Studio: international art (58.1913)

The Etchings of James McBey

MUSIC CABINET IN WALNUT WOOD. DESIGNED AND
EXECUTED AT THE CENTRAL SCHOOL OF ARTS AND
CRAFTS BY WILLIAM WEINHART UNDER THE DIRECTION
OF CHARLES SPOONER AND E. J. MINAHANE
(See A7 tide on Arts and Crafts Exhibition, i. 27)

and how much it is," which distinguished an
original talent and exceptional personality.

Gifted he certainly is, for no tuition or training
of any kind in draughtsmanship or the craft of
etching has helped his natural graphic expression.
Born and bred in the fishing village of Newburgh
on the Aberdeen coast, he was in early life subject
to no artistic influences whatever, and, until
he was fifteen years of age and went from school
into an Aberdeen bank, he had never seen an oil
painting, or indeed a picture of any kind, save the
sort of thing vouchsafed by the commercial
calendar. But in the public library he chanced
upon the English translation of Maxime Lalanne's
"Gravures a l'eau-forte,"andfrom that book helearnt
the principles of etching, which he promptly essayed
to put into practice. It was long before he saw an
actual etching, a few reproductions only coming

within his reach. From the first, however, he
seems to have divined the true expressive spirit
and scope of the art, its basic principle of essen-
tial line, its vitality and infinity of pictorial sug-
gestion. This is patent even in a proof I have
now before me of the second plate he ever at-
tempted, dated 1902, when he was but eighteen.
Three boys are fishing from a harbour quay,
and in the tense attitudes of the small fishermen,
and the atmospheric vista of boats and buildings
across the water, the scene is realised with extra-
ordinary vitality, and I find in this little early plate
of Mr. McBey's more freshness of vision, more of
the true genius of etching, than I can perceive in
many of the elaborate plates of popular etchers
of the day. And this is what I find generally in
Mr. McBey's work, in spite of occasional lapses in
drawing, in craftsmanship, and this I hope will be
found suggested, at least, by the reproductions of
the examples given here. Of course, while he
was finding out his technique, many of his earlier
efforts were failures. These were, for the most
part, attempts to interpret night effects, for his days
were then claimed by the drudgery of the Aberdeen
bank, until he impulsively emancipated himself by
journeys to Holland and Spain in search of pictorial
adventure. But it is interesting to trace his artistic
development even through the tentative plates of
his earlier days, plates which the accomplished
art-critic and brother-etcher, Mr. Martin Hardie, as
confident as I am of Mr. McBey's future eminence,
has already begun to catalogue.

Granting the artist's happy and individual com-
mand of his medium to interpret with delight-
ful spontaneity and vitality his personal vision
—and Mr. McBey's line is as happily expressive
and verily his own whether he uses dry-point
or acid—that which counts more is, after all,
what the artist has seen, and the way in which
he has presented it to our vision. Now, although
in Mr. McBey's selection of subjects he may
occasionally recall memories of certain masters
—and, in looking pictorially at Dutch landscapes,
he has obviously had, as every artist, young or old,
must have, the supreme way of Rembrandt in his
mind, just as it would have been impossible for
him to have forgotten Goya when looking with
artistic eye at a Spanish Bullfight—I contend
nevertheless, that his bullfight dry-points (to wit,
The Ovation to the Matador and The Picador
attacked) and his Dutch landscape etchings, are as
instinct with essential vitality and imaginative
expression as any of his thoroughly individual
pictorial interpretations of scenes that one does

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