Studio: international art (6.1896)

Some Younger Etchers

on the contrary, what was perhaps most remarkable
of all was the high technical level this etcher had
immediately sprung to. And not one print recalled,
in its subject, or by bravura of treatment, or by
any trace whatever of comic intention, the familiar
themes of its producer. An art delicately observ-
ant and wholly serious was evidenced in the six,
and making inquiries as to the existence of more,
I find Mr. Raven-Hill to be the author of one
circus-subject, seen already in pen-and-ink work,

and of a little group of etchings dealing with the
quaintness and vivacity of the town and life of
Portsmouth.

Why I wish, thus early in his career as an etcher,
to welcome the work of Mr. Raven-Hill is because
it evidences so immediately its author's possession
of the etcher's instinct. In the few prints of
Mr. Raven-Hill which I am privileged to know, I
discern no instance of the treatment of a theme
which in some other medium might have been
treated with better effect. That is one great point.
34

Mr. Raven-Hill has taken up the needle of the
etcher when the needle of the etcher was precisely
the instrument that the true artist would choose.
Did a theme offer the opportunity for curious and
for pure line, Mr. Raven-Hill has seized it. The
lines are well composed, and they are of great
freedom ; the piece here reproduced is evidence
of this. The work is thoroughly and admirably
delicate. It avoids complicated problems—it does
not perhaps yet even attempt to grapple with all the
difficulties that the masters have
faced. But of its kind, and so far as
it proceeds, it is good entirely; and
that is all that I shall say about it,
until, in the fulness of time, more of
it shall have been made accessible
to observation and comment.

Even less in quantity than the
etched work of Mr. Raven-Hill is,
thus far perhaps, the etched work ot
Mr. Will Rothenstein—a young man
whom the Royal Society of Painter-
Etchers as yet knows not—whom it
may know some day—an artist whose
eccentricity cannot conceal his clever-
ness, but whose cleverness must not,
and will not as I think, be charged
for ever with the weight of the merely
curious. Mr. Rothenstein is very
young. Of his etched work, so far
as I have seen it, some is suggested
visibly by Goya's spirit, and much is
the result of a familiarity with Goya's
themes and processes. Goya—who
hesitates at nothing—does not com-
mend himself to the ordinary Briton ;
nor will Mr. Rothenstein at once
commend himself to the ordinary
Briton; but I think he has a future,
and a future not wholly dependent
on the success of the clever com-
positions which illustrate Ernest
Dowson's translation of Voltaire's
Pucelle d'Orleans.

Now the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers has
for some time numbered among its members the
already distinguished young etcher of whom I next
speak. For several seasons Mr. Charles Holroyd—
one of the finest of the pupils of Legros, and a pupil
with a note too of his own, strong and unmistakable
—for several seasons has he hung upon the walls of
Pall Mall East his always grave, sometimes austere,
yet always beautiful compositions. Holroyd ob-
tained—some seven years ago it may have been—