Print collector's quarterly (12.1925)

QUARTERLY NOTES

By THE EDITOR

9,

into the British Museum, so completely
the marvellous French engravings, both in line
colour, of the reign of Louis XVI. ? Was it
of their implicit faith in Bartsch as the only
Was it because, like many collectors of to-day,

HY did orthodox British collectors of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth century, like
C. M. Cracherode, Sir Mark Sykes, Lord
Aylesford, Lord Grantham, Lord North-
wick and Felix Slade, who accumulated the stores of
fine prints of which many in the course of years have
passed
disdain
and in
because
guide ?
they were completely blind to the fine work that was
being done under their very eyes ? Or did they posi-
tively dislike, in their reverence for Marcantonio, Diirer
and Rembrandt, the frivolity of the French ? What-
ever the reason, it is surprising that with all the free
intercourse that went on between Paris and London
before the French Revolution and the long wars that
followed it, so few French engravings were brought to
England. There was an immense quantity of them
in the vast collection at Wrest Park, from which Lady
Lucas gave, in 1917, more than a thousand French
prints to the British Museum, but nearly all of these
were of the seventeenth or early eighteenth century,
ending practically with Chardin, and prior to the golden

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