Studio: international art (58.1913)

Studio- Talk

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"THE PLOUGH-HORSE" IfR0M AN ETCHING BY P. DUPONT

had, alike by his personal gifts and the temper of
his work, attained to a very exceptional position in
modern art, albeit the value and importance of that
work may not yet be generally recognised.

No doubt any one wishing to give an idea of
Dutch art about the beginning of the twentieth
century will cite those painters who have made the
Modern Dutch School renowned all over the world
—Mauve, Bosboom, the Brothers Maris, Israels,
and other painters produced in the country of
Rembrandt and Franz Hals. But in that selfsame
country there lived too a Goltius: a Lucas van
Leyden worked there: there too, as well as in
Germany, in Albert Diirer's time and that of the
lesser masters of the Renaissance, once flourished
the engraver's art. _

No wonder, therefore, that many artists, even
those who were purely colourists, imbibed a taste
for graphic art. Though the public took little notice

of it, yet a band of artists, by forming themselves
into a " Black and White Club," proved that at the
end of the nineteenth century there was growing
up by the side of impressionism an art which was
distinguished by the pure accented line. In their
capacity of etchers, engravers, woodcutters and
lithographers these painters showed that the glorious
past of Dutch black-and-white art had once more
begun to revive. In the case of the majority of
them this graphic art was rather a pleasant form
of relief from the ordinary labour of painting. One
only of their number became so irresistibly attracted
by it that it came to thoroughly dominate the rest
of his work—Pieter Dupont, the black-and-white
artist par excellence, who, not merely by his pro-
ductions but by his office of professor of etching and
engraving at the Rijks Academie in Amsterdam,
manfully upheld the cause of the purely graphic arts.

Returning home after a comparativelyshort study-
trip to London and Paris, Dupont decided to

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