FOUR MASTERS OF ETCHING
PREFACE
It is well to say, in a word or two, what this short book aims at.Unavoidably inferior to Mr. Hamerton’s in merit, it is voluntarilymuch more limited in scheme. Taking only the four artists whoseem to me most worthy of note among the many good etchers ofour day, it seeks to study their work with a degree of detail unnecessaryand even impossible in a volume of wider scope. In tryingto do this, it can hardly help affording, at least incidentally, somenotion of what I hold to be the right principles of etching, nor canit wholly ignore the relation of etching to other art, or the relationof Art to Nature and Life. But these points are touched but briefly,and only by the way.
A book of larger aim, on Etching in England and France, mightjustifiably have given almost as much importance to Macbeth andTissot here, and to Bracquemond there, as has been given in theannexed pages to Haden, Whistler, Jacquemart, and Legros. ButMacbeth and Tissot belong to a younger generation than do any ofmy four masters. Much of what the art of etching could do in moderndays was already in evidence before their work began. My fourmasters are four pioneers. Bracquemond may be a pioneer also; butin his original work, skilled and individual as that is, he has chosento be very limited. The place he occupies is honourable, but it issmall.
About the four chapters that here follow I need say very little.ivThat on Seymour Haden has been passed through the Art Journal,that on Legros through the Academy, that on Jules Jacquemart throughthe Nineteenth Century. All have now been revised. Something of thechapter on Whistler has also appeared in the Nineteenth Century, but inquite different form, and I will explain why. In the first place, sincethat article appeared, Mr. Whistler has given me cause to modify tosome extent my estimate of his art. Having seen this cause, I haveacted on it. I am not a Mede nor a Persian. And in a system ofcriticism which seeks to inquire and understand, rather than todenounce, there is place for change. Again, much of the article inthe Nineteenth Century was occasioned not by Mr. Whistler’s practice,b