Page:The Etchings of Charles Meryon.djvu/11



No modern author could write on Meryon without acknowledging in the amplest terms, as I do, his indebtedness to M. Loys Delteil's monograph on this great etcher in his Peintre-Graveur Illustré (1907). The biography which precedes it, and the quotations which it gives from Baudelaire and Burty, and from Meryon's own comments on what Burty wrote about Meryon, make M. Delteil's volume much more than a catalogue. The other books that I have chiefly consulted are Burty's Catalogue of Meryon, translated by M. B. Huish (1879), and Aglaüs Bouvenne's "Notes et Souvenirs sur Charles Meryon" (1883.) I have had no access to original documents, except the chief documents of all, the etchings themselves, or to books not generally known; but there may be readers, perhaps, who will welcome a brief account in English of Meryon's career, an estimate of his rank as an etcher, and comments on all of his etchings that they have any need to know and admire. The originals of all the etchings reproduced in the plates, except the portrait by Bracquemond, are in the British Museum. 5 September, 1921. —Page 23, line 18 from top, for "February 4th" read "February 14th."