Studio: international art (51.1911)

THE STUDIO

The mezzotints of mr.

FRANK SHORT, A.R.A., P.R.E.
BY MALCOLM C. SALAMAN.

When the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers
elected Mr. Frank Short, A.R.A., as its new Presi-
dent, in succession to the late Sir Francis Seymour
Haden, it chose, perhaps, the most interesting,
accomplished and versatile among living masters
of the engraver’s art. Indeed, there is no known
method of making pictures upon the copper-plate
which Mr. Short has not handled with originality,
distinction, and complete command of all its
capabilities. His etchings are, of course, among
the finest and most individual done in our time—
Whistler himself having admired and praised them
highly; his aquatints have discovered fresh and
more ample resources in the medium; but it is in
the domain of mezzotint that he holds a place
quite unique and commanding, so that proofs of
his plates are now sought avidly by the most ex-
clusive collectors, who, until the achievements of

Mr. Short, had believed that the great artistic
manner of mezzotint had died long ago with the
masters who consummated it.

Since its invention in 1642, the art of mezzotint
engraving has passed through varying phases of
development, but hitherto always as an interpre-
tative or reproductive art. The great English
engravers of the latter half of the eighteenth
century achieved innumerable masterpieces in
their translations of the great English portrait-
painters, while Turner and, later, Constable re-
cognised with splendid result the value of this
richly expressive medium for the interpretation of
landscape as drawn or painted; but, so far, none
had seen how this beautiful branch of the en-
graver’s art could be employed for the first-hand
picturing of sea and land in poetic moods. Mean-
while, the great days of mezzotint had become a
tradition, the very genius of the art seeming to
have been lost in a decadence of method, and, as
Ruskin thought, beyond recovery. But art calls
never in vain, and mezzotint engraving was an art