International studio (15.1901/1902(1902))

An Armenian Etcher

Parisian life. This melancholy, too, has guided
him in his choice of subjects, has led him straight
to the world of labour and poverty, with its tramps
and mendicants and its outcasts. By such as these
he has been profoundly and painfully inspired.

The strange thing is, that he should at once have
attained such absolute maitrise in handling subjects
with which he must have been so unfamiliar—
subjects for the treatment of which his previous
studies would, it seems reasonable to think, have
altogether unfitted him. Strange, too, his skill in
the use of instruments the mastery of which usually
demands years of apprenticeship. In one of the
earliest—if not actually the first—of his plates,

1 L ITALIENNE

FROM AN ETCHING BY EDGAR CHAHINE

(By permission oj M. Ed. Sagot, Paris)

styled Distribution de soupe le Vendredi, he reveals
himself in complete possession of his moral and
technical personality, a keen faculty of observation,
a perfect knowledge of mise-en-page, a rare appre-
ciation of values, and a very special power of
characterisation. All these and other things pro-
claimed thus early an artist of the highest order.
Since then, M. Chahine has etched plates as beauti-
ful as this, but none more beautiful. The patience
of the half-starved crowd that waits and waits—-
men, women and children, some sitting on the
kerb, others leaning against the wall, their legs weak
with fatigue; the dull uniformity of colour and
attitude and gesture, the sort of fatalistic resignation
in the faces; and in the fore-
ground the figure of a man
in workman’s blouse and
casquette, his features set as
though in secret revolt, and
marked by toil, and suffer-
ing, and poverty—all these
things are traced with
surest hand, because they
were seen clearly and sym-
pathetically, because the
methods of expression were
here in perfect accord with
the ideas and the feelings
of the artist who expressed
them.

This impression of things
strongly felt is present in
all M. Chahine’s works,
and to this quality he owes
the greater part of his
success, His sensitiveness
has been in no way
hardened by acquaintance
with the sights amid which
he lives. It is sincerely to
be hoped he may never
growcallous and indifferent,
as has been the case with
so many others. May his
art retain that savour which
gives it so special a charm!
The astonishment he felt,
the emotion aroused in him
in the presence of hitherto
unknown types and sur-
roundings, had been ex-
perienced before, and j ust as
deeply, by another artist—I
refer to our own Steinlen.

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