Print collector's quarterly (4.1914)

It is evil for the warrior and the warred upon. It arouses
the bestial in man; it devastates; it leads to revenge.
Rape and arson and theft are its concomitants. The
series beging and ends with scenes of formal splendor,
and all between is misery and degradation. What grim
humor underlies a picture thus roundecl! How pitiable
is man if his differences are forever to be decided by so
vicious and destructive a means!
And now, from such pictures of violence let us take
respite in a few of Callot’s finest landscapes, Le Jardin
ou le Marais, Le Colombier and Le Moulin d l’eau
are three lovely little et chings. I find in them hints
of later artists, — Haden even, and Meryon; while
Rembrandt himself may here (as obviously, in some of
his etchings of beggars) be in debt to Callot — Rem-
brandt who was born in the year when the master from
Lorraine arrived at Rome.1 Not alone are trees and
water, hunters and bathers and laboring peasants
drawn with charming ficlelity, but there is consummate
treatment of light and shade, giving picturesque quality
to these simple designs. In a fourth, Le Port de Mer, is
that excellent drawing of ships offen found in Callot’s
work, perhaps nowhere more engagingly than in the
Combat Naval and in one of the plates of the Siege
de Breda.
But when all is said, it is as a master of the grotesque
that Callot is in a dass by himself. There comes to mind
his Temptation of St. Anthony — a plate related to de-
signs of Bosch van Aken and Schongauer, with a
carcase-chariot adapted from Agostino Veneziano.
1 For the names of those scores of other artists who either imi-
tated or were directly influenced by Callot consult the chapter en-
titled “Nachahmungen and Beeinflussungen” in Hermann Nasse’S
book on Callot.

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