Sweet Thames run softly

As I’m just about to spend a couple of days in London, I thought I would post a little visual essay on etchings of the Thames between the dawn of Impressionism and the outbreak of the First World War. Some of these are by friends and associates of Whistler, and others by French artists drawn to London and the Thames just as British ones were drawn to Paris and the Seine (I have, for instance, an 1892 etching of Le Pont Neuf by Whistler’s disciple Frank Laing). Chief among the French artists, of course, is Claude Monet; my etchings are interpretative works by Charles Waltner and Gustave Greux, made in 1904, the year Monet exhibited the Thames paintings he had been working on since 1899. These etchings by Waltner and Greux were commissioned and published by the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, as were all of the others except the one by Jacques Beurdeley, which was published by a rival journal, the Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne. So there is a definite ebb and flow of influence to be discerned here; for instance Monet would almost certainly have seen John Postle Heseltine’s etching of Waterloo Bridge before making his own studies of the same motif. There was a fascinating-sounding exhibition in 2005 entitled Monet’s London: Artists’ Reflections on the Thames 1859-1914, which included work by great names such as Tissot, Derain, Pissarro, and Daubigny, as well etchings by two of my favourite lesser-known Impressionists, Félix Buhot and Henri Guérard. I didn’t get to see this, so I suppose I must look out for the catalogue and make do with that. In the meantime, here is my personal take on the same theme.


Arthur Evershed, At Twickenham
Etching, 1876


Arthur Evershed, On the banks of the Thames
Etching, 1876

Arthur Evershed (1836-1919) was born at Billinghurst in Sussex, where his father was a doctor. Evershed himself was to pursue parallel medical and artistic careers. The young Arthur was sent at the age of 16 to study with the landscape painter Alfred Clirt. However at the age of 22, at his father's urging, Evershed abandoned art to study medicine. On graduation he set up practice in Ampthill, Bedfordshire. Nevertheless, Arthur Evershed continued to take his art seriously, exhibiting at the Royal Academy from 1855 (at the age of 19) to 1892. He was made an Associate RE in 1891, and a Fellow in 1898. Despite this late recognition by his peers, the high point of Arthur Evershed's art career was undoubtedly the publication of a highly-favourable essay on "Les eaux-fortes de M. Evershed" in the influential Parisian revue the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1876. Written by Alfred de Lostalot, this article put Evershed forward as one of the key English etchers, alongside such names as Seymour Haden and Edwin Edwards. The Gazette also commissioned two original etchings by Evershed, bringing his art vividly to the attention of the French art world. Alfred de Lostalot remarked particularly on the fact that Evershed's etchings - almost all scenes along the Thames - were drawn directly on the copper plates, in front of the motif. This is what gives Evershed's work of this date its Impressionistic freshness - but the Gazette des Beaux-Arts was not the forum to make the crucial connection between Arthur Evershed and the Impressionists. Arthur Evershed made his first etchings in 1872, by which time he was living and working in Hampstead.


James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Fulham
Etching, 1879

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. He came to Europe in 1855, at first dividing his time between Paris and London. In 1860, when his painting La jeune fille en blanc was refused by the jury of the Salon de Paris, and exhibited instead in the Salon des Refusées, a piqued Whistler, always hyper-sensitive to criticism, settled in London. He only returned to live in Paris in 1896, after the death of his wife. Whistler was famous for his friendships and his enmities, most notably his celebrated libel case against Ruskin, and his long-running feud with his brother-in-law Francis Seymour Haden, a surgeon who founded of the Society of Painter-Etchers (now the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers). The cause of the fatal rift between Whistler and Haden, aggravated by professional jealousies and the clash of two strong personalities, was Haden’s refusal to meet the funeral expenses of his medical partner James Traer, a friend of Whistler, after Traer died in a Paris brothel.


John Postle Heseltine, Le pont de Waterloo à Londres
Etching, 1897

John Postle Heseltine (1843-1929) was born in Dilham in Norfolk. Heseltine was an accomplished etcher, who exhibited at the Royal Academy almost every year between 1869 and 1916. Heseltine specialized in landscapes. Freed by private wealth from the constraints that hampered other artists, he was also an avid collector of prints and drawings. John Postle Heseltine was a friend of Whistler, and a member of the Arts Club.


Claude Oscar Monet, Waterloo Bridge, soleil voilé
Etching by Charles Waltner after Monet, 1904


Claude Oscar Monet, Le Parlement de Londres, soleil couchant
Etching by Gustave Greux after Monet, 1904

Monet painted his views of the Thames and Parliament during visits to London in 1899, 1900, and 1901, concentrating on the fog-laden vistas of trembling light that he could see from his room in the Savoy Hotel. He continued to work on the paintings back in his studio in Giverny.


Joseph Pennell, Le débarcadère du Temple à Londres
Etching, 1906

A notable lithographer and etcher, Joseph Pennell (1860-1926) was born in Philadelphia, but spent nearly thirty years in London, where he was a close friend (and eventual biographer) of Whistler. Joseph Pennell returned to America in 1912. This etching shows the landing stage at the Temple.


Jacques Beurdeley, Sur la Tamise
Etching, 1909

The painter and etcher Jacques Beurdeley (1874-1954) studied under Fernand Cormon, to whose studio Toulouse-Lautrec was a frequent visitor. Beurdeley studied printmaking with Eugène Carrière and Auguste Delâtre. Jacques Beurdeley's father was a friend of both Puvis de Chavannes and Whistler, and the influence of Whistler can be seen in Beurdeley's work, along with that of Corot and Meryon.


Paul-Adrien Bouroux, Le Pont de la Tour à Londres
Etching, 1910

Paul-Adrien Bouroux (1878-1967) was born in Mézières in the Ardennes. Although enthused by drawing from early childhood, Bouroux started a career in the Civil Service. It was only when doing his military service in Rouen that fellow-conscripts introduced him to their teacher at the Beaux-Arts, Paris, Luc-Olivier Merson, who offered him informal advice. Back in the civilian world, Bouroux made friends with Victor Focillon, who taught him the art of etching. Bouroux exhibited his first etching with the Société des Artistes Français in 1905, and the following year gave up his job as a tax collector to devote himself to etching. He travelled across Europe etching landscapes and cityscapes. Bouroux served at the front in WWI, collecting his sketches and etchings of the war under the title Au front d'Alsace. After the war he continued his travels, and began to concentrate on producing etchings for limited edition fine press books. Together with the bibliophile Henri Vever and the etchers Charles Jouas and André Dauchez, Bouroux founded the Société de Saint Eloy to publish such works. He received the Légion d’Honneur in 1936. From the early 1950s Bouroux's eyesight began to fail, and at the end of his life he often received assistance from his friend and neighbour Maurice Achener in finishing his plates.

The interpreter's art

It’s hard to remember now that to a large extent both engraving and etching were once regarded as primarily a means of reproducing rather than creating works of art. I have an original etching by one of the acknowledged masters of the interpretative etching, Charles Waltner (1846-1925), signed and dated 1905 in the plate, entitled Portrait de Mlle G… C… (the pianist Germaine Chéné). This was only the sixth original etching made by Waltner, who had nevertheless by this time been a famous etcher for 30 years, and was the professor of etching at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. People were so accustomed to seeing etchings by Waltner “after” this or that master that the portrait of Germaine Chéné is wrily inscribed in the plate “d’après nature”.


Charles Waltner, Portrait de Mlle G… C…
original etching, 1905

Modern means of reproduction by photogravure and the four-colour process killed off interpretative etching and engraving, but at one time this art was held in extremely high esteem. The skill with which an artist such as Charles Waltner could mimic in black-and-white line the line, tone, and very essence of a colour oil painting was truly astonishing. I have at least 16 interpetative etchings by Waltner, after artists as varied as Rembrandt, Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Gustave Courbet, and George Romney.


Charles Waltner, Portrait de l’artiste
interpretative etching after Rembrandt, 1906

Probably the most technically astounding are the three large etchings of the Magi which Waltner made in 1876 after Rubens. Both the control and the freedom of Waltner’s line show the hand of a virtuoso. He interprets the art of Rubens with both a minute attention to detail and a swashbuckling vigour


Charles Waltner, Le Mage Grec
interpretative etching after Peter Paul Rubens, 1876

Waltner’s flexibility, and ability to find a true affinity with the artists whose work he interpreted, can be seen by contrasting works after the Old Masters such as Rubens or Rembrandt with his 1904 etching after Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, soleil voilé. Monet himself never took up printmaking, but if he had it is hard to imagine him making a better job of this etching than Waltner, whose soft and subtle plate, printed in sanguine, is suffused with the sun-laden vapour of a London fog.


Charles Waltner, Waterloo Bridge, soleil voilé
interpretative etching after Claude Oscar Monet, 1904

There were a number of masters of the art and craft of the interpretative etching and engraving working in France in the last half of the nineteenth century – to mention just a few, I have wonderful works by artists such as Henri Guérard, Gustave Greux, Achille Jacquet, Jean Patricot, Léopold Flameng, Eugène Gaujean, and Léon Gaucherel. Many of these men were also significant original artists. Sometimes this leads to a delicious fusion of talents, where the interpretative etcher would now be regarded as equally important as the artist being interpreted. Such is the case, for instance, with my etching after Jules Breton by Félix Vallotton.


Félix Vallotton, Le soir dans un hameau du Finistère
intepretative etching with drypoint after Jules Breton, 1889

Of all the artists working in this field, one was regarded by the French themselves as the undisputed genius of the genre. That artist was Jules Jacquemart (1837-1880).


Marcellin Desboutin, Portrait of Jules Jacquemart
original drypoint, 1876

Jacquemart produced many interpretative etchings Old Masters, which show a beautifully subtle skill and both lightness and sureness of touch. For instance I have Jacquemart etchings after Rembrandt, Fyt, Potter, and Ostade.


Jules Jacquemart, Paysage
interpretative etching after Rembrandt, 1877

Above all, Jules Jacquemart was famous for his meticulous etchings of objets d’art. For instance in the 1860s he was commissioned by the Louvre to produce 60 etchings of the French crown jewels.


Jules Jacquemart, Pendule de Marie-Antoinette
original etching, 1877

The catalogue raisonné of Jacquemart’s etchings published by Louis Gonse in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1876 lists 378 plates, to which could be added many more over the next four years. Considering Jaquemart died at the age of only 43 this is a serious oeuvre, and would be an important body of work if it consisted only of etchings such as the two reproduced above. But in fact, there is another, little-known side to Jacquemart’s work – a side that allies him, not as you might expect to the academic Salon artists, but to the Impressionists.


Jules Jacquemart, Chez Berne-Bellecour
original etching, 1875

My single example of this aspect of the art of Jules Jacquemart is the 1875 etching Chez Berne-Bellecour. It was made in the studio of the artist Étienne Prosper Berne-Bellecour, who was one year Jacquemart’s junior. The sitter is presumbably Mme Berne-Bellecour. Working side by side, the two artists each created an etching of the same subject. Sadly, I don’t have, and have never seen, that produced by Berne-Bellecour. But Louis Gonse had the two to compare, and declared Jacquemart’s version much superior, noting in particular its painterly qualities. Gonse writes that, “Celle de M. Jacquemart n’est qu’une impression à l’eau-forte, pour nous servir du mot à la mode, mais nous la préférons beaucoup à la planche plus étudié du peintre”: That of M. Jacquemart is just an etched impression, to use the word of the moment, but we greatly prefer it to the more studied plate of the painter. The word impression is italicized, to make sure that his readers pick up the reference to the Impressionists.

The First Impressionist Exhibition had been held only the previous year, in 1874, so Jacquemart was very quick to adopt the new style; he saw immediately how the sketch-like freshness of Impressionism, and its “less-is-more” aesthetic, could open new avenues for the etcher. In general the staid Gazette des Beaux-Arts was sceptical of the Impressionists, and I believe that Jacquemart’s Chez Berne-Bellecour was the first print published by the Gazette to be described as an “impression”.

Jacquemart’s premature death means that he only had four or five years to produce his various “impressions” and “effets”, and that they have been largely overlooked by art historians. But I believe he made an important contribution to early Impressionism, and that his story once again belies the easy assumption that the established Parisian art world was implacably hostile to the new art.