International studio (14.1901)

Recent Etching and Engraving

called the Little Masters would have avoided.
But instances of this are rare, and generally—as in
one of the latest of his little triumphs, the book-
plate of “T. Mackenzie”—harmonious design is
wedded to execution faultless and brilliant. The
etched bookplates of Mr. Eve and Mr. Holroyd
are rightly and naturally richer than Mr. Sherborn’s
plates in picturesqueness of shadow. Perhaps in
general these artists have used their medium wisely,
but Mr. Sherborn remains the Master of the
Bookplate, and the surviving master of the medium
in which he has chosen to labour.

Miss Constance Pott, whose soft ground etching
I single out for notice quite as much by reason of
the uncompromising vigour of the performance as
because of the medium she has elected to employ,
is, I believe, a pupil of the veteran master of line
whose achievements I have just been discussing,
but I know no line engraving by her. She etches,
however, in the customary way, like more than one
other clever woman numbered among the Associates

of the Society—like Miss Sloane, whose little
memorandum of Mersea Island takes us in imagina-
tion to the land of the earlier fiction ot Baring
Gould, and like Miss Kemp Welch, whose best
work, so delicate that it could only lose by the
reduction of a process block, shows the ordinary
English country, the sign-post at the crossways,
and the sheep along the lane.

We may turn for a moment to some good etchers
not represented in this year’s exhibition of the
Society. The weird talent of Mr. Strang, employed
in illustration of the uncanny tales of Mr. Kipling,
has been in evidence at the gallery of Mr. R.
Gutekunst, who shows likewise this year the varied
work of Mr. Laing, not exhibited at the Society,
and perfectly worthy of notice. I do not hold that
there is only one true method in etching, but it is,
at all events, in the method most usually accounted
the true one that Mr. Oliver Hall has worked.

And now we will get back to the Society. And
courtesy shall lead us first to the mention of the
foreigners. Edgar Chahine, though not, I
understand, a Frenchman, is probably of
French training. His themes, like those
of the two other foreigners that I shall
name, are Parisian. I am not impressed
tremendously by his technical skill, but
he does enter uncompromisingly into the
life he wants to show us—the life of people
on the fringe and borderland of the recog-
nised world—the tramp, the Bohemian, the
acrobat, it may be, who makes ready for
the Fair. Even if one does not altogether
admire, one cannot quite easily forget the
best plate, in which, recording this world,
he records the Paris of the Outer Boulevard,
which has a life entirely of its own. Sitting
on the steps of a caravan, in the plate I am
thinking of, is an evil child in whom is
concentrated the vice of three generations.
She is food for the storyteller. Bejot deals
with places, not with people. The “places”
are generally one place—Paris, the city of
light. He is good on the quay-side, because
he is there a bold draughtsman as well as a
sound topographer; but in the plate of his
I care for the most, Montmartre, he is not
a topographer at all, and one has scarcely
time to notice whether he is bold draughts-
man or not. He is charged with his sub-
ject ; his own sense of it he conveys to
you impressively. Montmartre is a vision
of squalid Paris. Unlike the great work of
Mr. Cameron in his Set called London, it

BOOKPLATE BY C. W. SHERBORN

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