Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/462

Rh 442 pure art of line-engraving reached its maturity. He retained much of the early Italian manner in his backgrounds, where its simplicity gives a desirable sobriety : but his figures are boldly modelled in curved lines, crossing each other in the darker shades, but left single iu the passages from dark to light, and breaking- away in fine dots as they approach the light itself, which is of pure white paper. A school of engraving was thus founded by Raphael, through Marcantonio, which cast aside the minute details of the early schools for a broad, harmonious treatment. We cannot here give a detailed account of the northern and southern schools of line-engraving, which, after Diirer and Marcantonio, developed themselves with great rapidity and were ennobled by many famous names, but although we cannot give lists of these, we may direct the student .to a school of engraving which marked a new development, The in- the group known as the engravers of Rubens. That great fluenceof pointer understood the importance of engraving as a means 3ns- of increasing his fame and wealth, and directed Vorster- man and others, as Raphael had directed Marcantonio. The theory of engraving at that time was that it ought not to render accurately the local colour of painting, which would appear wanting in harmony when dissociated from the hues of the picture ; and it was one of the anxieties of Rubens so to direct his engravers that the result might be a fine plate independently of what he had painted. To this end he helped his engravers by drawings, in which he sometimes went so far as to indicate what he thought Vorster- the best direction for the lines. Rubens liked Vorster- inan and ma n s work, and scarcely corrected it, a plate he especially pravers of a PP rove( l bsing Susannah and the Elders, which is a learned Rubens, piece of work well modelled, and shaded everywhere on the figures and costumes with fine curved lines, the straight line being reserved for the masonry. Vorsterman quitted Rubens after executing fourteen important plates, and was succeeded by Paul Pontius, then a youth of twenty, who went on engraving from Rubens with increasing skill until the painter s death. Boetius a Bolswert engraved from Rubens towards the close of his life, and his brother Schelte a Bolswert engraved more than sixty composi tions from Rubens, of the most varied character, including hunting scenes and landscapes. This brings us to the engraving of landscape as a separate study. Rubens treated landscape in a very broad comprehensive manner, and Schelte s way of engraving it was also broad and com prehensive. The lines are long and often undulating, the cross hatchings bold and rather obtrusive, for they often substitute unpleasant reticulations for the refinement and mystery of nature, but it was a beginning, and a vigorous beginning. The technical developments of engraving under the influence of Rubens may be summed up briefly as follows : 1. The Italian outline had been discarded as the chief subject of attention, and modelling had been Results substituted for it ; 2. Broad masses had been substituted of his in- f or t] ie minutely finished detail of the northern schools; tice * 3. A system of light and dark had been adopted which was not pictorial, but belonged especially to engraving, which it rendered (in the opinion of Rubens) more harmonious. The history of line-engraving, from the time of Rubens to the beginning of the 19th century, is rather that of the vigorous and energetic application of principles already accepted than any new development. From the two sources we have already indicated, the school of Raphael and the school of Rubens, a double tradition English flowed to England and France, where it mingled and and directed English and French practice. The first influence _, . O on English line engraving was Flemish, and came from fmfvUig Rubens through Vandyke, Vorsterman, and others ; but the English engravers soon underwent French and Italian influences, for although Payne learned from a Fleming, Faithorne studied in France under the direction of Philippe de Champagne the painter, and Robert Nanteuil the engraver. Sir Robert Strange studied in France under Sti Philippe Lebas, and then five years in Italy, where he saturated his mind with Italian art. French engravers came to stay and work in England as they went to study in Italy, so that the art of engraving became in the 18th century a cosmopolitan language. In figure-engraving the outline was less and less insisted upon. Strange made it his study to soften and lose the outline. Mean while, the great classical Renaissance school, with Gerard Audran at its head, had carried forward the art of model- Au ling with the burin, and had arrived at great perfection of a sober and dignified kind. Audran was very productive in the latter half of the 17th century, and died in 1703, after a life of severe self-direction in, labour, the best external influence he underwent being that of the painter Nicolas Poussin. He made his work more rapid by the use of etching, but kept it entirely subordinate to the work of the burin. One of the finest of his large plates is St John Baptizing, from Poussin, with groups of dignified figures in the foreground and a background of grand classical landscape, all executed with the most thorough knowledge according to the ideas of that time. The influence of Claude Lorrain on the engraving of land- inf scape was exercised less through his etchings than his of pictures, which compelled the engravers to study delicate ^ a distinctions in the values of light and dark. In this way, through Woollet and Yivares, Claude exercised an influence on landscape engraving almost equal to that of Raphael and Rubens on the engraving of the figure, though he did not, like those painters, direct his engravers personally. In the 19th century line-engraving has received both Lir an impulse and a check, which by many is thought to S ra be its death blow. The impulse came from the growth in | of public wealth, the increasing interest in art and the cen increase in the commerce of art, which now, by means of of engraving, penetrated into the homes of the middle classes, as well as from the growing demand for illustrated books, which have given employment to engravers of first- rate ability. The check to line-engraving has come from the desire for cheaper and more rapid methods, a desire satisfied in various ways, but especially by etching and by the various kinds of photography. Nevertheless, the 19th century has produced most highly accomplished work in line-engraving, both in the figure and in land scape. Its characteristics, in comparison with the work Clia of other centuries, are chiefly a more thorough and delicate tori rendering of local colour, light and shade, and texture. of The elder engravers could draw as correctly as the ^ moderns, but they either neglected these elements or admitted them sparingly, as opposed to the spirit of their art. If you look at a modern engraving from Landseer, you will see the blackness of a gentleman s boots (local colour), the soft roughness of his coat (texture), and the exact value in light and dark of his face and costume against the cloudy sky. Nay more, you will find every sparkle on bit, boot, and stirrup. Modern painting pays more attention to texture and chiaroscuro than classiculpaint- ing did, so engraving has followed in the same directions. But there is a certain sameness in pure line-engraving which is more favourable to some forms and textures than to others. This sameness of line-engraving, and its costli- Mix ness, have led to the adoption of mixed methods, which met are extremely prevalent in modern commercial prints from popular artists. In the well-known prints from Rosa Bonheur, -for example, by T. Landseer, H. T. Ryall, and C. G. Lewis, the tone of the skies is got by machine-ruling, and so is much undertone in the landscape ; the fur of the animals is all etched, nnd so are the foreground plants,