International studio (16.1902)

French Medals




“a dutch greengrocer’s shop”

FROM AN ETCHING BY FRANK SHORT, R.E.

A little essay might be written alone upon his trans-
lations into Etching and Mezzotint—like the original
Liber itself—of those drawings which Turner, and
the professional engravers of his day whom he
employed, never tackled, to add to the Liber.
With no Turner standing near to advise him, by
himself Short accomplished this thing. The
Vintage: Macon takes its place with the very
finest of the work of a hundred years ago. Another
Turner, a Swiss Pass—a silvery mezzotint of utmost
delicacy, unconnected, of course, with the Liber—
must really be named. I call that a feat, indeed a
late Turner realised; a dream arrested ; the evanes-
cent made lasting. A Sussex Down—from a sketch
that belonged to Henry Vaughan—is a Constable
landscape, over which there sweeps, with an amazing
power, the breeze and the sunshine of the chalk
hills. A Road in Yorkshire is a noble Dewint:
none the less splendid because it has a touch of
the severe and the forbidding. And to make an
end—though the end is not truly yet—one of the
latest little mezzotints is one of the finest. Again
a Dewint: again a hill-country—Shap Fells, with
Dewint’s expressive modelling—with his tone, his
abounding breadth, his dignity of method, that
Short appreciates so much, and so finely renders.
Frederick Wedmore.

HE LATEST EVOLUTION OF
THE MEDAL IN FRANCE. BY
ROGER MARX.
The success achieved by the Paris
Mint—the “Monnaie de Paris”—at the Universal
Exhibition of 1900, affords significant testimony ot
the efforts that have been, and are being, made in
France to maintain, even to increase, the popularity
enjoyed there by the medallist’s art. This is
neither the time nor the place to boast of the
excellence of our implements, nor to insist on the
perfection of our machinery, although the progress
made in these respects earned for the “Monnaie de
Paris ” the highest award on the part of the jury.
A consideration of questions such as these—
questions of a purely technical order—would serve
no useful purpose in an art magazine like The
Studio. But this department of French manu-
facture did more than merely satisfy curiosity, by
initiating people into the secrets of the “ striking,”
by showing a minting press and automatic scales
worked by electric motors; apart from all this—the
mechanical side of the matter—we were shown in
a glass case placed in the centre of the salon d’entree
of the Palais des Lettres, Sciences et Arts, a
collection 01 nineteenth-century medals, of which
the stamps belong to the Ministry of Finance.
IS