New York Etching Club: R. Swain Gifford

The first meeting of the New York Etching Club was convened on 2 May 1877 at the studio of James David Smillie. About twenty artists were present, half of whom had never etched before. The centerpiece of the evening was therefore a practical demonstration. Smillie laid a ground onto a small etching plate, on which an Algerian landscape was drawn with an etching needle by Robert Swain Gifford, the image was bitten into the plate by immersion in a tray of mordant, and then the plate was printed by the physician and amateur etcher Leroy Milton Yale. James D. Smillie remembered the occasion in a note in the first illustrated catalogue issued by the club: "The smear of thick, pasty ink was deftly rubbed into the lines just corroded, and as deftly cleansed from the polished surface; the damped sheet of thin, silky Japan paper was spread upon the gently warmed plate; the heavy steel roller of the printing press, with its triple facing of thick, soft blanket, was slowly rolled over it, and in another moment, finding scant room in the pressing crowd, the first-born of the New York Etching Club was being tenderly passed from hand to hand."

R. Swain Gifford, Algerian Landscape

(The first plate etched at the New York Etching Club)

Etching, 1877

The moment when that "first-born" proof emerged from Smillie's press heralded the dawn of the American Etching Revival, or the American Painter-Etcher Movement, which saw a craze for both making and collecting etchings sweep across the USA in the 1880s. The New York Etching Club was pre-eminent in this movement. Many of its members quickly established international reputations, and were also Fellows of Francis Seymour Haden's Society of Painter-Etchers, which was founded in 1880, and in 1888 became the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers (now Painter-Printmakers). Within the USA, their reputations were sealed by publication of their etchings in the American Art Review, edited by Sylvester Rosa Koehler from 1879-1881. So although there were other active local organisations, including the Philadelphia Society of Etchers, the Brooklyn Scratchers Club, the Chicago Society of Etchers and so on, the name of the New York Etching Club has understandably been applied retrospectively to the whole American Etching Revival. Although an early proposal to change the name of the club to the Society of American Etchers was rejected, it would have been a sensible move. When a separate Society of American Etchers was formed in 1888, its 20 members were all also members of the New York Etching Club.

R. Swain Gifford, Summer Storm

Etching, 1879

I've been developing an interest in the artists of the New York Etching Club, and intend to devote individual posts to several of them. It seems to me that in embracing the art of etching, with its intrinsic affinity with a more sketchy and impressionistic style of art, these artists laid one of the foundation stones of American Impressionism (and, indeed, they were very shortly joined by such giants of that movement as John Henry Twachtman and J. Alden Weir). They were not, however, looking to the Impressionists for inspiration; instead, their artistic models were the painter-etchers of the earlier Barbizon School, themselves precursors of Impressionism.

R. Swain Gifford, A Woodland Pasture

Etching, 1888

It seems appropriate to start these posts with the artist who etched that "first-born" plate, R. Swain Gifford. Robert Swain Gifford was born on Naushon Island off Cape Cod in 1840, but when he was very young his family moved to New Bedford, Massachussetts. Showing an early talent for art, he studied under the Dutch marine painter Albert van Beest, then resident in New Bedford. Working as R. Swain Gifford, he achieved an international reputation for his oils, watercolors, and etchings.

R. Swain Gifford, Flowers

Etching, 1880

Gifford produced his first etchings in 1865 or 1866, but like many etchers of this date his interest petered out. Etching materials were hard to come by, there were no specialist printers, no community of interest, and no market for the end result.

R. Swain Gifford, Palestine

Etching, 1880

Despite travels to England, France, Spain, Italy, and perhaps most importantly North Africa and the Sahara Desert, R. Swain Gifford remains best known for his studies of his native New England. The etching "Coal-Pockets at New Bedford", for instance, was one of many local studies produced in the summer months when Gifford retreated from the city to his residence in Nonquitt, six miles from his childhood home of New Bedford.

R. Swain Gifford, Coal-Pockets at New Bedford, Mass.

Etching, 1879

One interesting feature of the Coal-Pockets etching is Gifford's choice of an industrial subject. Although the aesthetics of the image treat the coal storage tower as if it were a lonely windmill or ruined castle, it is still refreshing to find the modern world, and the world of work, represented in a New York Etching Club etching. Despite the name of the club, the city of New York had to wait for the Ashcan artists to be preferred as subject matter over the New York Etchers' endless romantic landscapes and seascapes.

R. Swain Gifford, The Path by the Shore

Etching, 1879

For all their conservative ideas about artistic subjects, the etchers of the New York Etching Club introduced a new rhythmic freedom of line and a new freshness of treatment into American art. The critic Sylvester Rosa Koehler wrote of R. Swain Gifford's etchings that, "He has learned to a high degree the art of saying much with little, and therefore makes every line tell." Gifford shows himself at his best, I think, in the atmospheric Summer Storm, and at his least interesting in the facile romanticism of The Baron of St. Castine.

R. Swain Gifford, The Baron of St. Castine

Etching, 1979

Robert Swain Gifford died in 1905.

In the twilight zone: a mezzotint by Raphaël Drouart

Mezzotint is a method of creating a tonal intaglio image; the name means "half-tint" in Italian. The French term, manière noire ("black manner") expresses the particular nature of this printmaking method more clearly. The special quality of mezzotints is the the subtlety with which they graduate from purest black to white. For this reason the method is especially suited to muted and mysterious subjects, murky twilights and forbidden shadows. English readers will be familiar with the supernatural powers lurking in such a picture in M. R. James's classic ghost story "The Mezzotint".

Raphaël Drouart, Hermaphrodite et Salmacis

Mezzotint, 1922

Raphaël Drouart's mezzotint Hermaphrodite et Salmacis depicts just such a twilight moment. The story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, though it is older than that. The fifteen-year-old Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, has left Mount Ida, and chanced upon the nymph Salmacis. For her, it is love at first sight, but Hermaphroditus rebuffs her. So the nymph waits for him to bathe in her pool and there, where she herself has semi-divine powers, she clasps him to her and begs the gods that they may be inseparably united. And so they become one dual-sexed being, the first hermaphrodite.

Raphaël Drouart, Faisans

Wood engraving, 1922

A painter and sculptor as well as printmaker, Raphaël Drouart took up printmaking after WWI, mastered every technique, and introduced many innovations of his own. Drouart was born in Choisy-le-Roi (Val de Marne), and studied under Fernand Cormon and Maurice Denis. Never a modernist, Drouart's art has its roots in Art Nouveau and Symbolism.

Raphaël Drouart, L'Été

Wood engraving in two colours (en camaïeu), 1924

Because the process of creating a mezzotint, using a tool known as a rocker, is extremely time-consuming and specialized, few twentieth century artists have favoured this method of printmaking. But although some of the effects of mezzotint can be mimicked in etching by use of a roulette and by mastery of aquatint, the mezzotint remains the most moody and mysterious of all printmaking techniques. Mario Avati is probably the most famous modern exponent of the process, but there are others. I've already posted about Georges Gorvel's atmospheric mezzotints of Paris under aerial bombardment in WWI. In a future post I will explore the work of two contemporary artists who favour the mezzotint over other intaglio methods, Michel Mathonnat and Michel Estèbe.

Scratching and biting: the art of Armand Coussens

The Provençal painter and printmaker Armand Coussens was born in Saint-Ambroix (Gard) in 1881. He studied at the Beaux-Arts, Nîmes, under Alexis Lahaye. Ambitious for his talented student, Lahaye encouraged Coussens to go to Paris to enter for the Prix de Rome. But the 7 years he spent in Paris from 1900 to 1907 were frustrating for the young artist, who spent his time studying the Impressionists and painting on the quais of the Seine, rather than following the stultifying course at the Beaux-Arts, Paris, which even at that date was still focussed on copying antique casts and intended to produce a new generation of history painters. Driven to despair by this academic approach, Coussens returned to Nîmes, to become professor of drawing at the Beaux-Arts there.

Armand Coussens, Amateurs d'estampes

Etching and aquatint, 1922

The nineteenth-century poet Thomas Hood, who trained as an engraver, wrote that etching "begins in a scratching and ends in a biting!" In this vividly expressive etching, Armand Coussens was certainly biting the hand that fed him. In the spirit of Daumier, it satirizes the very men on whom printmakers relied for their patronage, the "amateurs d'estampes". For such connoisseurs, print-collecting was a kind of competitive sport, in which refinement of taste was often tinged with snobbery and one-upmanship. Coussens, who began etching in 1912, had his first success in 1914 when he sold a plate to the master printer Vernant for a society of just such amateurs d'estampes. In 1919 the Musée du Luxembourg - where Coussens had spent so many days studying the Impressionist masters - bought eight etchings and a painting, as well as two watercolours by his wife, Jeanne Coussens, who had also studied under Alexis Lahaye. But this seems to have been the highwater mark of Coussens' career, and a sense of personal disappointment may lie behind the scratching and biting exhibited in Amateurs d'estampes. Although this etching and aquatint is in black only, Armand Coussens was an enthusiastic promoter of colour etchings, which were still regarded as inferior to black-and-white, despite the achievements of artists such as Raffaëlli in the previous generation. He died in Nîmes in 1935.

Two visions of New York: Walter Pach and Adriaan Lubbers

The contrasting views of New York exhibited in the two prints in this post were made at almost the same time, by two artists who both had reasons to think they were at the cutting edge of modern art; both were published in the same art revue, Byblis. In their different ways both explore the city as a metaphor for modernity; both show how deeply what we see is affected by how we think.

Walter Pach, New York

Etching, 1928

The first is by Walter Pach. The painter, etcher and art critic Walter Pach was born in New York City in 1883. Pach studied under Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase. Moving to Paris, he became part of the artistic and literary circle of Gertrude and Leo Stein. Walter Pach's achievements as an artist have been overshadowed by his enormous influence on American taste in his championing of such artists as Cézanne, van Gogh, and Diego Rivera, as well as Native American art. He was, in effect, the American version of Roger Fry, whose daring choice of art for two groundbreaking Post-Impressionist exhibitions in London in 1910 and 1912 had such a profound affect on British art of the twentieth century. In a similar vein, it was Walter Pach who (with Arthur B. Davies and Walter Kuhn at the Association of American Painters and Sculptors) organised the famous Armory Show of 1913, which is credited with decisively turning American artists towards modernism. Of the organisers, it was the Paris-based Walter Pach who had access to avant-garde artists such as the three brothers Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, whose work caused such as stir when exhibited in the Armory Show (or as it was billed, The International Exhibition of Modern Art). As an artist, Walter Pach was welcomed into the Paris art world, and the publication of this etching accompanied an appreciate essay on his art by Léon Rosenthal. Pach was also elected a member of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. For all his promotion of the avant-garde, on the evidence of this etching Pach did not himself stray far from a Post-Impressionist aesthetic. He died in 1958.

Adriaan Lubbers, The El at Chatham Square

Lithograph, 1930

The second is by the itinerant Dutch artist Adriaan Lubbers. Adriaan Lubbers was born in Amsterdam in 1892. Lubbers is particularly remembered for his paintings, drawings, and lithographs of 1920s New York, which remain one of the most evocative visual records of the city at this vibrant period. His lithograph of the elevated railway (the El, or as Byblis spells it, Le L à Chatham Square), shows a more striking modernism than Pach's. His understanding of the angles and spaces of the city has been radically affected by exposure to Cubism, Vorticism, and Futurism. This is the second of two versions of the same scene; the first, published in 1929, is on a larger scale, but otherwise the two are virtually identical. The second version was made especially for Byblis, to accompany an essay on Lubbers by Charles Terrasse. After living and travelling throughout Europe, Adriaan Lubbers was fittingly in Manhattan when he died of a stroke in 1954.

Art Deco elegance: the art of Jean-Emile Laboureur

The founder of the group Les Peintres-Graveurs Indépendants, Jean-Émile Laboureur was one of the most successful and influential printmakers of his day, and a man who rode the waves of successive art movements, creating 794 prints. Laboureur was born in Nantes in 1877. He went to Paris in 1895, studying at the Académie Julian. His mentor, the Nantes industrialist and art collector Lotz-Brissoneau, introduced him to the printmaker Auguste Lepère, who taught him the art of wood engraving. Lepère published Laboureur's first woodcut, Au Luxembourg, in L'Image in July 1897. In that same year, Laboureur made his first etchings, and also created his first lithographs under the watchful eye of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whom he met at l'imprimerie Ancourt.  Lautrec's influence can be seen in his work over the next decade. Another strong influence on Laboureur's early woodcuts was Paul Gauguin, but neither Lautrec's vivacity nor Gauguin's primitivism truly reflected Laboureur's inner nature, as shown by the speed with which Laboureur was seduced by the sophistication of Cubism. I believe Jean-Émile Laboureur was the first printmaker to be strongly influenced by Cubism (around 1913), though his Cubist aesthetic soon mutated into an elegant, almost dandy-ish Art Deco world of languid elongated hedonists.

Jean-Émile Laboureur, Broadway, New York

Etching, 1907

My prints by Jean-Émile Laboureur  include etchings, copper engravings, and wood engravings, made between 1907 and 1928. The earliest, an etched view of Broadway in New York, published by the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, is one of the products of Laboureur's early years in the United States, where he taught at the Art Student's League in New York, and made some striking etchings of both New York and Pittsburgh. In the period 1899-1911 Laboureur lived in Dresden, the USA, Canada, London, Italy, Greece, and Turkey, before returning definitively to Paris.

Jean-Émile Laboureur, Sur la Marne

Engraving, 1924

Jean-Émile Laboureur, Sur la Tamise

Wood engraving, 1924

Once back in Paris, Jean-Émile Laboureur made friends with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the artist Marie Laurencin, becoming Laurencin's tutor in printmaking. It was at this period that he really developed his own artistic style, though a catalogue of 1909 already lists 171 prints. In 1916 he turned to copper engraving, and this became his most distinctive and individual means of expression. His early wartime engravings, Petites images de la guerre sur le front britannique, made while serving as an interpreter for the British troops at the Western Front, are wonderfully-observed, and very much studies in manners rather than depictions of warfare. In style they are not unlike his 1924 engraving Sur la Marne, though of course the subject matter is entirely different. From the same year I have another scene of indolent pleasure-seekers disporting on a river, this time on the Thames. Both river scenes were published in Byblis.

Jean-Émile Laboureur, Paysage

Wood engraving, 1922

Jean-Émile Laboureur, Le Cinéma

Wood engraving, 1924

The two small-scale wood engravings above were made for the annual almanachs of the Société de la Gravure sur Bois Originale, in which French wood engravers strove to impress each other with their virtuosity. The almanachs were issued in editions of only 160 copies.

Jean-Émile Laboureur, Falling out of bed

Engraving, 1925

Jean-Émile Laboureur, Venice in the rain

Engraving, 1925

My 1925 engravings of Venice come from one of 75 separate suites without text of Laboureur's illustrations for The Devil on Love by Jacques Cazotte. They were printed on Hollande van Gelder paper by Stanley Morison.

Jean-Émile Laboureur, Fernand Fleuret

Engraving, 1928

Jean-Émile Laboureur, Restif de la Bretonne

Engraving, 1928

Jean-Émile Laboureur, Scene in a brothel

Engraving, 1928

These 1928 engravings were made for Fernand Fleuret's Supplément au Spectateur Nocturne, and include portraits of both Fleuret (another friend of Apollinaire) and the author to whose work he was supplying a modern twist, Restif de la Bretonne.

Jean-Émile Laboureur, Walk in the park

Engraving, 1928

There were major retrospectives of the art of Jean-Émile Laboureur in 1991 and 1996, both in his home town of Nantes. For much of the information above I am indebted to Janine Bailly-Herzberg's invaluable Dictionnaire de l'Estampe en France.

Two sides to every story: a copperplate of Charles Meryon

Charles Meryon was born in Batignolles, Paris, on 23 November 1821, and died in the mental hospital at Charenton on 14 February 1868, at the age of just 46. His name is indelibly associated with the city, which he depicted in etchings of incredible subtlety. Yet Meryon was a cuckoo in the Parisian nest. He was the illegitimate son of Narcisse Chaspaux, a dancer at the Paris opera house, and Charles Lewis Meryon, an itinerant English doctor. This ancestry may explain the uncertainty as to whether his surname should be spelled Meryon or Méryon—authorities differ, as they do about whether his mother was French or Spanish. Narcisse Chaspaux died insane in 1837, the year Charles Meryon entered the École navale. His naval career lasted until 1842, taking him both to Athens and to the South Pacific. In the course of these voyages he made many sketches, and eventually he resolved to become an artist. However, it soon became apparent that he was colour-blind, and that a career as a painter was out of the question. So he turned to etching, studying the art in the studio of Eugène Bléry (1805-1886), whose meticulous standards of observation Meryon maintained.

Eugène Bléry, Vue du château de Nemours

Etching, 1851

I have an interesting pair of Meryon etchings. The first is one of his Parisian scenes, Le Petit Pont. This was actually his first important work, exhibited at the Salon of 1850. My impression is from the cancelled plate. As you can see, Charles Meryon has not been content simply to mark an X from corner to corner, or make a discreet cancellation mark in the bottom lefthand corner. Instead he has attacked the plate with a drypoint needle, scratching a rhythmic welter of diagonal marks across the whole composition, as if he has lashed it with a whip. Ironically, this intended destruction of the piece has not quite worked, as to a modern eye the combination of Canaletto-like calm and expressionistic fury is rather pleasing. Meryon’s Paris seems to be being both destroyed and remade under our gaze. There is an image of the uncancelled plate in this post by John Coulthart at feuilleton.

Charles Meryon, Le Petit Pont (from the cancelled plate)

Etching, 1850

Having put Le Petit Pont beyond use, as he thought, Charles Meryon then turned the copperplate over, rotated it by 90 degrees, and used it to etch my second work, Vue de l’ancien Louvre, after a painting by the Dutch artist Reinier Nooms, known as Zeeman (1623-1667). This interpretative etching was commissioned from Meryon in 1865 by the all-powerful surintendant des Beaux-Arts, M. de Nieuwerkerke, for publication by the Chalcographie du Louvre, and executed the following year. Meryon had already made four etchings after Zeeman as part of his apprenticeship, having been particularly impressed both by Zeeman’s etchings of Paris and his marine sujects. He etched the plate for Vue de l’ancien Louvre directly in front of the painting, holding in one hand the plate and a reversing mirror, and in the other his etching needle.

Charles Meryon, Vue de l’ancien Louvre

Etching after Zeeman, 1866

It was Meryon’s custom, as we have seen with Le Petit Pont, to cancel his plates after a small edition. In fact he was quite obsessive about this. In the case of the Vue de l’ancien Louvre, however, he was stymied. He marched up to the Louvre to reclaim the plate, and when this was refused flew into a temper and laid about him with his cane. After creating this ruckus, Meryon left in a state of great vexation, while for their part the authorities at the Louvre resolved never to commission work again from such a rowdy and unreasonable character. As a result, the Chalcographie du Louvre contains the only surviving copperplate of Charles Meryon, from which my impressions of the two contrasting sides were printed by Vernant in 1922, in an edition of 605 copies for Byblis. They accompanied an article by Pierre Gusman, “Histoire d’une planche de Meryon”.

The row at the Louvre was evidence of an underlying mental problem; Meryon had from May 1858 spent fifteen months in the asylum at Charenton, and he seems to have suffered from delusions and paranoia. It may be that the sense of order that dominates Meryon’s 102 etchings is evidence of a temperament that was always threatening to explode out of control, and that the excessive violence with which he cancelled the plate of Le Petit Pont shows how strongly an appetite for destruction counterbalanced Charles Meryon’s creative instinct.

Japonisme/Europeanisme

In the course of this blog, I often use the word Japonisme, as a way of encapsulating the rejuvenating, electrifying effect that exposure to Japanese art and aesthetics had on European artists of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist era. One of the first blogs I started to follow was Lily's Japonisme, which has remained a source of great value to me. The meaning of the word Japonisme can best be shown visually, perhaps by looking at this colour autolithograph by Henri Rivière (1864-1951).

Henri Rivière, Brume matinale (Matin de brume à Loguivy)

Lithograph, 1903

But was Japonisme a one-way street, with European artists learning from the Japanese, and the Japanese going on their own sweet way? Of course not. Japanese artists were as eager to learn from the West as European artists were to learn from the East. Here is an example of what I mean, a modernist female nude by Kiyoshi Hasegawa (Hasegawa Kiyoshi, as it should be in Japanese convention). I think this is a wonderful piece of work, a machine age nude rather than an Art Deco one.

Kiyoshi Hasegawa, Femme nue

Engraving, 1929

Kiyoshi Hasegawa was born in Yokohama in 1891. He moved to Paris alongside fellow Japanese artist Tsuguharu Foujita, and spent most of his life there, working in a Western style deeply influenced by the subtlety of line and feeling in Japanese art. I have to admit I don't know the precise dates at which Foujita and Hasegawa arrived in Paris, but I have a strong feeling that Foujita got there first, and that Hasegawa was always therefore second fiddle to his compatriot. Western influences on Hasegawa's work include Jean Laboureur and Jules Pascin. Hasegawa's prints are primarily engravings and mezzotints. He died in 1980. In 2005 the Yokohama Museum of Art received over 1000 items from the Paris atelier of Kiyoshi Hasegawa.