Chapter XIII: Part II

It is difficult to clothe one’s speech in the detached terms of a catalogue when writing of an artist whose work always kindles fresh enthusiasm. And so I may perhaps be pardoned if, in adding something to a previous essay upon the etchings of Herman A. Webster, I venture to strike a more personal note.

“He loves dark and dingy thoroughfares with dilapidated roofs and moldering plaster, ... for the patches of brilliant, quivering sunlight to which the shadows give so full a value.” Martin Hardie.

Size of the original etching, 11¼ × 5⅞ inches]

“In landscape, as in his architectural work, Webster sets his theme upon the plate with fine skill of arrangement and with exquisite draughtsmanship.” Martin Hardie.

Size of the original etching, 6 × 8¼ inches]

There can be few men to whom art is more of a religion than to Webster. On two occasions when I saw him during his hurried visits to London in the spring of 1910, he spoke of his art with all the zeal of a missionary and the fervor of a convert. He seemed to be laboring in a slough of despond, beset with a feeling that his past work was something worthless, to be thrown aside like Christian’s bundle. He appeared to be torn in sunder by divers doctrines, telling me of the constant ebb and flow of argument in the Paris cafés and studios between the _parti métier_ and the _parti âme_--those who maintained that finished technique, the “_cuisine_” of the French student, was the final aim, and those who held that the artist’s own emotion, howsoever it might find expression, was the greatest thing of all. Webster felt--and it was a fact, indeed, at which I hinted in writing of his work before--that he was sacrificing something of the _âme_ to the _métier_; and his own realization of that is already becoming apparent in his outlook and his style. Then, too, his talk was all of the attainment and suggestion of light as the supreme quality in an etching; and here I could reassure him, for few have ever preached the gospel of light with more truth and earnestness than Webster himself in the _Quai Montebello_ and many other plates.

Still, there matters stood more than a year ago, and the plates that Webster had etched at Marseilles and elsewhere lay rejected and unbitten in his studio. Then he set out to America, where he spent the summer of 1910, and, like Mr. Pennell, fell a victim to the sky-scrapers of New York. “They are the most marvelous things,” he wrote, “on the face of Mother Earth to-day. It took me two months to begin to see them, but then they began to glow, to take shape, and to grow. Perhaps no work of human hands in all the world offers such a stupendous picture as New York seen from almost anywhere within the down-town district, or from the river or the bay. There are cliffs and cañons where sun and shadow work the weirdest miracles, and soaring above them, between forty and fifty stories from the ground, rise arched roofs and pointed ones, gray and gold and brown, that one must see with one’s own eyes to have the faintest conception of. From across the Hudson in the afternoon when the sun goes down you can watch the shadows creep up the sides of these mountains of brick and stone until you’d swear you were looking out on some gigantic fairyland.”

His admiration of those sky-scrapers found expression in a series of drawings made on behalf of _The Century Magazine_, and in, at any rate, one etching--the _Cortlandt Street, New York_. The subject will appeal most, perhaps, to those who live beneath the familiar shade of these monstrous habitations, with their hundreds of staring eyes; but the ordinary man, though he may find it strangely uninspiring and unromantic, will at any rate admire the firm decision of the drawing and welcome the slender filaments and trembling gray spirals of smoke--so difficult to express in line with a point of steel--that cast a veil over the sordid reality of the scene. Though Webster carried that one plate to a finish, he was still obsessed by all sorts of doubts. Many drawings were torn up, and many plates that he etched were wilfully destroyed. Just as the golfer falls victim to too much reading of theoretical works, so for Webster his eager indulgence in theory and science put him “off his game.” I say all this to account for what must seem a small output during two years for a man whose sole work is etching. It is all to the artist’s credit; but, none the less, we have suffered, _nous autres_, for his convictions. Now, however, Richard is himself again. A month or more spent in Frankfort this summer has produced a series of pencil-drawings and etchings which should bring satisfaction and content both to the artist and to all who admire his work.

“Then there are the _Street of the Three Kings_, the _Bendergasse_, and _Sixteenth Century Houses_, all of them felicitous in charm of theme, in play of light and shade, and in the suggestion of life given by the animated figures.” Martin Hardie.

Size of the original etching, 8 × 5¼ inches]

Size of the original etching, 12⅞ × 7½ inches]

Before speaking of the Frankfort series of etchings, a word may be said about Webster’s pencil-drawings. I know of no other artist, save perhaps Mr. Muirhead Bone, who can use the pencil-point with such exquisite fineness and precision in the production of an architectural drawing that, with all its accuracy, still retains the freshness of a sketch. Finding in a portfolio a drawing of _Cortlandt Street_ and several others that repeated the subjects of the Frankfort etchings, I felt curious as to the exact relationship between these drawings and the work on the copperplate. This interest was largely, perhaps, that of a fellow-etcher, keen to see “how the wheels go round,” but Webster’s reply to a question on this subject may interest others as well. “I determine my composition,” he wrote, “in outline first. This outline I transfer to the plate. Then I go out and carefully study in pencil, on the original outline sketch, the subject I want to do, so as to ‘get acquainted’ with it before beginning the more exacting work upon the copperplate. I never use a drawing to work from except sometimes as an extra guide in the biting, where a careful study can be very useful.” They are beautiful things, these pencil-drawings of New York and Frankfort, but there can be only one of each. The etchings, fortunately, can be shared and enjoyed by many possessors.

Frankfort has grown to be a large and very modern town with broad thoroughfares and palatial buildings; but it has its old quarter as well, and among the houses that nestle in narrow streets round the cathedral, Webster has found the same kind of subject that fascinated him before in Bruges and Marseilles and Paris. A brilliant draughtsman, he never seems to hesitate or lose his way among the manifold intricacies of the old-world buildings that he depicts. He aims always at knitting his subjects into fine unity of composition by broad massing of light and shade. “In the last few months,” he writes, “I have grown never to make an etching for etching’s sake, but for the means it gives of studying closely the play of light across my subject.” That is his main theme: the light that travels now with cold curiosity as it did centuries ago, glancing into open windows, throwing into relief a corbel or a crocket, casting a shadow under eave or window ledge, revealing, like a patch in some tattered garment, the cracks and seams in moldering plaster or time-worn timber. In depicting these storehouses of human joys and aspirations, hopes and despairs, he has none of Meryon’s gloom and morbidness. It is true that behind many of the windows in these poor homes of his pictures some Marie Claire may be toiling in sad-eyed poverty; yet for Webster the outside shall be sunny, little white curtains shall veil the gloom, and flowers shall blossom on the window ledge, though the sad worker may have watered them with her tears. And if sunshine is still potent in these new plates, there is also a fresh and joyous note of life and movement in the streets. The introduction of figures, well placed and full of character, is a new development in Webster’s art. Bustling workers, or happy groups of gossiping women, or the dark mass of a distant crowd, are introduced with consummate skill, and the picturesqueness of the old streets gains new value from the suggestion of this living stream of human traffic. The presence of modern life enhances the gray and wrinkled age of the buildings which have watched so many generations come and go.

Size of the original etching, 8 × 6⁵⁄₁₆ inches]

“_Der Langer Franz_, a view of the Rathaus tower that took its nickname from a tall burgomaster of the town, is a little gem, brilliant with light and rich in the mystery of shadow.”

Martin Hardie.

Size of the original etching. 4⅞ × 3⅜ inches]

Among the new plates are four that deal with street scenes in the Alt Stadt of Frankfort. _Der Langer Franz_, a view of the Rathaus tower that took its nickname from a tall burgomaster of the town, is the smallest of all, but a little gem, brilliant with light and rich in the mystery of shadow. Then there are the _Street of the Three Kings_, the _Bendergasse_, and _Sixteenth-century Houses_, all of them felicitous in charm of theme, in play of light and shade, and in the suggestion of life given by the animated figures. There are admirable figures again in _An Old Court_, one of the plates that the collector of future days will most desire to possess. There is less in it of obvious labor than in the street scenes; the etcher has overcome a natural fear of blank spaces; and his reticence and more summary execution have lent to this plate much of the unconscious and unpremeditated charm that is one of the finest qualities which an etching can possess.

Two etchings of old bridges over the Main at Frankfort must rank among the best work that Webster has yet produced. One is a small and spirited plate showing the tower of the cathedral and a row of houses, most delicately drawn, rising with a beautiful sky-line above the solid mass of the shadowed bridge with its heavy buttresses. The other shows the old bridge that spans the Main between Frankfort and Sachsenhausen. Legend tells that in compensation for finishing the building within a certain time the architect made a vow to sacrifice to the devil the first living being that crossed the bridge. Then, when the fatal day arrived, he drove a cock across, and so cheated the devil of his due. Much the same story of outwitting the devil is told about the building of the cathedral at Aix-la-Chapelle. Whether Webster ventured upon any compact I do not know; but this plate, in its building, in its well-constructed composition, in its splendid effect of brilliant sunshine, is one of the most successful tasks he has ever accomplished. The group of figures on the near bank, happily placed like those in Vermeer’s famous _View of Delft_, adds no little to the charm of the scene. I would set this plate beside _Les Blanchisseuses_ and the _Quai Montebello_, which Mr. Wedmore has found “modestly perfect,” as representing the very summit of Webster’s art.

This old bridge spans the river Main between Frankfort and Sachsenhausen

“I would set this plate beside _Les Blanchisseuses_ and _Quai Montebello_, which Mr. Wedmore has found ‘modestly perfect,’ as representing the very summit of Webster’s art.” Martin Hardie.

Size of the original etching, 5½ × 8½ inches]

“... One of the best etchings he has ever made.... It is not merely fine in its pattern of light and shade, but it has a direct force and simplification that are rich with promise for the future.”

Martin Hardie.

Size of the original etching, 8⅝ × 5⅞ inches]

While he has surrendered for the time being to the charm of Frankfort, Webster has not been unfaithful to the Paris of his early love. Of Paris he might say, like Montaigne, “That city has ever had my heart; and it has fallen out to me, as of excellent things, that the more of other fine cities I have seen since, the more the beauty of this gains on my affections. I love it tenderly, even with all its warts and blemishes.” All the more for the warts and blemishes of its old buildings Webster loves it, too; and while working on his Frankfort plates he has completed another of _La Rue St. Jacques, Paris_, which, I think, is one of the best etchings he has ever made. At times, even in his Frankfort plates, one still feels that his superb draughtsmanship and his love of detail--_ce superflu, si nécessaire_--have led him to a uniformity of finish that is almost too “icily regular.” I do not mean that Webster’s elaboration is the cold, almost meaningless, elaboration of the line-engraver; nor do I forget that the technique of Meryon, one of the greatest masters of etchings, was, in Mr. Wedmore’s happy phrasing, “one of unfaltering firmness and regularity, one of undeterred deliberation.” All the same, one wishes that Meryon had done a few more things like the _Rue des Mauvais Garçons_, and wishes that Webster also, in a similar way, were now and then less sure of himself, were held sometimes by a trembling hesitancy, or driven sometimes by the passion of the moment to allow room for fortunate accident and rapid suggestion. For that reason I welcome his _Rue St. Jacques_. It is not merely fine in its pattern of light and shade, but it has a direct force and simplification that are rich with promise for the future.

Since writing the above, I have seen working-proofs of two new etchings of landscape. And here, too, there is high promise. They show, at least, that Webster is not going to remain a man of one subject; that he is opening his heart to the beauty and romance of simple nature. He has sought his first themes in that pleasant countryside where, between tall poplars, you get peeps of Château Gaillard, nobly set upon its hill. In landscape, as in his architectural work, Webster sets his theme upon the plate with fine skill of arrangement and with exquisite draughtsmanship. These two plates, _Château Gaillard_ and _La Route de Louviers_, are exhilarating in their feeling of sunshine, and they please by their absolute simplicity of statement. They are honest, and without artifice. Printed “as clean as a whistle,” without any of the doubtful expedients that give a meretricious attractiveness to so much modern etching, they appeal by their rightness of pattern and precision of line. Those who see high promise as well as present fulfilment in Webster’s art, will not regret that he has left the town and set out where

thro’ the green land,
Vistas of change and adventure,
The gray roads go beckoning and winding.

ANDERS ZORN--PAINTER-ETCHER

BY J. NILSEN LAURVIK

Broadly speaking there are but two kinds of artists--innovators and imitators. The first may be known by the opposition they arouse in the sacred sanctums of mediocrity and by their final but reluctant acceptance by the self-appointed custodians of the Hall of Fame whose business it is to exclude genius until Time shall have tempered all its buoyant, youthful enthusiasms, which are the very signs and tokens of those starry creatures whom the gods have blessed. Youth and all its amazing prodigality are of the very essence of genius, and it is by virtue of this exuberant overflowing of the spirit that the works of Anders Zorn make their vital appeal.

He celebrates with fervent, dramatic strokes the pageant of the visible world, and all that his alert eyes can see his nimble fingers depict with an unfailing sense of the pictorial possibilities inherent in the passing procession of contemporary life. There is in his work something of childlike spontaneity,--a healthy, natural enjoyment in the mere practice of his art that is infectious. He has the same impartial love for nature as it is as had Velasquez and Frans Hals, and the same incomparable interdependence of head and hand. His art is, in the best sense of the word, purely objective, dedicated to a specific transcription of the outward semblance of things. These bright, vivacious plates are not evolved by any painful process of mental cogitation, nor are they the result of imaginative vagaries.

Zorn is concerned but little with abstract form or involved compositions. But he cannot be accused of evading difficulties through any fear of failure, as he has so convincingly demonstrated in his vivid, sun-flecked _Interior of a Parisian Omnibus_ with its sharply characterized passengers, and in his dramatically effective _Waltz_ with its assemblage of swaying figures moving rhythmically through the spacious ball-room, both marvels of discerning observation recorded with an almost clairvoyant magic of line that evoke the kaleidoscopic shimmer and brilliancy of the scenes depicted. The difficulties presented by these complex subjects are surmounted with the same nonchalant ease and certainty that distinguish his long series of individual portraits and figure pieces. That the latter predominate in the hierarchy of his etched work is a matter of choice rather than of chance and may, I think, be taken as an indication of his keen appreciation of the limitations as well as the possibilities of this medium. No one, not even Whistler, has realized more clearly than he that etching at its best is essentially an impressionistic art, to be practised only in the happiest moods, and his finest plates are marvels of swift, stenographic notations that have been scratched upon the copper direct from nature in a white heat of enthusiasm.

Size of the original etching, 12½ × 8⅜ inches]

Size of the original etching, 13¼ × 9 inches]

He calls etching his diversion, which accounts for the uniformly high quality of this side of his art. Done for the sheer love of it, as other men would ride horseback or play golf, these plates are the product of a joyousness that is the mother of all great art. It is typical of him that he should have taken up the practice of this exacting though elusive art merely as an amusement, as he himself says, “with which to while away odd hours, instead of sitting at home or going about for entertainment.” This is characteristic of his whole life and harks back to the genesis of his artistic career when, as a mere lad, he carved in birch-wood with his clasp-knife images of the flocks he tended in the Dalecarlian forests. Even in those early days this son of humble peasant folk revealed a power of lifelike characterization that did not pass unnoticed by these shrewd, clear-eyed peasantry whose sole criterion in matters of art was whether or not the counterfeit presentment looked like the original. And in these small carved images of cows and sheep they found a striking resemblance to their models that aroused their keenest admiration. His first patron was one of these peasant folk, a shepherd friend of his, who bought from him a carved statuette of an enraged cow for which Zorn received in payment a sou and a little white loaf. To make his sculpture more lifelike he used to imitate antique statuary by tinting his work. His palette was the palm of his hand, in which he mixed a composite of bilberry juice and certain coloring substances obtained from little forest flowers.

That was the beginning of a sturdy naturalism that no subsequent academic training has been able to nullify. Even in these first tentative attempts at personal expression he revealed the essential qualities of his genius,--his very powerful color sense and his acute observation of natural phenomena. His work betrays an almost savage delight in the truth of nature, and if to be truthful is to be cruel, then Zorn is often cruel. He employs no gentle gloss, and, whether it be friend or casual sitter, each is treated with unblushing frankness. A full-blooded art, somewhat primitive and exulting in its crude strength, it gives one a pulsating sense of reality. His work has the natural daring of one who is on familiar terms with all the secrets of his art. Conveying an appearance of brilliant, almost reckless improvisation, it is none the less the result of astute and penetrating observation that has in each case recorded the face of actuality as well as its deeper and abiding spirit.

Strongly opposed to all the conventionalities of the studio, he abhors posing as much as he dislikes monogamy, preferring to study his subjects under natural conditions when they are off their guard and then to transcribe his impressions very largely from memory, after the essential lines have been noted. Thus have come into being some of his most memorable plates, such as the _Renan_, and the portrait of himself and his wife, each executed in a few hours of concentrated effort. The very swiftness with which these impressions have been recorded has no doubt contributed much toward giving them that convincing finality which, paradoxically enough, are theirs in a preëminent degree no matter how casual may appear the means by which this effect has been achieved. That is the impression left upon one by his illuminating portrait of the pontifical-looking Renan, for example.

Size of the original etching, 9 × 6¼ inches]

Size of the original etching, 9⅜ × 13½ inches]

Here is set down for all time in a few unerring lines the soul and body of the man--the casuist and the voluptuary of thought, the Balzacian bulk of him physically and the bigness of him mentally. The massive and apparently grotesque exterior of this speculative dreamer, immersed in his own meditations, conveys something of the same sense of aloofness with which Rodin has invested his statue of Balzac. They both appear to be dreaming of life and its mysteries until the immense torso seems but an Olympian pedestal supporting the domelike head. It is more than a pocket-edition biography, this portrait. Executed in one sitting in Renan’s study in April of 1892, nine years after his initiation into the mysteries of etching, this plate may be said to epitomize the whole art of Zorn,--his vigorous truthfulness, his synthetic treatment of salient points of character, and his love of dramatic contrasts of sharply juxtaposed masses of black and white. Moreover, it furnishes a striking exposition of the purely technical side of his art in which he has created for himself a highly original and personal method. No one has eschewed more rigorously than he the “happy accidents” employed as a convenient cloak by masquerading incompetents, foisting their meaningless scrawls on a bewildered public, to whom etching has become synonymous with a pretty dilettantism that is within the easy reach of every aspiring fledgling of art. These parallel, slanting strokes that seem to cut and divide the form into unrelated sections are really the expression of an accurate and well-defined intention that manifests itself in the extraordinary verisimilitude of the figure and its adroitly suggested accessories. It is like a fleeting glimpse in a mirror in which the impalpable spirit of reality is reflected, evoking by some mysterious incantation the most fugitive nuances of expression and gesture with the slightest inflection of his modeling.

It is the extreme refinement and subtility in this seeming brutality that give to these plates their unique value and interest. Seldom has a man suggested his predecessors less than does Zorn in these epigrammatic etchings. They are according to no established formula. If he has looked upon Rembrandt, as what practitioner of aqua fortis has not, there is but slight evidence of it in these straightforward vibrant plates. To be sure, he has the same love of bold contrasts of light and shade as had the master of Amsterdam, without the romantic glamour of the dreamy Dutchman. This modern Swede is more direct, more incisive, his line has something of the penetrating and biting analysis of a page from Strindberg, and not infrequently, as in the case of his haunting portrait of the besotted poet Paul Verlaine, there is discernible a sort of ironic humor that throws a revealing light upon his sitter. With what discerning and subtle insight he has portrayed that gentle flavor of intellectual skepticism which is the chief characteristic of Anatole France; while the head of Rodin, laughing in his foaming beard, is highly indicative of the immense creative energy of the author of _Le Penseur_. In every instance he has successfully summarized the essential and abiding characteristics of his sitter, no less effectually accomplished in the twenty-minute impromptu of Marcelin Berthelot than in the more deliberately studied portrait of Marquand, or the very succinctly realized version of August Strindberg, the Swedish author. These portraits of contemporary men and women are fascinating records of repeated excursions into the realm of _character_, which holds for Zorn the strongest appeal, as it has ever for all men of the North, whose supreme happiness is the realization of a clearly defined individualism.

Size of the original etching, 11⅜ × 7⅝ inches]

Size of the original etching, 10¾ × 7¾ inches]

While Zorn to-day occupies a position of unchallenged supremacy in the difficult and exacting field of portraiture--his portrait etchings would alone make a notable Pantheon of contemporary worthies--it is in his frank, unabashed nudes and in his delineations of Swedish peasant types that we find the most personal expression of his peculiar genius. Nowhere has his faculty of instantaneous perception, his ability to grasp at a glance and in its entirety either an isolated individual or a group of figures, been employed to greater advantage than in these brilliant, dazzling nudes and in these veracious records of his beloved Dalecarlian peasants. With a few swift, sure strokes he gives us the soft contour, the undulating curves of the fresh, firm flesh, of these strong-limbed Junos, as well as the wrinkled, time-worn visages of the aged tillers of the soil.

His interest in this type is not episodic, it is persistent. They were his first subjects as well as his first patrons, and throughout his career it is to them that he has turned for rest and refreshment from the social banalities of the mundane life in the great capitals of the world where he is in constant demand as a painter of exclusive society. At heart he remains a peasant, retaining a strong love for the scenes of his boyhood with all their simple associations. Here he is at home, and here he has given untrammeled expression to that paganism which is the dominant trait of his character. He delights in portraying these sturdy, flaxen-haired peasants in all the unconscious abandon of their naïve natures, and the series of plates celebrating the intimate life of these people are the most authentic expressions of his art because the most closely related to the mainsprings of his personality.

His love of the unstudied, unposed naturalness of life has found its culminating expression in these nudes of women and children as seen in the open air in the free solitude of the shores of Dalecarlia. Zorn regards nature with the eagerness of the primitive, and these ruddy women are virile protests against the anemic, hyperæsthetic refinements of the school-room conventions. Stripped of all regard for the accepted ideals of feminine beauty these women of Zorn repel or appeal by the unfeigned candor of every look and gesture. These big, blonde women, whose naked bodies move with unrestrained freedom through the tonic, balsam air are imbued with a superb, healthy animalism such as has never been depicted in the whole history of art. They spring from a strong artistic impulse that has its roots in the subsoil of nature. To see these frankly realistic versions of unsophisticated, throbbing femininity is to feel that the nude has never before been adequately portrayed--all other nudes seem mere means toward some elaborately preconceived end while those of Zorn are gloriously self-sufficing, an end in themselves.

Size of the original etching, 6¼ × 4¾ inches]

“Edo” is the name of the Swedish island where Zorn etched this beautiful plate

Size of the original etching, 7 × 4⅝ inches]

An ardent sensuousness marks all these things, but it is sane and wholesome, with no trace of doubtful submeaning. That is strikingly exemplified in _My Model and my Boat_, in which the exuberant, re-creating force of life is presented in all its tantalizing seductiveness of ample, quivering curves. The beauty of vigorous symmetry, of inherent strength, overcome the somewhat obvious coarseness of the type of woman depicted here, and one can have nothing but admiration for the underlying sincerity as well as the consummate mastery revealed in every stroke of these plates. But the purely physical allure of his nudes is by no means always as insistent as in the foregoing. The elusive and half-reticent feminine charm has not escaped him, and there are some nudes out of doors, in the lambent light of dawn and twilight, more delicate, more subtly suggestive, than anything hitherto accomplished in etching.

The nudes of Rembrandt would look singularly coarse and heavy by comparison with these silvery, exquisitely modeled Brunhildas of Zorn, who disport themselves on the sunlit beach or emerge from the enveloping shadow of some protruding cliff with a childlike unconsciousness and a pagan naïveté that disarms prudish prejudices. In its supple grace and vibrant vitality the delicately modulated back of the bending figure of _The Bather--Evening_ is a pantheistic hymn to the eternal efflorescence of life. She pauses in the silvery twilight, before breaking the surface of the mirror-like lake into a thousand jewels of refracted light, and she is as much a part of the enshrouding stillness as the aged rocks on which she stands. Whistler never did anything more evanescent than the landscape of this plate, which is printed in a key as light and airy as the magically executed lines, that give the softness of the figure’s contours as well as the hardness of the rocks and the veiled serenity of distant lake and woodland. It is a splendid affirmation of the extremely delicate sensibilities possessed by this most vigorous and brilliant of contemporary etchers, whose art is one of the most powerful and significant manifestations of the re-awakened æsthetic impulse of the twentieth century.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.

Small capitals have been capitalised.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.

Perceived typographical errors have been changed.