Studio: international art (22.1901)

Coloured Etchings in France.

fig. 27 iron work

There is relatively little of polychromy in M.
Charles Maurin's plates; he affects the most
delicate colour schemes, washing in his tints so
lightly as almost to leave the paper revealed
beneath; he loves simple subjects too, all that is
quiet and intime, especially " bits " of interiors. He
is, so far as I know, the only etcher in colours who
has devoted himself largely to the female nude, for
his models figure in nearly all his delightful little
plates with a spirit of modernity akin to that
possessed by the famous French engravers of
coloured plates in the eighteenth century. Nothing
of its kind could be more charming than his Sortie
de bain, for example, or his Fillette a la poupce;
nothing more delicate than Le Modele or Le Petit
Lever, nothing more graceful in its simplicity than
L'Enfant au ruban rose, wherein, save for the flesh
been brought into requisition, and each material tints of mother and child, and the bow of ribbon
is treated in an original, clever, and thoroughly brightening the baby's curls, there is, so to speak,
artistic manner. We find illustrated in them some no colour. One tone only—and that really not
quaint characteristics of the Japanese race—their a tone, for it is the typical blue-grey tint of the
love of old things for the sake of
their antiquity, their tender regard for
characteristic natural features side by
side with an admiration for skilled
workmanship. The simple, uncoloured
and undecorated wooden and thatched
temple for Shinto worship is often erected
in Japan in close vicinity to the highly
painted and carved Bhuddist structure.

The two religions, so different in
characteristics, do not appear to clash
one with the other. Simplicity and
high ritual have each their charm, and
each ministers to human cravings.
In Japanese art we are continually
coming across objects which show these
differences of thought and sentiment,
and these variations are, I think, well
illustrated in the tobacco boxes here
referred to.

Charles Holme.

COLOURED ETCHINGS
IN FRANCE.—PART
II. BY GABRIEL
MOUREY.

I propose to devote the greater part
of this second article on etching in
colours to MM. Charles Maurin, Francis

Jourdain, and B. Boutet de Monvel "l'habit rouge" by j.

the younger. (By permission ol M. C. Hessilc, Paris)

94