Pennell's rejoinder; "personally they are very decent fellows."

Apart from the steady improvement in the quality of his pictures (and that he is thirty years older than when I knew him first), I can perceive no change in Joseph Pennell. A positive personality, he was himself from the beginning, and he will remain so to the end. His long intercourse with many distinguished people in London has not imparted to his speech even a trace of the London accent, nor have the more ornate and ceremonious manners of his British and Continental friends changed him in the least from the simple and kindly young Philadelphian whom I first knew. As I write I can almost see him in his London home, taking his ease in his library and comfortably "dumped" down in his low-seated wicker armchair. It was in this unceremonious, but characteristic pose, that Whistler made his portrait knees and elbows being well in evidence. An outsider seeing him thus would think (begging his pardon) that he was a very lazy man. Joseph Pennell a lazy man! Any one who thinks so still has evidently not read the preceding pages.

MR. PENNELL AS A PRINTER

New York has had several exhibitions of Mr. Pennell's works because we "believe in” them, and because we are sure that etchings of such fine quality should be recommended as being,

perhaps, the very best works of the kind which are available to art-lovers at a price which has not yet become excessive.

This article specially considers Mr. Pennell as the printer as well as the etcher of his own plates. No printer can print a good proof from a bad plate, but, per contra, a maladroit printer would surely spoil the effect of the finest etched plate in the world. Admitting this, it is certain that no man can know so well what the printed proof should be as does the artist himself. Every line of his picture was drawn with an artistic purpose a purpose of which only he himself has the secret; so that when we see a proof which has been printed by the hands of the original creative artist, whether we personally like it or not, we at least know that it is exactly what its maker had intended it to be.

Nine-tenths of all the famous engravings and etchings in existence have not been printed by the artist who made the plate, but by some professional printer. Such an intermediary must have great skill, but no matter how skilful he may be he can never enter into the exact purpose and intent of the artist who conceived and etched the original plate. The skilled mechanic can print ten or twenty proofs exactly alike in quality, a thing which the original artist cannot do. Every proof which the artist prints is, in a way, a new problem to him, and hence it is that such wide differences of effect and of quality are found in different proofs of the same plate

when they are printed by the artist himself. For this reason we see the importance to the intelligent collector of selecting just the proof which entirely satisfies him.

Three centuries ago Rembrandt was forced to become his own printer (and he never could suffer any one to witness the printing). Whistler, also, through his extreme fastidiousness, became his own printer; and the great tradition is carried on by Mr. Pennell. Some etchers and good ones must remain at the mercy of the professional printer, because they themselves can never acquire the handicraft skill to print their own plates. The printer's proofs may be excellent, but they can never equal in originality the proofs printed by the original artist, provided that he knows how to print.

No modern paper yields so good a proof as does fine hand-made paper, which has been mellowed in tone and texture by one or two centuries of age, and Mr. Pennell (who is a great traveler throughout Europe) has been most fortunate in accumulating a supply of the finest old paper.

To pass from the printing to the more important subject of the result of the printing, namely, the pictures themselves, it will be seen that inexhaustible London furnishes the subjects of most of the etchings. No sensitive person can live in London for long years without acquiring a real love for the greatest of all cities. Even its very uglinesses have their charm!