French Etching From Meryon to Lepère, Being a Lecture Delivered to the Print Collectors Club
Description:... Excerpt from French Etching From Meryon to Lepère, Being a Lecture Delivered to the Print Collectors Club
But I pass on, after this brief retrospect, to the actual subject of my lecture, the etchers of the modern French School. I have often thought, since I chose the subject, that it is wrong to detach the etching, for separate treatment, from the lithograph. The unity of French art seems to protest against the involuntary schism. There have been great lithographers, of course, who never etched a plate, and great etchers who never used the lithographic chalk. What has Daumier, it may justly be asked, to do with Meryon? But again and again, in thinking of French graphic artists of the later nineteenth century, I have felt myself tempted to give special praise to the lithographs of men whom it was here my task to consider as etchers only.
The history of the modern French school of etching may be said to begin in 1850. That is the date of the first mature etching by Meryon, the earliest of his "Eaux-Fortes sur Paris," "Le Petit Pont." There had been modern French etchers, it is true, before Meryon. Blery, who taught him the metier, was no great artist, but two, at least, of the Barbizon School of painter-etchers, Daubigny and Jacque, were etching long before 1850, and have a higher claim on our respect than Blery. Neither of these, however, was of outstanding eminence as an etcher. Daubigny's pleasant landscapes make no mark on history. Jacque's scenes of rustic life, his groups of sheep, pigs or chickens do not surpass, if they even reach, the average of Dutch etchings in the age of Adriaen van de Velde and Potter, and the modern collector is interested rather in his dry-points, which are full of a poetry and charm that surprise us in the forties.
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