Studio: international art (25.1902)

French Medals

"A DUTCH GREENGROCER'S SHOP" FROM AN ETCHING BY FRANK SHORT, R.E.

A little essay might be written alone upon his trans- r I ^HE LATEST EVOLUTION OF
lations into Etching and Mezzotint—like the original I THE MEDAL IN FRANCE. BY

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Liber itself—of those drawings which Turner, and I ROGER MARX.

the professional engravers of his day whom he *• The success achieved by the Paris

employed, never tackled, to add to the Liber. Mint—the "Monnaie de Paris"—at the Universal

With no Turner standing near to advise him, by Exhibition of 1900, affords significant testimony ot

himself Short accomplished this thing. The the efforts that have been, and are being, made in

Vintage : Macon takes its place with the very France to maintain, even to increase, the popularity

finest of the work of a hundred years ago. Another enjoyed there by the medallist's art. This is

Turner, a Swiss Pass—a silvery mezzotint of utmost neither the time nor the place to boast of the

delicacy, unconnected, of course, with the Liber— excellence of our implements, nor to insist on the

must really be named. I call that a feat, indeed—a perfection of our machinery, although the progress

late Turner realised; a dream arrested; the evanes- made in these respects earned for the "Monnaie de

cent made lasting. A Sussex Down—from a sketch Paris " the highest award on the part of the jury,

that belonged to Henry Vaughan—is a Constable A consideration of questions such as these—

landscape, over which there sweeps, with an amazing questions of a purely technical order—would serve

power, the breeze and the sunshine of the chalk no useful purpose in an art magazine like The

hills. A Road in Yorkshire is a noble Dewint: Studio. But this department of French manu-

none the less splendid because it has a touch of facture did more than merely satisfy curiosity, by

the severe and the forbidding. And to make an initiating people into the secrets of the " striking,"

end—though the end is not truly yet—one of the by showing a minting press and automatic scales

latest little mezzotints is one of the finest. Again worked by electric motors; apart from all this—the

a Dewint: again a hill-country—Shop Fells, with mechanical side of the matter—we were shown in

Dewint's expressive modelling—with his tone, his a glass case placed in the centre of the salon d'entree

abounding breadth, his dignity of method, that of the Palais des Lettres, Sciences et Arts, a

Short appreciates so much, and so finely renders. collection ot nineteenth-century medals, of which

Frederick Wedmore. the stamps belong to the Ministry of Finance.

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