Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from French Etching From Meryon to Lep�re, Being a Lecture Delivered to the Print Collectors Club
Iiservice of the Maison Rousseau, which was decorated with a multitude of designs of fish, birds, ?owers and insects. They illustrate the Japanese in?uence which was just about then becoming fashionable in Paris, and has left its traces also in the art of Felix Buhot and of Jacquemart, that supreme master of another class of still life than Bracquemond's. Jacquemart was an incomparable etcher of porcelain and crystal, armour, bibelots and jewels; he was a connoisseur and a virtuoso whose skill is as undeniable as his enthusiasm and his taste. I am of opinion, however, that success in that kind of etching, however eminent, depends so much upon association of ideas, so much upon the intrinsic beauty and value of the original objects represented in the etchings, that it cannot make the same claim upon our admlration as the work of the painter etchers who are themselves creators of the idea and the com position which they etch. I shall not do more, therefore, than allude to the multitude of skilful reproductive etchers to whom France gave birth in the period with which I am dealing. I will name but a few of them, almost at random: Rajon, Flameng, brunet-debaines, Laguillermie, Waltner, Courtry, Gaujean; the vignettists Le Rat, Greux, Monzi�s, Lalauze, who worked chie?y on a smaller scale and were prolific in the illustration of books. These men had their vogue and success - in England, many of them, as well as in France but their day is over; the perfection of photogravure and other photo-mechanical processes drove their work out of the field, and I do not think that either the subjects on which they spent their energies or the degree of skill to which they attained give them a chance of ever obtaining such posthumous fame as is enjoyed by the vignettists, or the greater masters of engraving, of the eighteenth century.
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