Page:The Etchings of Charles Meryon.djvu/14

 from the first. But on the whole his reception in France was cool and discouraging; academic opinion at the time was unfavourable to original etching. The editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts grudged admission to Burty's essay and asked, if two articles were to be devoted to a modern etcher, how many would be needed for Raphael. His Galerie Notre-Dame was refused by the Salon in 1853, and though many of his Paris etchings were exhibited there, they gained no prize. The public collections did not acquire his works and it was not till 1866 that Burty induced the Chalcographie Impériale at the Louvre to commission and publish one of his plates, L'Ancien Louvre, after Zeeman (plate 38). The stories told of the pitiful sums that he used to accept for proofs of his finest etchings, a franc and a half or two francs, sometimes, seem almost incredible now, when such proofs sell for hundreds of pounds. In a pathetic letter which he addressed in 1854 to the Minister of the Interior, appealing to him for the support which he could not obtain from the public, he announced his intention of producing a set of ten etchings of Bourges, and charging fifteen francs for the set. He actually sold the whole series of his masterpieces, "Eaux-fortes sur Paris," as a set, for twenty-five or thirty francs. They sold very slowly indeed. A receipt is extant from him for twenty-five francs paid by Baron Pichon in 1866, twelve years after the publication of the set, for "une suite de vues anciennes de Paris, gravées par moi à l'eau-forte, intitulées Eaux-fortes sur Paris."

It was not till 1910 that the first collective exhibition of Meryon's etched work was held in Paris, at the Galerie De-vambez. In England, where his fame was spread by Seymour Haden, Philip Gilbert Hamerton and Wedmore, Meryon's reputation grew more rapidly, at least after his death. The great French private collections of his etchings crossed the Channel, Burty's being sold in 1876, and the year 1879, eleven years after Meryon's death, witnessed the publication of two different English catalogues of his etchings and the holding of a fine exhibition of his etchings and drawings at the Burling-