Page:The Etchings of Charles Meryon.djvu/20

 taining the head, reduced from an etching which according to Meryon's own account was originally a half length, in which a violin and some chemical apparatus were introduced beside the sitter. It was an original etching, based on a drawing from life by Meryon himself.

All the other portraits are of much later date, one belonging to the year 1856, the rest to 1861 or 1862 (plate 47). None of them are original etchings; they are founded on drawings by others, old prints or photographs, in one case on a medallion by David d'Angers; they are quite insignificant and we shall have no need to mention them again. The other etchings of 1849-50 would have no interest for us if anyone else but Meryon had etched them. It is only the four oblong subjects of Paris and its vicinity after Zeeman that count for something more, because they show very plainly on what Meryon formed his taste, and anticipate, in the proportions and ordonnance of the plate and in the treatment of river boats and of the little figures on the banks of the Seine that we see in Le Pavillon de Mademoiselle and in La Rivière de Seine et l'angle du Mail, habits that we shall soon come to regard, when we consider the original etchings of Paris, as specially characteristic of Meryon himself.

THE ETCHINGS OF PARIS

But when we come to Le Petit Pont (plate 7), etched in the same year as these copies after Zeeman, and exhibited in the Salon of 1850, we are aware of quite a different vision, a different order of intellect, as well as greater perfection of technical skill. It is becoming difficult for us after the lapse of seventy years, in which so many other etchers have been working on Meryon's lines, to realise how new, how epoch-making in the strict sense of the word, was such an etching as Le Petit Pont in 1850. There had been fine engravers and etchers of architecture before Meryon; there had been Hollar, there had been Canale, Piranesi and Rossini. But they in their different degrees were facile and fluent, rhetorical, diffuse,