Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1904 (Heft 5))

really like. But here we may have the same sympathetic appreciation of
characterization, and the result be controlled by an equally trained intelligence,
but expressed by and through tools that are rigidly accurate, and so
independent of the physical condition of their user, that, given the idea is
right that they are set to record, it is infallibly done.
¶ The great successes in painted portraits are due to the rare alliance
of great vision, sympathetic appreciation, alertness in seizing upon the
characteristic elements to best reveal the sitter, with the genius of great
draughtsmanship and painting. If we can get these same powers of obser-
vation, etc., in the photographic artist, who has also the full control of the
tools at his command in lighting, lenses, etc., the portraiture resulting will,
I take it, be fully as valuable, from the point of view of the personality of
the sitter, which in the case of our great men and women is what we chiefly
want and what we want to pass on to posterity.
¶ Of course, this entails a like seriousness of point of view on the part of
the sitter: he must be content to give the required number of patient
sittings, even to the undergoing of say two or more dozen exposures; and
also, it may be added, to value the artistic result from the cash point of
view, on the same scale he willingly extends to the painter. The latter
easily persuades his sitter to the painful ordeal of many hours of uncomfort-
able sittings, to the extent in some cases of thirty or forty even; and he
exacts, and gets cheerfully paid, a huge fee for what may even then be but
dubious as a likeness, however excellent as a piece of painting—which, after
all, to the sitter, or friends, or relations, is not the first consideration. It
is too often the fashion to scoffat the worker who proposes so many
photographic exposures being made; our art is thought to be so facile that
the merest minute or so is supposed to suffice where hours of sitting would
not be grudged to a painter. But to the serious artist it is not so, and it
may well be that many a dozen exposures may be demanded ere the result
is gained that is so vital a presentment as to be impossible of attainment by
any other method.
¶ This subject of portrait-making reminds me that you have, or lately did
have, a very accomplished artist from our shores visiting your country for
the purpose of making etched portraits after the manner of Holbein. I
allude to Mr. Strang, a master in fine, pure, strong, etched line, and more
than occasionally a master in seizing a likeness, though to my thinking
there is always more of the artist evident than the sitter; a defect
inseparable, I suppose, from any really strong genius in this work. Take
Holbein himself, Mr. Strang’sexemplar in these works of his; we always
have the inescapable feeling that it is Holbein’swork and not another
man’s, and we have of course no clue as to the quality of likeness he
achieved, convinced though we may rightly feel that these are the veritable
people themselves. The longer one studies these immortal works the more
strongly one feels that as likenesses they must be absolute. Of course it is
understood that they must be studied in a photographic facsimile repro-
duction (here again does condemned photography score heavily) when we