – etchings, to speak strictly – make up a whole which is the more creditable to the Dutch school, inasmuch as it would be impossible at any time to find the like in the schools of other countries. French engraving had doubtless reason to be proud of the masterpieces of Claude Lorraine, or the clever and witty etchings of Callot and Israel Silvestre. In Italy after Parmigiano, Agostino Carracci, and certain other contemporary Bolognese, in Spain, Ribera, and afterwards Goya, acquired a legitimate renown as etchers. But whatever may be the merit of their individual work, these artists are unconnected in either of their native countries with any group wholly devoted to work of the same kind: with any artistic family of common origin, inclination, and belief.

Now the skilful Dutch etchers do not come singly, nor at long intervals. They work in a body. It is within a few years, in fact almost simultaneously, that Adrian Brauwer and Adrian van Ostade publish their tavern scenes; Ruysdael and Jan Both their landscapes; Paul Potter and Berghem, Adrian van de Velde, Marc de Bye, Karel du Jardin, such a multitude of charming little subjects, their village scenes and village people, their flocks in the fields, or their single animals. Whilst emulating each other's talent, all are agreed to pursue one and the same object, all are agreed as to the necessity of devotion to the study of surrounding nature and everyday truth.

Although the Dutch etchers display in the totality of their achievement the same ideal and the same tendency, each keeps, if only in the matter of workmanship, a certain distinction and character of his own. One, however, stands out from the group with matchless splendour, with all the superiority of genius over talent: that one is Rembrandt.

Pains and patience have been wasted on the secret of Rembrandt's method of etching and printing; in trying to discover his tools and his manner of using them, so as to achieve with him those contrasts of soft shadow and radiant light. Vain quest of technical tricks where, really, there is no more than a style born of imagination, and, like it, inspired from above! It may be said that with Rembrandt, as with great musical composers, the harmonic system is so closely allied to the melodic idea, that analysis, if not impossible, is at least superfluous. It sometimes happens – before a Correggio, for instance – that the charm of the painting affects one in a manner abstract enough to produce a sort of musical sensation. Though it does not appear that the art of engraving could be endowed with a similar expansive force, yet Rembrandt's etchings may almost be said to possess it. They give the feeling of undefined aspirations rather than the limited likeness of things; the spectator is touched by the mysterious meaning of these passionate visions, rather than by the form in which they are conveyed. The impression received is so keen that it stifles any trivial wish to criticise, and certain details which would be painful elsewhere are here not even displeasing, inasmuch as no one would dream of requiring a mathematical explanation of the special conditions of the subject, or of the skill of workmanship which the artist has displayed Before the "Sacrifice of Abraham," the "Tobit," the "Lazarus," and all the other soul-speaking masterpieces who would pause to consider the strangeness or the vulgarity of the personages and their apparel? Only the critic, who, unwitting of the rest, would begin by examining with a magnifying glass the workmanship of the ray of light which illumines the "Hundred Guilder Piece," the "Annunciation," or the "Pilgrimage to Emmaus."

Rembrandt's method is, so to speak, supersensuous. At times he lightly touches his plate, and at times he attacks as at a venture; at others he skims the surface and caresses it with an exquisite refinement, a magical dexterity. In his lights he breaks the line of the contour, but only to resume and boldly accentuate it in his shadows; or he reverses the method, and in the one, as in the other case, succeeds infallibly in fixing, satisfying, and convincing the attention. He uses engraver's tools and methods as Bossuet uses words, subduing them to the needs of his thought, and constraining them to express it, careless of fine finish as of trivial subtlety. Like Bossuet, too, he composes out of the most incongruous elements, out of the trivial and the lofty, the commonplace and the heroic, a style invariably eloquent; and from the mingling of these heterogeneous elements there springs an admirable harmony of result.

The Flemish engravers formed by Rubens, and their Dutch contemporaries, had no worthy successors. The revolution they accomplished in the art was brief, and did not extend beyond the Low Countries. In Italy, Dutch and Flemish engravings were naturally despised. It is said – and it is easy to believe – that those accustomed to commune with Raphael and Marc Antonio esteemed them fitting decorations "for the walls of pothouses." In France and Germany, where Italian ideas in art had reigned since the sixteenth century, they experienced at first no better reception. When at length the consideration they really deserved was accorded them, the superiority of France was established, and her engravers could no longer be expected to descend to imitation. The movement in the schools of the Low Countries, before the second half of the seventeenth century, is thus, to speak truth, a mere episode in the history of the art, and its masterpieces had no lasting influence on engraving in general. For it to have been otherwise, the engravers of other countries must have renounced, not only the national traditions, but even the models they had at hand. The method of Bolswert or of Pontius could only be usefully employed to reproduce the works of Rubens and Van Dyck. The handling of Visscher and of Suyderhoef was only suitable to such pictures as were painted in Amsterdam and Leyden.

And meanwhile, when the schools of the Low Countries were shining with a lustre so brilliant and so transitory, what was doing in France? and how in France was the great age of engraving inaugurated?

CHAPTER VI.
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.