International studio (16.1902)

Frank Short, R.E.

and—though drawing the figure very little—there
crops out everywhere his ready sympathy with
human fortunes. He loves the changes of atmo-
sphere and climate, over an uneventful, long-stretch-
ing land. He loves not so much foliage as the
banks of the tidal river. He loves boats, masts,
cordage, the intricate lines of modern scaffolding,
the palings round the shipyard, the quaint town.
So much for general characteristics. Were I
invited to particularise—to name certain etchings,
certain dry-points, which I consider on his highest
level—I should name, no doubt, Waiting for the-
Flood (the first, may it not be recorded, that won
the approval of Mr. Whistler) ; the Evening,
Bosham ; The Deserter, with the rough old boat in
the foreground, and the bridge of boats and the
town itself in the not too remote background ; the
Angler’s Bridge o?i the Wandle, for pattern of line,
eminently; and, for rhythm of line, the Quiet
Evening on the Ferry over the Blyth—a study of
“line within line,” indeed : an old wooden pier—
low, narrow, serpentining—and timbers to bank up
the river. Nor should I forget the velvety dry-
point, Overijssel, of which, through an accident,
there were but very few good impressions, or the

Building the “ Golden Beef that most frank and
spirited, decisive etching, of which, through an
accident also, the impressions are to be counted
on the fingers of one hand alone.
The original mezzotints are but a small group.
Mezzotint has been used so seldom for original
work; but Mr. Short, in the Weary APoon and in
the Lifting Cloud—this last a study of storm-tossed
sea and moving sky—has used it admirably. A
Span of old Battersea Bridge is, I think, his best
original aquatint—but eminently characteristic is
the Curfew, which, an inscription on the plate
shows, is connected in his own mind with the
most musical of all Miltonic verse. The Maxwell
Bank is his best soft-ground etching.
Of the reproductive work—it is all in mezzotint
—I should like to say, first, that its notes are flexi-
bility and variety. Here, nothing that is good
seems to come at all amiss to him. G. F. Watts—-
august and a Classic already—is the living man
whom he has chiefly interpreted ; and most delicate
as is the Hope, most refined the Endymion, I do
not think he has got beyond—or that he can ever
reasonably hope to get beyond—the first great Watts
he ever interpreted—the Orpheus and Eurydice.


“ A WINTRY BLAST ON THE STOURBRIDGE CANAL

FROM AN ETCHING BY FRANK SHORT, R.E.

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