Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/408

 *ordinate value in the fashionable world of collectors. In comparison with the best work done with the graver, with the etching-needle, and with the scraper from the early days of the old masters down to Whistler and Seymour Haden, Mr. Timothy Cole, and Mr. Frank Short, the prices realised by colour prints show an unbalanced judgment, and it is to be hoped for the sake of all that is true and beautiful in Art that the bubble of colour-print collecting will soon be pricked. When Lady Hamilton as Nature after Romney, engraved in stipple by Meyer and printed in colour, realises four hundred and seventy guineas, when Hoppner's The Frankland Sisters, engraved by Ward, sells for £693, and the thirteen prints of Wheatley's Cries of London bring one thousand pounds, it is time to cry a halt. Of course there is no intrinsic value to be placed on any work of art. It is worth exactly what somebody cares to pay for it. Art, and especially art-dealing, is subject to the caprice of fashion. But a note of warning should be sounded to reach the ears of the ordinary man, that he may not embark on colour prints as an investment or even as a speculation, for the time cannot be far off when those interested persons who have so carefully "rigged the market" in colour prints will find their châteaux en Espagne tumbling about their ears.

A mezzotint in colour is a contradiction in terms. The mezzotint engravers themselves rejected the colour printer for their finest plates. Valentine Green absolutely refused to have any of his work printed in such manner. A coloured mezzotint is always a dangerous possession. Even in eighteenth