Introduction to the Catalogue of an Exhibition made by the Grolier Club

FOR

painter

OR nearly four centuries the line engraver has gone hand in hand with the creative not actually making copies or replicas of his work, but translating it from the language of color into the language of black and white; and it is mainly because he is the reproducer and multiplier of the essential qualities of great paintings that we owe the engraver such a debt of recognition.

The great masterpiece of painting is a solitary aristocrat. Happy is the individual or the community that possess such a picture; meanwhile it is unavailable to the rest of mankind - but the engraving done from it is as available, familiar, and companionable as a printed book. Although but a frail sheet of paper it is more durable than any painting, and prevailing by its numbers it is in many cases the only remaining record of some precious original which has long since perished.

A very few of the great painters possessed the technical skill and the patience to engrave or etch their own designs; thus the line engravings of Albrecht Dürer and the etchings of Rembrandt

THE DOCTORS OF THE CHURCH

Size of the original print, 24 by 15 inches.

From the line-engraving by William Sharp (1749-1824), after the painting by Guido Reni. Engraved in 1785. The original painting, at the time of the engraving, was in the Houghton Gallery, but is now in the Imperial Gallery of St. Petersburg.

are incomparably finer than any reproductive work done by another hand could be; but in the great majority of cases the creative artist employed and directed the skilled engraver and fully understood the value of that subordinate art which multiplied and perpetuated his own original design.

Thus Raphael found and made a great engraver of Marcantonio Raimondi; Cornelis Cort worked in Titian's own house; Rubens formed and trained a notable band of engravers, and so did both Sir Joshua Reynolds and Turner. And these engravers (themselves consummate artists) soon learned to comprehend and to interpret, with special insight and skill, the style of the master who guided them.

Under these circumstances the common objection that such engravings are not "original" is quite out of place. When Marcantonio or Desnoyers engraves a picture by Raphael, no one wants originality on his part; Raphael supplies that; but what we do demand is absolute fidelity to his original. What would be thought of a literary man who, in rendering an ode of Horace or the Dies Iræ into English, would proceed to infuse some of his own "originality" into the translation?

If such institutions as the British Museum and the Paris Bibliothèque have zealously collected and preserved tens of thousands of line engravings, believing them to be veritable works of art, and worthy of the care that is devoted to them, it is evident that the limits of space in this gallery

render it impossible to do full justice to so wide a field. The intelligent specialist will certainly miss some of his favorite prints, and he may wonder at the absence from the catalogue of some of the famous names in engraving; but until the physical problem is solved whereby a pint vessel may be made to contain a quart or a gallon of liquid, he will doubtless make due allowance for such enforced omissions.

Raphael Morghen, one of the last of the great line engravers, died in 1833- and in the same decade Daguerre announced to the world the discovery of photography. Thereafter chemistry and sunlight have put an end to what Ruskin calls "the noble human labour of the engraver." He is no longer indispensable, as for centuries he was. Like Scott's superseded and forlorn Last Minstrel,

"He tunes to please a peasant's ear

The harp a king had loved to hear."

He "rests from his labors," yet "his works do follow him." The great engravers are dead, but the great engravings will never die.

All the charm which belongs to an object which is rare as well as beautiful inheres in the fine impressions of the best of the old line engravings. "Steel-facing" of copper plates was then unknown, and in the process of printing from the unprotected copper it very soon wore out. Hence really good impressions of these old engravings are of