concentration and a reticence requisite in no other art." And he goes on to say that, for these reasons, etching, of all arts, is the least suited to the half-educated artist. We have all, alas, seen too many demonstrations of the truth of this! I confess that in thus quoting from Seymour Haden's writings, I am putting my own efforts at a great disadvantage. The quotation stands out like the new patch in the old garment.

Admitting that Seymour Haden was a born artist, richly endowed with the creative faculty, how was it that he also became the superb technician that he is? This did not come to him by nature nor does it come to any one. It came to him through long, hard, earnest study and practise. He studied the best models - Rembrandt's etchings above all. He was never afraid to pay the necessary price for a faultless proof by Rembrandt. But even before he began to form his unsurpassed collection of the old masterpieces it was his custom to borrow a portfolio of such etchings from a London dealer whom I myself remember as a very old man, Mr. Love, of Bunhill Row, and carrying home such treasures he would sit up at night with them—not only delighting in their beauty, as other amateurs do, but also studying and analyzing the method and technic of each master. Then, after long practice in drawing, and with an intimate technical knowledge of the recognized masterpieces of etching, he himself began to etch.

Thereafter his hard-earned holidays in the

From the etching by Seymour Haden.

This is a splendid example of the artist's masterly drawing of tree-forms. Among modern etchers of landscape Sey

mour Haden easily ranks first.

From the etchings by Seymour Haden. These two etchings were done upon the same day and from the same place - one looking up and the other down the river Thames.

country were devoted to etching the beautiful English landscape. These plates were etched out of doors, on the spot, and generally at a single sitting.

If he had been one of the regular makers of pictures for sale, he would have first ascertained what sort of pictures the public were buying, and would then have tried to produce something to suit the market. Or else, knowing that the works of some artists were popular, he would have made an imitation of them. But, happily for art, every one of Seymour Haden's etchings, from first to last, was done in his own way, solely to please himself, and (except in the case of a very few of his later plates) with no view whatever to publicity or sale.

Indeed, he was thus producing masterpieces for nearly twenty years, when, at the instance of a few enlightened amateurs on the Continent of Europe, he finally consented, in 1865, to the publication of a selection of twenty-five of his plates.

These were published in Paris; for it was supposed that in England nobody would understand them. But when France set the example England eagerly followed, and the whole edition was very soon sold.

But notwithstanding this, in England thirty years ago taste in art was in a very sad condition generally. A picture, to please the public, had to be of a formal, prim, "goody-goody" character, and was expected to tell some sort of a pretty little story. The nobler attributes of

art

the imaginative, the suggestive, the really artistic qualities - were generally ignored. He who could most slavishly imitate the external form and texture of an object was the best artist. The great John Ruskin had nothing better to say of etching than that it was "a blundering art": and I well remember an elderly English painter saying to me, when denouncing the French school and all its works: "Even their very landscapes are immoral!" But, as General Grant once said, "a bad law is sure to work its own cure"; and the impulse toward a freer, more suggestive, more intellectual art came to England and to America mainly from France - and the French got it from such masters as Rembrandt. And yet it was at this very discouraging time that Seymour Haden and Whistler were producing those etchings that all the world now accepts as masterpieces. The earlier proofs of them only got into circulation through being given away by the artists; for at that time nobody would dream of buying a contemporary etching.

Truly the ancient Israelites were not the only people who first stoned their prophets and afterwards built sepulchers in their honor; and Whistler - a man who conciliates nobody-most pungently says to the critics who now lavish their praise on his London etchings of over forty years ago: "If they are so good now, why were they not also good when you first saw them?"

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I will conclude with a criticism on my own lecture!