Engraving: Its Origin, Processes, and History

CHAPTER IX.
ENGRAVING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

At the beginning of the nineteenth century some of the most celebrated artists of the French school of painting belonged, by the nature of their talent as well as by the date of their chief successes, to the ante-revolutionary period. Greuze, Fragonard, Moreau, Mme. Vigée-Lebrun, Vien even, notwithstanding his intentions of reform, Regnault and Vincent, in spite of their influence as professors on the new generation – all seemed rather to recall the past than to herald the future. One man, Louis David, personified the progress of the epoch. His pictures, "Les Horaces," and the "Brutus," had appeared some years before, and the approaching exhibition of "Les Sabines" was impatiently expected. At this time the younger artists and the public unanimously regarded David as the regenerator of national art and a master justly supreme. Architecture, painting, furniture, even fashion in dress, were all subjected to his absolute sway; everything was done in imitation of the antique, as understood and interpreted by him. Under the pretexts of pure beauty and a chaste style, nothing but a soulless body, a sort of coloured statue, was represented on canvas; while sculpture became no more than an imitation of Greek or Roman statuary. Since Lebrun, indeed, no single influence had so completely tyrannised over French taste.

Engraving, though fated like the other arts to accept the dictatorship of David, was at any rate the first to throw off his yoke. Before the Restoration, whilst the painter of Marat, then painter to the Emperor, was still in the fulness of his power, the great Italians, whose pictures crowded the Louvre, had already been interpreted with more respect for the memory of the old manner than submission to the requirements of the newer style.

The most talented of these new artists, Boucher-Desnoyers, when working at his "Belle Jardinière," after Raphael, or his "Vierge aux Rochers," after Leonardo, probably thought much less of contemporary work than of the French engravers of the seventeenth century; while on their part Bervic and Tardieu, who had long before given proof of their power, faithfully maintained the great traditions: the one in an austerity of execution and a firmness of touch hereditary in his family, the other in his scientific ease of handling. These three were of the race of the older masters, and their work, unjustly forgotten some years later during the rage for the English manner, deserves a better fate than to be confounded with the cold and formal prints published in the France of the First Empire. The engravings after David, by popularising his work, obtained some success in their day, but have failed to secure a lasting reputation. The fault, however, is not altogether with the engravers: in spite of the apparent conscientiousness of the painter, his real indecision of method must count for something in the mediocre achievements of his interpreters.

Free to impose his own system on all other artists, David might have enforced his artistic authority on his contemporaries; and even if it were beyond his power to restore the French school of engraving, he might at least have regenerated its principles, and, combining separate efforts under the synthesis of his own personal conception, have breathed into it a fresh spirit of unity. This he never attempted; and it is even hard to guess at what he expected from his engravers. It might be supposed that his own fondness for precision of form would have led him to require from them insistence as to the drawing, and not much attention to colour and effect; yet most of the prints after his pictures – amongst others those by Morel and Massard – are heavy in tone and feeble in drawing. There is in them no trace either of the precise manner of David, or of the large method of the old school; it is therefore not in these commonplace works, and still less in the barren engravings composing the great "Commission d'Égypte," that we must look for signs of such talent as then existed in France.

The few painters who, like Regnault, were more or less independent of David's influence, or, like Prud'hon, had ventured to create an entirely original method, were admired by so small a public that their pictures were not generally reproduced in engraving and thus could do little for the progress of the art. Some, however, of Prud'hon's drawings and pictures met, under the Directory and the Empire, with excellent interpreters in Copia and in Barthélemy Roger; while in the last years of the eighteenth century Bervic's engraving of Regnault's "Éducation d'Achille" had obtained at least as much success as the original had won in the Salon of 1783. To give a companion to this justly celebrated piece, Bervic soon after published his "Enlèvement de Déjanire," after Guido. This work, to which the judges of the Decennial Competition awarded the prize in preference to any engraving published in France from 1800 to 1810, by confirming the engraver's reputation, caused his fellow-craftsmen to return once more to the old path of progress.

It must not, however, be supposed that Bervic did not himself diverge somewhat from the way of the masters: it may even be said that he was always more inclined to skirt it than to follow it resolutely. At the outset he was not sufficiently alive to the perils of facility; and later on he was apt to attach too much importance to certain quite material qualities. Yet it must be added that he never went so far as to entirely sacrifice essentials to accessories, and that more than once – in his fine full-length of Louis XVI. for instance – he displayed an ability all the more laudable as the original was by no means inspiring.

From the engraving it is hard to suspect the mediocrity of Callet's picture. This, now at Versailles, is insipidly coloured and loosely and clumsily drawn; the print, on the contrary, is to be admired for its solid appearance, and its easy yet unostentatious handling. Lace, satin, velvet, all accessories, indeed, are treated with a largeness of touch by no means at variance with delicacy, and the general tone is harmoniously luminous. Here and there, however, is already visible a certain artifice of manner which threatens to degenerate into an unwise cultivation of fine line, and end in an abuse of skill. This, indeed, is what happened. Bervic, henceforth, thought of little else but dexterity, and ended in his "Laocoon," perhaps the best known of all his works, by a display of common technical fireworks, to a certain extent surprising, but by no means to be unreservedly admired. The care with which he set himself to imitate the grain of marble by minute workmanship is only trifling with his subject; and though a group of statues cannot be treated in the same way as figures painted on canvas, it was more important, and more desirable in every respect, to reproduce the character and style of the original than to imitate the substance in which it was wrought.

Moreover, in the attempt so to interpret his model, Bervic has defeated his own purpose. By a multitude of details, and an abuse of half-lights intended to bring out the slightest accidents of form and modelling, he has only succeeded in depriving the general aspect of brilliancy and unity.

Far removed, indeed, was such a method from that of the Old Masters, and Bervic lived long enough to change his mind. "I have missed the truth," he declared in his old age, "and if I could begin life again I should do nothing I have done." There he wronged himself. As happens often in tardy repentances, he remembered past errors only to exaggerate them; but we must be juster to the engraver of the "Louis XVI." and "L'Éducation d'Achille" than he was to himself, and not forget that much of his work should be excluded from the sweeping condemnation which he launched upon the whole.

Whilst Bervic was counted the greatest French engraver, Italy boasted of a man, his inferior in reality, but whom, in the existing dearth of talent, his countrymen agreed to thrust into the glorious eminence of a master. Like Canova, his senior by a few years only, Raphael Morghen had the good fortune to be born at the right time. Both second-rate artists, they would have passed almost unnoticed in a more favoured century; as it was, in the absence of contemporary rivals, their compatriots accepted their accidental superiority as a proof of absolute merit. Moreover, by merely submitting in some sort to the dictates of opinion and of public taste, their popularity and success were easily assured. The writings of Winckelmann and Raphael Mengs had brought antique statues and Italian pictures of the sixteenth century once more into favour; so that Canova, by imitating the former more or less cleverly, and Morghen by engraving the latter, could neither of them fail to please, and it is especially to their choice of subjects that we must attribute the great reputation they both enjoyed.

Morghen, the pupil and son-in-law of Volpato, whose weak engravings from the "Stanze," in the Vatican, are known to every one, shared with that feeble artist, and with Longhi, the privilege of reproducing admirable paintings, which had either never been engraved, or not since the time of the masters. This alone gives a certain value to his plates, faulty as they are. Assuredly, for instance, the engraving of Leonardo's "Last Supper" reproduces no more than the general lines of the composition and the attitude of the figures. We look at it as we might listen to an inferior actor reading verses from "Polyeucte" or "Athalie," because the inspiration of the master is still to be felt, in spite of the intermediary of expression; only the sort of beauty inherent in the conception and arrangement of the original remains in this piece of Morghen's. What can be said of the head of the Saviour, like those of the Apostles, restored by the engraver, and unillumined by the faintest glimmer of sentiment? How is it possible, examining the work in detail, not to be offended by the arrogance of the technique and the display of mere mechanical facility, when one remembers the incomparable accuracy of Leonardo and his perfection of style?

But in thus substituting his own manner, and the caprices of his individual taste, for the manner and the taste of the painter of "The Last Supper," Morghen only treated this great master as he was in the habit of treating others. Whether it was his lot to interpret Raphael or Poussin, Andrea del Sarto or Correggio, he had but one uniform method for the most conflicting types; and to his tricks of hand he subjected, without remorse, the inspired grace or the noble energy of whatever he copied. Once, however, it was given him to entertain higher aspirations, and to study more conscientiously the particular characteristics of the work he was to reproduce. It would be impossible without deliberate injustice to avoid recognising merit in his plate from Van Dyck's "Francesco de Moncada," as much on the score of intelligent fidelity as of skilful execution. But, for his other works, could one, without equal injustice, condone the inadequacy of expression and drawing, the systematic contempt of all effort, the many evidences of vain and self-confident ease which refuses to be humbled even in the presence of genius?

Morghen preserved till the end the brilliant reputation which his extreme fertility and the complacent patriotism of the Italians had won for him at the outset. Born in Naples, he settled in Florence, whither he had been allured by the Grand Duke Ferdinand III., and where he remained during the French occupation, and, much less resentful than Alfieri, repulsed neither the homage nor the favour of the foreigner. On the return of the Grand Duke, his old protector, he was still less ready to yield to the Neapolitans, who coveted the honour of recalling the renowned artist to his native country. When at length he died in 1833, all Italy was stirred at the news, and innumerable sonnets, the usual expression of public regret or enthusiasm, celebrated "the undying glory of the illustrious engraver of 'The Last Supper.'"

Johann Godard Müller, who early in life had had nearly as widespread a recognition in Germany as Morghen in Italy, departed this world in lonely misery three years before the Neapolitan. Beyond the walls of Stuttgart, scarce any one remembered the existence or the brief renown of the engraver of the "Madonna della Sedia" and the "Battle of Bunker's Hill." For he had long ceased to trouble about his work or his reputation, and lived only to mourn a son, who in 1816 died at the very time when, in his turn, he was about to become one of the most distinguished engravers of his country.

From childhood this son, Christian Frederick Müller, had been devoted to his father's art. His first attempts were successful enough to warrant his early admittance to the school of engraving recently founded at Stuttgart by Duke Charles of Wurtemberg. We have seen that during the second half of the eighteenth century many German engravers came to Paris for training, and that many remained there. Expelled from France, their adopted country, by the Revolution, they returned to Germany, and the institution of a school of engraving in Stuttgart was one result of their expulsion. But by 1802 many of the fugitives were already back in Paris, and the studios, closed for ten years, once more opened their doors to numerous pupils. Frederick Müller, then barely twenty, followed his father's example, and in his turn went to perfect himself under French masters.

Commended to the good offices of Wille, then past eighty, who felt it an honour to have taught Johann Godard Müller, and introduced by him, the young man was soon in relation with Bervic, Tardieu, and Desnoyers; and without constituting himself a thorough-going imitator of these fine craftsmen, he yet borrowed enough from them to be considered, if not their rival, at least one of their most faithful disciples. The plates he engraved for the "Musée Français," published by Laurent and Robillard⁵⁰ show laudable submission to the principles of the masters and an already sound experience of art; but it is in the "Madonna di San Sisto," in which he seems to have arrived at maturity, that his talent may be fully measured. Before undertaking this plate, the young engraver went to Italy to study other work by the "Divine Painter," and to prepare himself for the interpretation of the picture in the Dresden Gallery by drawing from the Vatican frescoes. On his return to Germany, he at once applied himself to the task, and pursued it with such ardour that, towards the end of 1815, that is in three years, he had brought it to an end. The "Madonna di San Sisto" deserves to rank with the finest line engravings of the beginning of the century. It has long been popular; but renown came too slowly for the engraver, and unhappily he lacked the patience to await its coming.

When Müller had finished his work, he determined to publish it himself, hoping to gain not only honour but legitimate profit. He was exhausted by hard work, but he trusted to meet with the reward which he felt to be due to such continual effort, and to meet with it at once. Time passed, however, and the young engraver, a prey to feverish anxiety, began to rail at the indifference of his contemporaries. He had soon to make arrangements with a publisher, that the fruit of his labours might not be altogether lost. Several amateurs then bought proofs, but there was as yet no general popularity for a print the appearance of which, in the expectation of its author, should have had all the importance of a public event. So many disappointments completed the ruin of his health, and at last affected his reason. In a paroxysm of excitement, Müller stabbed himself with a burnisher. Shortly after his "Sistine Madonna" obtained that great success which the poor artist had fondly anticipated. The publisher grew rich upon the proofs; and the name of the young engraver who had made too great haste to sell them was with justice acclaimed throughout Europe.

The works of Bervic, of Desnoyers, of Morghen and of Müller, may be said to represent the state of engraving in France, in Italy, and in Germany during the early years of the nineteenth century. They show that at that time the three schools professed the same doctrines, or, at least, followed the same masters; but this seeming conformity was not destined to be of long duration. The principles of art were soon modified by the influence of new ideas, and the German engravers (taking the lead in this change of aim) entered the path which they are still following.

At the time of Müller's death, the influence of Goethe and Schiller on German literature had begun to extend to the pictorial arts. Passionate study of the Middle Ages took the place of the worship of antiquity, and whilst the classical dictionary was still the only gospel for French painters, those beyond the Rhine were already drinking inspiration from Christian tradition and national legend. This was a happy reaction in so far as it reinvested art with that ethereal character which is indispensable to its higher developments; but, on the other hand, rapidly degenerating into mere archæology, the movement ended by oppressing and imprisoning talent under invariable formulas. A few years sufficed to reduce German art to such a condition that asceticism became the established rule. Since then Overbeck, Cornelius, and Kaulbach have added the weight of their authority and example, and continued and perfected the tradition of their forerunners; and this reformation has been as thorough in Germany as the far different revolution accomplished by David in France.

The German painters having thus laid aside a part of their material resources, the German engravers have been obliged to confine themselves to a translation of the ideal sentiment of their originals. In this task it must be allowed they have perfectly succeeded. They reproduce with singular completeness that generative thought, and religious, philosophical, or literary imagination, which, far more than any pictorial idea, inspires the German painter.

Strictly speaking, they do not produce engravings: that is, they do not produce works in which the burin has sought to render the value of tone, colour, chiaroscuro, or any constituent of a picture save composition and drawing; they are satisfied to cut in the copper, with a precision frequently approaching dryness, the outlines of simple forms; while, by way of concession to the true pictorial spirit, they think it enough to throw in here and there a few suggestions of modelling and light masses of shadow. Among the numerous specimens of this extreme reticence of execution, it is sufficient to mention the "Apostolical Scenes" engraved, after Overbeck, by Franz Keller, Ludy, and Steinfensand; the plates after Cornelius, published at Carlsruhe and Munich, by Schäffer, Merz, and others; and lastly, Thaeter's big "Battle of the Huns," after Kaulbach.

Although subdivided into smaller classes, the modern German school is composed – at least, in so far as historical painting and engraving are concerned – of a group of kindred talents, inspired by abstract reflection rather than the study of reality. Nevertheless this main idea has not everywhere been carried out with the same logical rigour. The Düsseldorf engravers, for instance, have not always confined themselves, like those of Munich, to the representation of figures and their accessories, as mere silhouettes, strengthened, if at all, by the palest of shadows. Even more elastic principles have prevailed elsewhere. Felsing of Darmstadt, Mendel of Berlin, and Steinla of Dresden, have proved by their engravings after Fra Bartolommeo, Raphael, and Holbein, that they have no notion of denying themselves any of the methods used by the masters of engraving for imitating in the highest perfection the relief and life of objects figured on canvas. But these and other efforts must be considered exceptional. As we have said, the dominant tendency of German art since the reform is rather towards deliberate, even systematic, conception than spontaneous expression of sentiment: it is, in fact, the mortification of the eye for the intelligence. In a word, German engravers trust too much to logic and analysis, and too little to their senses. It is only natural that they should. The qualities lacking in their works are also lacking in the pictures and drawings from which these are engraved. Still, their main principle once admitted, we must allow that it could not well be pushed to a more logical conclusion. In Germany, separate and independent talents do not exist, as in Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, and Russia. The end is the same for all, and is obtained by all in nearly the same degree. In England, also, engraving, considered as a whole, presents an incontestable unity; nevertheless, the difference between the schools is great. A trifle hypochondriacal by dint of privations and penance, German art is sustained by a feverish faith which lends to it the animation of life; while in spite of its flourishing looks, English art is really decayed in constitution. Its health is only apparent, and the least study of its vital sources compels the recognition of its frailty.

It has frequently been said that the arts are the expression of the moral tendency of a people. This is doubtless true; at all events, it is true of those people for whom the arts have always been a necessity – of Greece and Italy, for example, where they have been as it were endemic. Where, however, art has been diffused by contagion – as an epidemic – it may remain quite distinct from national tendencies, or only represent a part of them, or even suggest the presence of quite antagonistic influences. Strictly speaking, a school of painting has only existed in England since the eighteenth century; surely its characteristics, past and present, are in nowise a spontaneous expression of national feeling? Are all its most important achievements – the portraits of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, and the landscapes of Turner – inspired by that practical wisdom, that spirit of order and love of exactness in everything, which characterise the English equally in private and in public life? On the contrary, the quest of spurious brilliancy and effect, exaggerated at the expense of accurate form and precision of style, is the one tradition of the English school of painting; and in spite of the inventive and tasteful work produced in the first half of the century by artists like Wilkie, Smirke, and Mulready, as of the more recent efforts of the Pre-Raphaelites, it would seem as if the school were neither able nor willing to change.

The æsthetic formula accepted and used, from one generation to another, by the English painters has influenced – and, perhaps naturally, with still more authority – their compatriots the engravers. Just now English engraving seems careless of further effort. It is as though its innumerable products had nothing whatever to reveal to those who buy them, and were bought from habit, and not from taste.

It has been seen that George III. did his utmost to encourage line engraving, and that the exportation of prints soon became a source of revenue. How could the country neglect those wares which abroad were made so heartily welcome? The aristocracy set the example. Men of high social position thought it their duty to subscribe to important publications. In imitation, or from patriotism, the middle class in their turn sought to favour the growth of engraving; and when, some years later, it became the fashion to illustrate "Keepsakes" and "Books of Beauty" with steel engravings, their cheapness put them within everybody's reach. People gradually took to having prints in their houses, just as they harboured superfluities of other kinds; and, the custom becoming more and more general, engravers could be almost certain of the sale of any sort of work. This is still the case. In London, every new print may reckon on a certain number of subscribers. Hence the facility of production, and the constant mechanical improvements tending to shorten the work; hence, too, unfortunately, the family likeness and purely conventional charm of the English prints of the last half-century.

A glance at any recent aquatints and mezzotints or into a new book of etchings, discovers nothing one does not seem to have seen a hundred times before. There are the eternal conflicts of light and darkness, the eternal contrasts between velvety and pearly textures. In its needless formality, this trickery resembles that of uninspired and styleless singers. A brief piano passage is followed by a crashing forte; the whole thing consists in abruptness of contrast, and depends for success entirely upon surprise. In both cases this element is soon exhausted by too frequent use. The novelty of their appearance might at first impart a certain charm to English engravings; but the unending repetition of the same effect has destroyed their principal merit, and it is difficult to regard them with attention or interest.

It would be unjust, however, to confine ourselves to the consideration of the abuse of general methods, and to say nothing of individual talents. England has produced some remarkable engravers since those in mezzotint formed by Reynolds and the landscape artists who were Woollett's pupils. Abraham Raimbach, for instance, was a fine workman, and a better draughtsman than most of his compatriots; his plates after Wilkie's "Blind Man's Buff," "The Rent-Day," and "The Village Politicians," deserve to be classed amongst the most agreeable works of modern engraving. Samuel William Reynolds, in his portraits after many English painters, and his plates from Géricault, Horace Vernet, and Paul Delaroche, and Samuel Cousins, in his engravings of Lawrence's "Master Lambton," "Pius VII.," and "Lady Gower and her Son," have succeeded in getting a good deal more from mezzotint than the eighteenth century masters.

In spite of the dissimilarity of their talents, Raimbach and Cousins may yet be compared as the last English engravers who attempted to invest their work with a character in conformity with the strict conditions of the art. Since them the London craftsmen have practised more or less skilfully an almost mechanical profession. They have only produced either the thousands of engravings, which every year proceed from the same source, or the prints that deal with still less ambitious subjects – animals, attributes of the chase, and so forth – on an absurdly large scale. They have, indeed, gone so far as to represent life-size dogs, cats, and game. There is even a certain plate, after Landseer, whose sole interest is a parrot on its perch, and which is much larger than the plates that used to be engraved from the largest compositions of the masters. To say the least, here are errors of taste not to be redeemed by improvements in the manufacture of tools, nor even by ingenious combinations of the different processes of engraving. However skilful contemporary English engravers may be in some respects, they cannot properly be said to produce works of art; because they insist on technique to an inordinate degree, and in like measure reduce almost to nothing the proportions of true art and sentiment.

One might, with still greater reason, thus explain the mediocrity of American prints in the present day. Few as they are, they do not rivet attention as the manifestations of an art which, young and inexperienced, is yet vital in its artlessness; on the contrary, they are depressing as the products of an art fallen into the sluggishness of old age. It is as though engraving in the United States had begun in decay – or rather, it may be, negatively, with no tendency to change, and no impulse to progress. Mostly mezzotints or aquatints, the prints sold in New York and New Orleans suggest that their authors only wished to appropriate as best they could the present fashions and methods of English engraving. As for work in line, it is almost entirely confined to the embellishment of bank notes and tradesmen's cards. Some of its professors are not without technical knowledge and a sort of skill; and if it were absolutely necessary to find a characteristic specimen of American art it should, perhaps, be sought amongst works of this sort. In any case, it is best to reserve a definitive opinion, and simply to state what American engraving is, and must be, till a master arise by whose influence and example it may be animated and renewed.

If, after considering the condition of engraving at the beginning of the present century, one should wish to become acquainted with its subsequent phases, assuredly one has to admit the pre-eminence of French talent. It may even be advanced that French engravers have maintained, and do still maintain, almost unaided the art of engraving within those limits from which it cannot deviate without the risk of becoming, as in Germany, a language of pure conventionality, or, as in England, the hackneyed expression of mere technical dexterity.

Without doubt, evidences of broader and more serious talent were not lacking even in that school which some years earlier seemed to have gone to decay. After Volpato and Morghen, and in opposition to their example, there were Italian engravers who worked to such purpose as to redeem the honour of the school. The plates by Toschi and his pupils, from pictures and frescoes by Correggio at Parma; Calamatta's "Vœu de Louis Treize," after Ingres; Mercuri's "Moissonneurs," after Léopold Robert, and many prints besides, either by the same artists or others of their race, assuredly deserve to rank with the most important achievements of French engraving in the first half of the nineteenth century. But the years that have lapsed since their publication, while barren for Italy, have brought a continued harvest to France. After the engravers who made their appearance in the last years of the Restoration their pupils became masters in turn; and, in spite of adverse circumstances, the indifference of a section of the public, and the increasing popularity of photography, their zeal seems no more likely to diminish than the value of their work.