DOI Heft:
Nr. 164 (October, 1910)
DOI Artikel:Studio-talk
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19867#0425
Studio- Talk
An English student, looking over all this work and
comparing it with other German productions in the
same line, will, I believe, be attracted by it a good
deal more than by that of other German etchers. He
will discover in it more affinity with the art of etching
as practised by the masters of his own country, and
consequently will be able to appreciate it better.
For Fischer has this much in common with the
most famous among modern English etchers, that
his technique is of the simplest and most direct
kind. Upon the Continent, etching has always
remained to a certain extent the relaxation of the
painter, and the art has been practised frequently
by way of experiment. The simple pursuit of line
seems not to furnish sufficient interest to many
practitioners, and we find them attempting all
possible manipulations, readily shifting from one
process to another, trying to profit by whatever
surprises may turn up.
Fischer has never etched in this spirit of experi-
menting. The simplest hard ground process and
plain dry point have almost without exception been
his methods. He never forgets the value of line,
by trifling with " tone" effects : and his sincere
respect for the value of line has led him to persist
in simplifying it, and never to drift into meaning-
less scratches or zigzag. This he has in common,
as I have said, with his English colleagues. Yet
there is a great difference between their work and
his ; and it is as easily analysed as it is perceived.
In England the etcher's art is pre-eminently style,
pre-eminently a system of linear decoration. To
translate the tone values of nature in its various
aspects into a system of lines, which is at once
convincing, artistic and, if possible, personal, is the
real object of the English artist. It is a cult of
artistic language, as it were, and after an artist has
once evolved his own particular form of speech, it
is this form, not what he talks about, which makes
up nine-tenths of his work. We need only think
of a few English etchers selected at random, say
Whistler, Pennell, Legros—whom we may, cum grano
salts, call English—Hall and Brangwyn, to prove
what has been said. Any single plate of any one
of them is recognised at once as the production of
this particular man, and it matters not whence he
gathered the subject for his picture. It is the
beauty of the manner in which they speak about
"NEAR LOBOS1TZ ON THE ELBE " (ETCHING)
(By permission of the Ernst Arnold Ktinsthandhmg, Dresden)
326
BY OTTO FISCHER
An English student, looking over all this work and
comparing it with other German productions in the
same line, will, I believe, be attracted by it a good
deal more than by that of other German etchers. He
will discover in it more affinity with the art of etching
as practised by the masters of his own country, and
consequently will be able to appreciate it better.
For Fischer has this much in common with the
most famous among modern English etchers, that
his technique is of the simplest and most direct
kind. Upon the Continent, etching has always
remained to a certain extent the relaxation of the
painter, and the art has been practised frequently
by way of experiment. The simple pursuit of line
seems not to furnish sufficient interest to many
practitioners, and we find them attempting all
possible manipulations, readily shifting from one
process to another, trying to profit by whatever
surprises may turn up.
Fischer has never etched in this spirit of experi-
menting. The simplest hard ground process and
plain dry point have almost without exception been
his methods. He never forgets the value of line,
by trifling with " tone" effects : and his sincere
respect for the value of line has led him to persist
in simplifying it, and never to drift into meaning-
less scratches or zigzag. This he has in common,
as I have said, with his English colleagues. Yet
there is a great difference between their work and
his ; and it is as easily analysed as it is perceived.
In England the etcher's art is pre-eminently style,
pre-eminently a system of linear decoration. To
translate the tone values of nature in its various
aspects into a system of lines, which is at once
convincing, artistic and, if possible, personal, is the
real object of the English artist. It is a cult of
artistic language, as it were, and after an artist has
once evolved his own particular form of speech, it
is this form, not what he talks about, which makes
up nine-tenths of his work. We need only think
of a few English etchers selected at random, say
Whistler, Pennell, Legros—whom we may, cum grano
salts, call English—Hall and Brangwyn, to prove
what has been said. Any single plate of any one
of them is recognised at once as the production of
this particular man, and it matters not whence he
gathered the subject for his picture. It is the
beauty of the manner in which they speak about
"NEAR LOBOS1TZ ON THE ELBE " (ETCHING)
(By permission of the Ernst Arnold Ktinsthandhmg, Dresden)
326
BY OTTO FISCHER