Yale University Library 39002005072666 i. m ^ETCHING* ' ENGLAND WEDMORE BY R RED. Z '/. 9 m k YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FORMED BY James Abraham Hillhouse, B.A. 1749 James Hillhouse, B.A. 1773 James Abraham Hillhouse, B.A. 1808 James Hillhouse, B.A. 1875 Removed 1942 from the Manor Souse in Sachem's Wood GIFT OF GEOBGE DUDLEY SEYMOUB, Etching in England TURNER. ' TWICKENHAM. Etching in England by Frederick Wedmore With 50 Illustrations London George Bell and Sons 1895 CHISWICK PRESS :— CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON. PREFACE. T READ, the other day, in a note of * • Abraham Hayward's to his translation of11 Faust," how Schlegel wrote of Goethe — to M. de Rdmusat, — "II naimait guere a donner des explications, et Una jamais voulu faire des prefaces." It would not be seemly, perhaps, that in the present volume of brief historical and critical record, I should endeavour to imitate so august a silence. Twenty-seven years have passed since one of the most interesting and judicial of English writers upon Fine Art published the book which did amongst us the service of popularising, in some degree at least, the knowledge of Etching. The craft of the aquafortist has, since then, become a medium of expression generally accepted, if not precisely understood ; and the half- educated young woman of our period, far from considering the art of whose achieve ments I treat, as " a form of elegant pen- drawing" {as she did in Mr. Hamerton's b viii PREFACE. first days), is likely perhaps to hold — with " Carry" in my own little story — that there is " nothing in the world so artistic as a very large etching." The public, if it has not become properly instructed in the technique of Etching, has at least had the opportunity of becoming so. Hence I have conceived it to be no part of my btisiness to discourse much upon methods. For them the reader may turn now, not only to Mr. Hamerton, but to Sir Seymour Haden, with his great praclical experience, his native endowments, and his finely trained taste; to Mr. Herkomer, with his frank and interesting personal record; to M. Maxime Lalanne ; to Mr. Frank Short — but the list is too long for me to attempt to exhaust it. What is done here — and done I think for the first time — is to devote a book to the survey, not of good etched work generally, nor of all etched work— all popular etched work — wrought in England, but of such work as has been wrought in England of the finer and truer kind. That has led to many omissions ; for, in the last generation and before it, people were popular — as many are to-day — who were clever draughtsmen, perhaps, but bad etchers. It has led, too, PREFACE. ix to many inclusions— inclusions not possible to Mr. Hamerton. Much of the best work done in England has been done since he wrote ; and a little excellent work, done long before he wrote, he happened to pass over. This present book, then, is devoted to the best English art. It treats of the foreigner only when he has laboured much in our land, or — / am thinking perhaps of M. Helleu — has at least been much associated with it. It includes necessarily a great American — Mr. Whistler — who was amongst its for more than thirty years — and a man of French birth who has been half his life with us — M. Legros. The art of Etching is not, it may be, like the art of Water-Colour, essentially English; but I suppose that nowhere more than here has it been practised with excellence and with legitimate variety. And this I say with the full knowledge that the, achievements of Rembrandt have made Holland classic ground for ever for the lover of Etching, and that the history of that art in France includes two names, at least, which are inevitably illustrious — Mdryoris nan^e and Tacquemarfs. F. W. LONDON: October, 1895. CONTENTS. PAGE I. Two Classes of Etching i II. Turner 3 III. Girton 6 IV. WlLKIE 10 V. Geddes 14 VI. Crome 20 VII. COTMAN 22 VIII. Samuel Palmer 26 IX. James McNeil Whistler 30 X. Sir Seymour Haden 45 XI. Alphonse Legros 62 XII. William Strang 71 XIII. Charles Holroyd 87 XIV. Frank Short 95 XV. C. J. Watson 103 XVI. Oliver Hall 115 XVII. Colonel Goff 119 XVIII. D. Y. Cameron 137 XIX. Joseph Pennell . . . .' 140 XX. Mortimer Menpes 144 XXI. L. Raven-Hill 148 XXII. R. W. Macbeth, Hubert Herkomer, R.A., and Axel Haig 152 XXIII. Some Other Etchers 159 XXIV. Helleu 172 ILLUSTRATIONS.1 I. TWICKENHAM {Frontispiece) .... Turner 2. Seine Bridge Girtin 3. The Receipt Wilkie 4. Peckham Rye Geddes 5. Halliford on Thames „ 17 6. Near Whitby Cotman 7. The Herdsman Samuel Palmer 8. Thames Police Whistler 9. The Piazzetta ,, 10. Tree Study Seymour Haden 43 11. Thomas Haden, after Wright of Derby Seymour Haden 47 12. Kidwelly Town 13. A Water Meadow 14. Windmill Hill 15. Scotch Firs 16. Communion dans l'Eglise St PAGE 7 11IS 232733 39 49 53 SS 59 Medard Legros 63 17. La Mort et le Bucheron ... „ 67 18. The Potato Basket . . . William Strang 73 19. The Bookstall „ „ 75 20. Lord Justice Lindley ... „ „. ^y 21. Midnight Mass, Monte Oliveto Charles HolroyS 81 1 In nearly every case the illustration is more or less reduced from the original. XIV ILLUSTRATIONS. Frank Short C.J. Watson Oliver Hall 22. Farm behind Scarborough Charles Holroyd 23. Round Temple „ „ 24. Wrought Nails 25. Sleeping till the Flood 26. Quarter Boys 27. Mill Bridge, Bosham 28. St. Etienne du Mont 29. Landscape with Trees 30. Roadside Trees 31. Trees on the Hill-side 32. The Edge of the Forest 33. Chain Pier, Brighton 34. Norfolk Bridge, Shoreham 35. Pine Trees, Christchurch 36. Border Towers D, 37. The Palace, Stirling Castle 38. Windmills, Zandaam 39. Le Puy en Velay 40. Japanese Girls 41. Wandle River 42. GWENYDD 43. The Open Window 44. At the Loom 45. Dorking 46. Sunrise in Wales . 47. A Hurrying Wind 48. Etude de Jeune Fille 49. Femme a la Tasse 50. Le Salon Blanc 83 85 89 919399 101 107 109 in "3 Colonel Goff 117 123 127 Y. Cameron 131133135 Joseph Pennell 141 . . . Menpes 145 L. Raven-Hill 149 Herkomer 153 Elizabeth Armstrong 157 Minna Bolingbroke 161 Percy Thomas 163 W. Holmes May 167 Alfred East 169 Helleu 173 177 181 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. i. TWO CLASSES OF ETCHING. A S in France and America, so, very specially, in England, the produc tions of the etcher have to be divided broadly into two classes, one of which is the result mainly of a commercial demand, and the other, of an artistic impulse. The etcher whose employment of the etching-needle is confined wholly, or confined in the main, to the work of realizing and translating the conceptions of another, is, like the repro ductive line-engraver, or the reproductive engraver in mezzotint, little more than the dexterous instrument which carries another's message. So artistic is his process, when it is properly used, that it is preferable indeed that he be himself an artist as well as a craftsman — it is indeed essential that he shall have some measure of artistic feeling, as well as the flexibility of the executant. B 2 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. But our demands upon him stop, in any case, at a comparatively early point ; and we find him more or less sharply cut off in our minds, and in our estimation, from the artist who, when he employs the etching- needle, is occupied with the spontaneous expression of his own thought and fancy — of the particular things of beauty and of interest which may strike him on his way through the world. II. TURNER. OF fine original etchers within the con fines of these realms, Turner was almost the first to appear. He was the senior, considerably, of Wilkie and Geddes, who will have to be spoken of soon after him. During twelve years of his " early middle " period — between 1807 and 1819 — he wrought what were in some respects im portant etchings upon something like seventy plates. But his etchings differed in aim, as well as in execution, from almost all the others I shall speak of in this brief general survey of the achievements, here in England, of the etcher's art. They did so partly by reason of the fact that it was never intended that they should be complete in themselves. They laid the basis of an effect which had to be completed by the employment of another art. They did hardly more than record — though always with an unequalled power and an unerring skill — the leading lines of those great landscape compositions 4 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. which the mezzotint of the engraver (and the engraver was often Turner himself) en dowed with light and shade and atmosphere. For it was by a union of these two arts that that noble publication was produced whose business it was to surpass in variety and subtlety the " Liber Veritatis " of Claude. It is very possible that in some of the plates of his " Liber Studiorum," Turner did not undertake the " biting-in," with acid, of those subjects whose draughtsman ship was his own. Probably he did in all the best of them. In an etching, the strength and the perfection of the result — the relation of part to part — is dependent so much on the biting. It is hardly conceivable that where the etchings of the " Liber Studi orum " strike us as most noble, they were not wholly — in biting as well as in draughts manship — Turner's own. They differ much in merit, apart, I think, from the necessary difference in interest which arises from the opportunity given by one subject and denied by another for the exercise of an etcher's skill. They have gener ally, within their proper limits, perfect free dom of handling, and an almost incompar able vigour, and a variety which liberates their author from^any charge of mannerism. There are few of them which could not hold their own with any plate of Rembrandt's done under conditions sufficiently resemb- TURNER. 5 ling theirs. The etching of the " Severn and Wye," or the etching of " St. Catherine's Hill, Guildford," is carried very nearly as far as the etching of the " Cottage with White Palings," and with a result very nearly as delightful and distinguished. And in regard to the average etching of Turner, it may fairly be said that a hand put in to pluck out of a portfolio by chance any one of the seventy, would discover that it held a print which was at least the equal of that one of Rembrandt's with which it is fairest of all to compare it — a print of Rembrandt's done, like Turner's, for " leading lines " alone — I mean the famous little tour de force, the " Six's Bridge." So much for the greatness of our English master. I pass from him with this re minder, given again for final word. Won derful as is his etching for selection of line, wonderful for firmness of hand, we must never allow ourselves to forget that it was not intended to present, that it was not intended to be in any way concerned with, the whole of a picture. 1 III. GIRTIN. THE limitations which we have marked in Turner's aim in Etching, are to be noticed just as clearly in the aim of Girtin. Nay, they are to be noticed yet more. For while Turner not infrequently gave em phasis to his work by the depth and vigour of his bitten line, Girtin, in his few and rare etchings — which, it is worth while- to re member,- just preceded Turner's — sought only to establish the composition and the outline. He did this with a skill of selec tion scarcely less than Turner's own, and admirable, almost as in his water-colour work, is the quiet sobriety of his picturesque record. But though Girtin's etchings — many soft-ground, and about twenty — may con tain some lessons for the craftsman, some indeed for the artist, they are scarcely for the portfolios of the collector. They were wrought, all of them, towards the end of Girtin's life, that was cut short in 1802, GIRTIN. 'A SEINE BRIDGE. GIRTIN. , 9 when he was twenty-nine years old. They were the preparations for his aquatinted plates of Paris, against which in their com pleted form there is only this to be said — that the avoidance, generally, of any attempt at atmospheric effects, involves a seeming monotony of treatment, though as dignified visions of old Parisian architecture, of Pa risian landscape, so to speak, in its habitual setting of wide sky and noble river, they have never been surpassed, and very seldom equalled. The vision of Girtin, it must always be remembered — whatever be his work — is not emphatically personal. With all his charm and breadth and dignity, something of the pure architectural draughtsman lingered to the end, in his labour. He had no parti pris about the facts : no bias we forgive, no prejudice we welcome. He sought to represent simply the " view," although no doubt the "view" was generally bettered by his artistry. IV. WILKIE. A FAMOUS Scotchman, David Wilkie, and his very distinguished friend and fellow-countryman, Andrew Geddes, wrought, each of them, in the middle period of Turner's life, a certain number of etch ings of independent merit. Those of Sir David Wilkie, which were but few, happen to be the best known, because Wilkie, much more than Geddes, was a leader of painting. But, meritorious as are the etchings of Wilkie, in their faithful record of character and picturesque effect, they are seldom as admirable as the prints of his less eminent brother. They have, generally, not so much freedom ; and, while they follow great traditions less, they are at the same time less individual. " Pope Examining a Censer " has the dignity of the designer and the draughtsman, but not much of the etcher's particular gift. "The Receipt" — or " A Gentleman Searching in a Bureau," DAVID WILKIE. 'THE RECEIPT." WILKIE. 13 for this second title explains the subject better — is the most successful of Wilkie's. It is characteristic of his simpler and less ambitious genre, and is indeed faultless, and more than faultless — charming. V. GEDDES. ANDREW GEDDES etched fourorfive times as many plates as Wilkie. He issued ten from Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, in 1826. The dates on some of them are 181 2, 18 16, and 1822 ; and, besides these ten that were published, about thirty more, which there was no attempt to issue to the world, have to be taken account of. Some, like the excellent " Portrait of the Painter's Mother " — which is so fine in illumination, in drawing, and in character — are directly suggested by the artist's paintings. Others — including all the land scapes — are, apparently, studies from Nature, done with a singular appreciation of the ripest art of Rembrandt. Geddes was very sensible of the charm of dry-point — of its peculiar quality of giv ing individuality to each one of the few impressions which you may safely produce from it, and of its unique capacity for rendering broad effects of light and shade. --„ , jW.o'&s.^. ANDREW GEDDES. "AT PECKHAM RYE." ANDREW GEDDES. 'AT HALLIFORD ON THAMES.' GEDDES. 19 The " Peckham Rye " shows this. Nothing can show it better. And there is at least one other plate by Geddes, " Halliford on Thames," which proves him just as com pletely a master of elegance and grace of line as " Peckham Rye " shows him a decisive master of masculine effect, and curiously adept in the broad and balanced disposition of masses of light and shade. Geddes's work will not decline in value, and the connoisseur has no business what ever to forget or to ignore it. Only, if he collects the dry-points of Geddes, he had better wait for years, if necessary, for early impressions of them, and he had better re pudiate altogether the unsatisfactory modern edition — the worthy Mr. David Laing's volume, "Etchings by Wilkie and Geddes," issued, with the best intentions in the world, in Edinburgh in 1875. D VI. CROME. IT is the splendid work of Crome among the Norfolk coppices — among the fields studded here and there with cattle, but chiefly in the tangle of the wood, or where the wood-path winds under the rustic pal ings, and then through undergrowth, and out into the rising meadow, to be lost at last, a thread against the horizon sky — it is this splendid tree-work, large, massive, intricate, pictorial, never narrowly faithful alone, that gives interest and value to Crome's series of etchings. He did them mostly in the last years of his life (which closed in 1821), and it was always for pleasure and remembrance that he wrought them. Publication he cannot have in tended, for he never did enough to be recognized a master while he lived, and his etched subjects gave him memoranda for his pictures, and were little records of places that he loved. Their merits came slowly to be known CROME. 21 by some few ; and the etchings, carelessly printed and ill-bitten, were given, here and there, by Crome to his friends. In 1834, his widow, I am told, issued an edition, which must have been very small, and four years later they came again in a measure before the lovers of Norfolk art, re-bitten by one Mr. Ninham, re-touched by one Mr. Edwards of Bungay, and issued with a short biography by Mr. Dawson Turner — a volume which may still be stumbled on at the booksellers. These later states are of slight artistic value. They tell us little of Crome which we may not know much better from other sources he has furnished, and much of their work is not Crome's at all. The early states are, at least, " signed all over " by him. Amateurish enough in bit ing and in printing, they are yet pleasant, characteristic records. "At Bawburgh," and "Near Hingham" (dated 1813), and "At Woodrising" are some of those that one would like to cherish : and cherished they ought to be, for the reasons I have named. Yet to put them beside even less admirable works which have enjoyed the ordinary conditions of fair presentation — the biting adequate, the printing careful, and the paper good — is to see them, of necessity, at a disadvantage. VII. COTMAN. COTMAN'S etchings— soft ground, for the most part — are scarcely for the average collector, any more than Crome's. No one, I mean, puts them carefully in the cabinet, or, with reverence, in the shrine and sanctuary of the solander box ; but, in book-form, they stand, and should stand, on the shelves of some lovers of Art. One not unwieldy volume — that " Liber Studi orum," which, in the year 1838, Cotman brought - together, not perhaps without thought of Turner's accomplished triumph — contains two score or so of plates which show much, not only of Cotman's capacity as a draughtsman, but of his genius for ideal composition, of his faculty for dignity of line, and for so disposing masses of light and shade that they should be not only significant, but impressive. It is here seen that this glorious and original colourist could dispense with colour and yet be fine and individual. Yet, as achievements in HOo COTMAN. 25 the art of Black-and-White, no careful student could place them in line with the plates of the admitted masters of etching. They have not often the subtlety of technique which, allied of course with fineness of con ception, is the very sign of the master. Still, they are too good to be passed by in silence. And they are a great man's work. VIII. SAMUEL PALMER. SAMUEL PALMER— an English clas sic, by this time, as a painter of water- colours — made (from the year 1850, or thereabouts, onward to his old age in the seventies) a limited number of elaborate etchings in which the play of line is almost wholly lost : more lost, much more lost, than in the etchings of Metyon. But Samuel Palmer, like Metyon, was a great poetic artist. Slowly he built up his effects, his noble sunrise or sunset landscapes — the landscape of artistic convention and poetic vision. The unity and strength of his thought was never sacrificed or frittered by the elaboration of his labour. To con demn him then, because he was not a free sketcher, would be as pedantic as to con demn Metyon. Nay more, were any such pedantic condemnation meted out to him, it would have to be meted out to the author of the " Ephraim Bonus " in his turn ; since it is a characteristic of Rembrandt, that in < SPHM wMH oi Ws < ijH t>Sr£ rtj! ¦ Xawftjj not- $Ll /ftar our w)^l"ctj m.qb'an ^^^¦^mHHn — „--.,*.- ..-¦.:¦.._. FRANK SHORT. QUARTER BOYS." XIV. FRANK SHORT. AMONGST the original etchers remain ing to be discussed I place Frank Short almost at the top of the tree. Some people will say that Short's true place would be with copyists or interpreters rather ; but that is only because they do not know his original work — the very limited issue of his original plates having withheld from them a publicity won already indeed by many of his brilliant interpretations of the pictures or the drawings of long-accepted artists. No one — not even Mr. Wehrschmidtor Mr. Gerald Robinson — has done as much as Frank Short for the modern revival of mezzotint. It is more perhaps by mezzo tint than by any other medium that Mr. Short has effected his delightful translations of Turner, of Constable, of Dewint, and of Watts. But if not one of these things existed — if he had never wrought* those exquisite interpretations, for example, of a sketch by Constable, belonging to Mr. Henry Vaughan, and of a Dewint drawing, 96 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. "A Road in Yorkshire "—if nothing of this work whatever had been done by Mr. Short, then would he still have cause to be remem bered and valued by reason of the beauty and the technical virtues of his original prints. Frank Short's original prints are, indeed, of all the greater merit because, just as Mr. Whistler himself, he has disregarded in them, from beginning to end, the taste of the everyday public. This delicate array of exquisite etching — very little of it merely tentative; most of it of complete accomplish ment, if of limited aim — has been called into being, as Mozart said of his " Don Giovanni," " for himself and two friends." The " two friends " must be taken — one need hardly protest — cum grano satis; they represent the rare connoisseur, the infre quent person who enjoys and understands. Two classes of subjects have hitherto to a great extent engrossed Mr. Frank Short in his original work, and to these there must now be added a third ; for within the last year or so, following in the wake of his friend Mr. C. J. Watson, he has visited the land of Rembrandt, and has done charm ingly suggestive and vivacious sketches of quaint town and long-stretched shore. But the two classes of subject with which one has been wont to identify him are sub jects of the English coast and of the English FRANK SHORT. 97 manufacturing districts ; and, in a certain sense, even these two subjects are one, and this One theme may be described — not too imaginatively, I think, if we look into the heart of the matter — as the complete accep tance of all that is considered unpicturesque in modern life : in the manufacturing dis tricts, the factory chimneys, the stunted, smoke-dried trees, the heavy skies, the dreary level water, along which barges make their monotonous way (see the in teresting dry-point, " Wintry Blast on the Stourbridge Canal "), and, on the English ¦ ¦ coast, the massive stone pier, the harbour muddy at low tide, the tug, the sheds, the warehouses, or it may be perhaps the wooden fences that protect and preserve the fore shore — the beauty of the whole, which is unquestionable, being obtained by a par ticularly subtle arrangement of line, a per fect sense of proportion, a perfect delicacy * V of handling. Coarser people, of more ordinary vision, addressing themselves, as by a parti pris, to these themes, have treated them with brutality. But, on these themes, it is the distinction of the treat ment of Mr. Short that in rendering them with fidelity and patience — even with love — he yet somehow, in the brief phrase of Robert Browning — " Put colour, poetising." 98 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. Yes, a certain measure of poetry must certainly be claimed not only for the " Evening, Bosham " and the " Sleeping till the Flood," but for the "Stourbridge Canal," which has been mentioned already, and for the print of "Rye's Long Pier" — this is called indeed, poetically enough in its suggestiveness, " Low Tide and the Evening Star" — and for the curiously clever little plate, "Wrought Nails," a scene of the Black Country, which shows the sheds of the workers, and little trees untended and decaying, and a bit of waste land, ragged and dreary, with nothing of Nature left, but only the evidence of men's grimy labours, of their hard, monotonous life. And, though up to the present, or until very lately, the field of Mr. Short's own observation of the world may seem to have been limited, it is plain to any qualified student of his prints that he has gained the effects he wanted by a fine sketcher's economy of means, by. a thorough capacity of draughtsmanship, much sense of design, and a very exceptional control over the technical resources of the etcher's art. C. J. WATSON. "MILL BRIDGE, BOSHAM," ti— ! ¦ ' 'sate ^Ifc 'S^?^^^pfeifV^ ¦p|p8ipi|feii| ItMnil' >!i if #SPTfe7u™|iiii gpi C. J. WATSON. ' ST. ETIENNE-DU-MONT." XV. C. J. WATSON. THE work of Mr. C. J. Watson is nearly always absolutely sturdy and sterling. It has tended, too, to become delicate ; and when one compares it with Mr. Short's, very likely the only thing which puts it at an obvious disadvantage is that (though one can hardly explain the matter) it has an air of being less personal. That, I admit, is no small affair. Judging from the work alone — and no one would desire to make the comparison except from the work only — one would say, " Here is a strong and capable hand, stirred to expression by a nature much less sensitive than that which reveals itself in the etched lyrics of Frank Short." Mr. Short records facts — not great and doleful dreams, like Mr. Strang or Mr. Legros — but he records facts poetically. More absolutely matter-of-fact is Mr. Wat son, who (I am speaking of him, of course, apart from his agreeable gift of .colour) so far portrays things realistically that the 104 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. personal, the individual, is comparatively absent, and his art can hardly be described in the phrase which does define Art generally — Nature beheld "a travers d'un tempera ment." But Mr. Watson, who has long been interesting, has of late years become within certain limits a first-rate craftsman, albeit still a little wanting in vivacity. It may be that his individuality — such individuality as he possesses — has to be sought for in the soundness of his technique, and in the ripe judgment which he shows in treating sub jects which at least are true etcher's subjects. Practising his art during early manhood in Norwich, and being himself, with his sturdy realism, as it were, a last echo of that " Norwich School " in which only Cotman was essentially and primarily poet — and Cotman could be realistic, too — Mr. Watson came, a few years since, to London, and here he has developed his powers a stage further, there is no doubt ; producing, in the first instance — since his residence in town, with its wider associations and its greater activities — plates admirable for directness and certainty, such as "The Mill Bridge, Bosham,"and then the" Chartres," its gabled and dilapidated houses, rather ; the back of Chartres — Chartres on the wrong side — and then the " St. Etienne du Mont," its west front — that is, the front of one of the most C. J. WATSON. 105 curious and characteristic of the churches of Paris — and then the " Ponte del Cavallo," a refined, if scarcely individual vision of Venice. Some greater delicacy and flexibility of method than were before possessed, or than were even desirable, perhaps, for the sub jects to which Mr. Watson in his earlier days addressed himself, are evident in the " Chartres ; " but they are yet more marked in the "St. Etienne" etching, which no true lover, no properly equipped student, of the achievements of the great original aquafortists will be able to examine without some thought of the wonderful plate of Metyon which bears the same title. Of the relative correctness of the two presenta tions — not, in my opinion, an all-important, though still an interesting matter — I will say nothing, or at least very little ; possibly it was Watson who had looked the hardest at the actual facade of which it was his one business to convey the impression. Still, the immense solidity of Metyon's etching gives it a realism as much its own as is all the wealth of its poetry. The very simpli fication of the facts must have been de liberate, and it accomplished its end. It would be ridiculous to suggest , that a draughtsman of architecture so patient and thorough as Metyon, could not have set forth each detail, as well as the general 106 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. character, had it been his aim. He had other aims, and this detail accordingly had to be at times subordinated ; for him there was not the church alone, but the College de Montaigu and the corner of the Panthdon, and the weird shadows and the passing women, and the dark mystery of the Paris street. In a word, there was his genius and his message — fancy or fantasy. For Mr. Watson there was " land, the solid and safe," as Mr. Browning moralizes ; the solid earth, or what the architect had put there-— nothing else. And what the architect had put there Mr. Watson noticed — portrayed it with strength — portrayed it, too, as after wards the " Ponte del Cavallo," with perhaps unwonted flexibility. In simpler subjects than the "St. Etienne du Mont " Mr. Watson shows as well as, or better, than there, a quality very charac teristic of the truest of modern etchers — of Mr. Whistler and Mr. Short particularly — I mean, in what is more or less architectural draughtsmanship, after all, an enjoyment of the evidences of construction. Very likely it may be said that that is a quality belong ing to him as a good draughtsman, whether, at the moment etching happens to be, or happens not to be, the medium of his work. I think not. There is something in the etched line that reveals especially the pre sence of this enjoyment — that calls for the certain display of it. OLIVER HALL. LANDSCAPE WITH TREES. r OLIVER HALL. "ROADSIDE TREES." OLIVER HALL. "trees on the hill-side." OLIVER HALL. 'THE EDGE OF THE FOREST.' XVI. OLIVER HALL. MR. OLIVER HALL, a young and, until lately, a comparatively little- known but a distinctly interesting and strongly gifted etcher (who paints, he tells me, a good deal in water-colour), has next to be spoken of; and if his work has one characteristic more than another— though grace and freedom are its characteristics too — the one that is most its own is the continual evidence his plates afford of his enjoyment of growth and building up — his pleasure in the traces of the way by which the object before him became the object that it is. Mr. Hall's object is more likely to be a tree than a church. Architecture he does not attack, and his rare figures are but the figures of the landscape-painter. He labours amongst sylvan and amongst pastoral scenes that are not strikingly pic turesque ; and in method, as well as often in theme, he suggests Seymour Haden. Mr. Hall has not yet wrought very many M Ii6 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. plates ; they number, it may be, two score. He is not, in his work, always faultless, and perhaps he is not thus far very varied. But he is in the right track, and has shown no disposition to leave it. He has done beau tiful things — the " Coniston Hall " one of the finest of them. He is a vigorous, frank, free sketcher, often sketching " effects," as well as forms that vanish less quickly ; and, in the realm of effects, the very spirited etch ing, "A Windy Day," is perhaps the best of that which he has done. It is a scene on Angerton Moss, a stretch of open country rising to the right ; the scattered trees and clustered farm buildings on the horizon line ; and they are wind-swept, and wind is in the sky. COLONEL GOFF. 'CHAIN PIER, BRIGHTON. XVII. GOFF. THE two contemporary etchers who in terest me most, among those I have not had occasion, yet, to write of, are two men unlike, perhaps, in nearly everything except in their possession of the essential quality of impulse — I mean the Frenchman, Monsieur P. Helleu, and our fellow-country man, Colonel Goff. No — when I said they were unlike in nearly everything but the essential quality of impulse, that was clearly an exaggeration. Another thing they have in common besides impulsiveness of temperament and sponta neity of effort — a love of beautiful and of free "line." Goff will show that in his studies of the hillside, of the shore, of foli age, of the tall grasses of the water-meadow, and of the winding stream ; Helleu will show it in his studies of the mosUmodern humanity, of the " Parisienne de Paris" — all that is most completely of the capital, subtle, refined, over-refined — but with how 120 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. extenuating an elegance ! — or, now again, of the young grace of well-bred girlhood, as in a certain " Etude de Jeune Fille," with its wonderful union of Nineteenth-Century vividness with the grace of Reynolds or Gainsborough. And yet one other thing belongs to them in common — to these two men whose work presents, most certainly, in method as in subject, many a point of contrast. Both, being artists essentially,' rather than merely skilled practitioners in a particular medium, swear no unbroken con stancy to the art of the etcher — cannot avoid the keen perception and keen enjoyment of those " effects " and combinations for which it is not etching that affords the readiest or most appropriate means of record. And accordingly we have from Monsieur Helleu, pastels ; from Colonel Goff, water-colour, wash heightened with pen-work, or pencil drawings, marked sometimes with a strong accent, at others blond and suave as silver- point itself. Third-rate professional artists, and idle folk, or folk so busy that they have not had time to notice what good work has been done in Etching, and who it is that has done it, will at once discount Colonel Goff's labours because I call him "Colonel." But when I declare that he is, in the character of his work and in the fidelity and enthu siasm with which for years he has pursued GOFF. 121 it, no more of an "amateur" than is Sir Seymour Haden, he will be, I trust, even by the most commonplace of judges, forgiven the accident of military rank — his greatest crime being, after all, only that of having served in the Coldstream Guards. The" offence may be condoned. Or, to speak seriously, I believe that military discipline, like the training of a surgeon bent on excel lence in his own art, is, in truth, only an ad vantage. The strenuousness, the thorough ness, of good professional work, whether it be done in barrack or in hospital, in a city man's office or in the study of a writer, gives -some guarantee of at all events the spirit in which the new work, the pictorial work, will be undertaken — a guarantee lacking in the case of the small professional painter, whose discipline in the arts of Life I must account to have been generally less complete. Yes, it is only fair to distinguish, when we talk about the " amateur " — and no one has less tolerance for the feeble amateur than I have — it is necessary to distinguish between the mind of the dilettante, of the idler, of the wishy-washy person who, from the high realms of an unbroken self-satisfaction, con descends occasionally to an art, and the mind of the trained and exact, and therefore of presumably the strenuous. Ten years of frequent "joyful labour"— Macduff's inestimable phrase — in the art of 122 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. Etching have resulted in making Colonel Goff the author of some seventy plates, of which, to the outsider at least, the first cha racteristic will seem to be, the range and variety of their themes. The key to this lies in the sensitiveness of the artist, in his width of appreciation, in his reasonable enjoyment of scenes and subjects that have little in common, that present the piquancy of change. It is only figure-subjects proper that have scarcely ever been attempted by him ; but in landscape, in marines, in town subjects, in subjects which involve now the expression of the passion of Nature, now the frankest introduction of every kind of modern detail of construction that is sup posed to be ugly, and that the sentimental brushman declares to be " unpaintable," Goff is thoroughly at home. Next to mere prettiness or " strikingness," what the public likes best in Landscape Art is not the record of Landscape's happy acci dent or of its intricate and balanced line, but the intelligible presentation of natural effects. That probably is why, among Goff's etchings, the "Summer Storm in the Itchen Valley " has thus far been the most popular. And certainly the public choice in this in stance lighted upon work that was admir able and accomplished, spontaneous and effective — work not a little akin to that in Seymour Haden's admirable " Water- .>feCj COLONEL GOFF. 'NORFOLK BRIDGE, SHOREHAM.'' GOFF. 125 Meadow," work not proceeding to a con scious elaboration, yet not stopping short of the point at which even for the many it may be expressive. Its quality, how ever, good as it is, does not really give it a unique place in the list of Goff's labours ; other plates — some that would be considered very humble ones' — show virtues quite as valuable. Few etchers are Goff's equals, fewer still go beyond him, in composition of line, in arrangement of light and shade ; and as he firmly possesses this science, it is natural that very many of his plates, and not only one or two of them, should satisfactorily display it. " Norfolk Bridge, Shoreham" — of which a reproduction is given here — displays it delightfully. The unity of impression is complete ; the group ing well-nigh faultless — there is the light arch of the bridge and the dark mass of clustered town behind it ; church and houses and timbered sheds set amidst the winding of tidal waters ; muddy shores, from above whose low sky-line there rises now and again the mast of a fishing-smack. In " Winchester " — a little plate of great simplicity and reticence — there is the note of a mood and of an hour, as well as of a place. Behind the flat meadows .and the nameless stream that small trees bend over, there is the long line of the cathedral ; and one feels over all the quiet of Autumn. Not 126 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. a whit less admirable — a complete and satisfying picture, wrought with strength and delicacy — is "Pine Trees, Christ- church." Then there is the peace of " Itchen Abbas Bridge" — the little dry-point with the miller's house, the waving poplar, the granary, and the slow stream. " In another plate, less personal, and perhaps less happy, but still good, there is the picturesqueness of the Lewes street ; in the " Ford, Shore ham," complex activity, fullness of theme. In the "South Cone," the great broad waves that swing about the base of Brighton Pier, not only suggest the wind and moving waters that the title implies, but have a certain decorative quality, possible only when the process of "selection" has been just, and the visible labour somewhat sternly simpli fied. " The Chain Pier, Brighton," combines in high degree the charms of elegance and mystery. See the foreshortening of the steep, high wall, the delicacy of the Chain Pier and little fleet of skiffs, the reticent, suggestive touch in those grouped houses by the "Albion." "Charing Cross Bridge," by reason of its subtle arrangement, its victory over difficult material — more even than the " Metropole," with the dark cliff of masonry and the lighted lamps along the Brighton " front " — is perhaps the best of all the several plates which are deliberately devoted to the treatment of such things as COLONEL GOFF. "PINE TREES, CHRISTCHURCH." GOFF. 129 seem prosaic to the person whose poetry is conventional. Most of Goff's plates give proof of thorough draughtsmanship, to the discerning ; though nowhere is such draughtsmanship paraded or made obvious. In one most recent plate, however, devoted to a subject of which the inartistic, unimaginative mind, and the in sensitive hand, would have made mere pattern — I mean the etching of the bared boughs of a weird apple tree — the draughts manship is, of necessity, and happily, con spicuous. But the thing is not pattern at all, and though we follow with delight the intricate line, there is the charm of an im pression as well as the fidelity of a record. There is accent about the etching ; em phasis, vitality ; an atmosphere plays, as it were, amongst the boughs ; the tree is not the tree only, but a part of Nature and the day. Gcethe said to that disciple to whom he most fully unveiled himself, — to the privi leged Eckermann, — "All my poems are 'occasional' poems." In that resided their freshness, and Goethe knew it well. " All my etchings are ' occasional ' etchings," could be said by nearly every fine etcher, too wise to set forth upon the picturesque tour with the deliberate resolution to per petrate particular prints. For the art of etch ing, if it is to yield you its peculiar charm, N 130 ETCHING IN ENGLAND, must have been exercised — I cannot say this thing too often — only upon spontaneous promptings. There are very few exceptions. Meryon himself — that greatest genius, per haps, in original engraving whom our Nine teenth Century has known, and one of the most elaborate of artists, — was not really an exception ; for, slow as his work must have been, the unity of impression preserved throughout so long a labour — the original impulse — was there, which the circumstance created. The spontaneity is essential. And few men better than Colonel Goff have exe cuted spontaneous work with the resources of a firmly-held knowledge. ", ¦-¦¦; ¦ -¦ D. Y. CAMERON. ' BORDER TOWERS. THE- P A L AC E- ST1 RLI NC« CAS TLE- JBVlL'r']JY'KING-JAMES;THETIFTH;r D. Y. CAMERON. "THE PALACE, STIRLING CASTLE." D. Y. CAMERON. " WINDMILLS, ZANDAAM." XVIII. CAMERON. THE amateur has had the opportunity of looking lately a good deal at the prints of a young Scottish artist, Mr. D. Y. Cameron, who has himself, to do him justice, looked long and much at the prints of the masters. Though young, he has already been prolific, and has wrought not only many plates, but in various methods. Of course, I like his work as against that of men who, however gifted in other mediums of expression, are not essentially etchers. For Mr. Cameron is essentially an etcher — a fine engraver on the copper, above all things. Yet I cannot feel that any great proportion of his work, thus far, has quite enough originality or freedom ; and if he is to live and last as an original engraver — as I believe he may — he will have to acquire these virtues in yet larger measure*. Mean while, here are a few comments on certain of the best of his most studiously wrought 138 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. pieces, of which even the least attractive do not lack a workmanlike accomplishment. " The Arch," a composition of curious shape — a tall, narrow plate — is a perform ance of solidity and brightness, although it shows that Mr. Cameron is apt to finish to the corners with a thoroughness too uniform or obvious — to be, indeed, like Mr. C. J. Watson, a little too positive and too mate rial. In the " Flower Market," with its fleeting lights and shades, he leaves in part this positiveness. He makes an in teresting experiment, but, after all, recalls the theme to which he addresses himself, only enough to assure you that the experi ment has not been made in the medium that is fittest for it. " Colour, colour, colour ! " you say. "The Palace, Stirling" — a dark forbidding interior — has certainly about it a grim Celtic imagination, and is individual in that. The oppositions of light and shade are at once strongly marked and skilful — their distribution quite success fully studied — in " White Horse Close." " The Dolphins " (1892) is full of vigour and vitality. Even better, perhaps, is "St. John Street, Stirling ; " because its draughts manship is at once freer and more hesi tating — not fixed and petrified, that is, but trembling with the semblance of life. And in the background of "A Rembrandt Farm," Mr. Cameron has wonderful reminiscences, CAMERON. 139 both of the master's touch and of his way of looking at the wide-stretched landscape that he cared for the most. Nor does the plate suffer perhaps from being for once a deliberate imitation, successfully accom plished. Yet I admire Mr. Cameron more — my hope for his Future is more certain — when I hold in my hand a good impression of his " Border Towers "—a composition of his own North country — a thing in which the inspiration has been very personal, and the fine work of detail has been obtained at no sacrifice of noble breadth. v. XIX. PENNELL MR. PENNELL is an extremely clever, energetic, dexterous American, who has found profitable employment in our English land. He has shown himself to be a ready journalist in draughtsmanship. Drawing architecture and the scenes of the street, he has produced not a little art that is at once popular and tolerable ; and he has even written about Art, dealing some times with far profounder people than his own order of mind permits him thoroughly to fathom. " Critic," therefore, I cannot call him, but able draughtsman, in a limited field, he unquestionably is. A somewhat small proportion of Mr. Pennell's work has consisted of etching, and in this he has shown, first, it appears, the influence of Seymour Haden, and next, the influence of Whistler. Had he but brought a personality to be enriched and fructified by great traditions ! That, how ever, has been denied him ; and, possessed J5gp8^_ ^*-^i*«KS8!&i sgl - JOSEPH PENNELL. "LE PUY EN VELAY." PENNELL. 143 well of the grammar of his art, and of some of the best of its methods, he yet, as his own work reveals him, is, at times, unin teresting, since he is always unimaginative. Vista he has none. Yet, how good can his work be when the subject comes easily to help him ! Nor is that seldom. The plate of " Le Puy en Velay," of which I give a reproduction, and which I like so much, recalls a noble Diirer background — takes our thoughts to those great elder masters who, from certain remarks that he has made about them, I judge that Mr. Pennell scarcely likes at all. It is the irony of circumstance. o XX. MENPES. THOUGH Mr. Mortimer Menpes had etched not a few coppers before he gave us the long series which recorded his impressions of Japan — and though, no doubt, he has etched from time to time since then — it is by the forty plates which constitute that Japanese set that he es tablishes his best claim to be regarded as an artist, serious and interesting. Traces of the Whistlerian vision, if not of the Whistlerian method, are perceptible in these memoranda of the people and the theatre, and of the long and low-built towns that stretch themselves sometimes along the edge of sleeping waters. But the art of Mr. Menpes is not all of it derivative. Something there is that is of himself alone, in the impression received and in the manner of its registration. He has economy of means, and yet abundance of resource. He is not merely a draughts- J:lVI MORTIMER MENPES. 'JAPANESE GIRLS." MENPES. 147 man who has chosen to etch : he is an etcher whose feeling for the capacity of his particular medium has in it much that is instinctive. XXI. RAVEN-HILL. MR. RAVEN-HILL— the artist who adds piquancy to comic newspapers — is little known as an etcher ; but his work upon the copper is delicate, rightly precise and rightly free — it is in the best etcher's manner — and if it is as yet so little recognized, that is only because it is so scanty and has been so seldom exhibited. From several points of view the small array of Mr. Raven-Hill's etched work is interesting and valuable ; it is, almost in variably, observant record and admirable craftsmanship ; and not the least legitimate of its sources of interest lies in the fact that in it the presence of the refined artist, as distinct from that of the smart comic illustrator, is markedly asserted. Here after it may be that Mr. Raven-Hill will choose to etch, and to etch ably, scenes from the life of which, in other mediums, he has been, deservedly, a popular ex ponent. Tom, Dick, and Harry — Harriet, L. RAVEN-HILL. ' THE WANDLE RIVER/ RAVEN-HILL. 151 too, by all means — will then have their day upon the copper, nor will clown and cabotin be left out of the account. But, hitherto, the best of Mr. Raven-Hill's few etchings record scenes Whistler might have chosen, and do so with a touch and choice of line which, it may well be, that master might not desire to disown. XXII. MACBETH AND HERKOMER AND AXEL HAIG. SO much said, and yet nothing said of men a dozen times more popular than the generally single-minded etchers are wont to be, of whom in chief I have spoken. But to the large public, Macbeth and Herkomer and Axel Haig appeal without need of introduction — Macbeth and Haig appeal especially by treatment, and Herkomer especially by subject. Herkomer's theme is generally a dramatic one, and into it he introduces such obvious interest of line and of expression as may be found in a woman with the picturesqueness of age, a man comely and vigorous, a girl with Anne Page's " eyes of youth." Mr. Her komer has a story to tell us — sometimes the story of a life as it is told in portraiture, and he tells it with no absence of ability. But attractive as he well may be, clever as he most surely is, he rarely reaches ex- quisiteness ; nor is there reason to think that the plate, the needle, and the aquafortis constitute in any special way his proper HUBERT HERKOMER, R.A. ' GWENDYDD." MACBETH, HERKOMER, AXEL HAIG. 155 medium. Still, one who is, as everybody knows, so spirited and energetic an artist — the author of so many a valiant experi ment, the winner of an occasional triumph in the art of Painting, from the day of the " Pensioners " to the day of the " Burgo masters " — can be a graceful sketcher on the copper, when he likes, or from time to time, at all events. Robert Macbeth's inventive work in etch ing does not want originality ; but it is not the originality of an etcher, in method or vision of the world, but rather the origin ality of his own painted pictures. These, or the effects of them, elaborate and interest ing, he reproduces, as far as may be, in the print. For nearly twenty years he has, from time to time, etched his own conceptions, and during much of this long period the public has surely benefited by his able, dexterous translations of great or charming masters, from Velasquez to Mason. A certain proportion of his original work upon the copper was performed — and not indeed unnaturally — before Mr. Macbeth became familiar with the technical resources of the craft. - Thus, the " Potato Harvest " — an interesting subject, and treated, as to its composition, very characteristically — is, as an etching, grey and colourless. "The Cambridgeshire Ferry" (of 1881), with that free, swinging, rustic girl he likes to paint, p 156 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. has excellent points about it, and would be called "important" by a dealer. Later, "A Cast Shoe" is luminous as well as elaborate. " Flora" — a print of 1882 — is very spirited and rich, and has the sentiment of the morn ing. But I am not sure whether the purist in the etcher's art would not like most of all the rapid and indicative sketch of "A Flood in the Fens." It is a slight study, with the rare note of action and of tragedy — a free dramatic record. Mr. Axel Haig, the third of these popular and long accepted artists, has no painted pictures by whose method he may be in spired — he is unlike Robert Macbeth in this respect — but his able etchings of archi tectural subjects are nearly all of them, nevertheless, finished up to the corners. So much is actually set forth, with such elaborate and skilled pains — all the work being perfectly evident, no labour of omis sion having been undertaken, and little labour of choice — that the imagination of the spectator has hardly a chance of exer cising itself. His intelligence, alas ! is well- nigh unnecessary. And yet, as you look at the long record of buildings whose aspect has been grasped and presented by Mr. Haig with diligence and skill, you must respect, in the artist, much of his craftsmanship, and his great German quality of untiring and sagacious effort. E. A. ARMSTRONG (STANHOPE-FORBES). ' THE OPEN WINDOW. XXIII. SOME OTHER ETCHERS* I CANNOT pretend that the artistic in dividuality of Elizabeth Armstrong and Minna Bolingbroke (now Mrs. Stanhope Forbes and Mrs. C. J. Watson) is yet suf ficiently marked to allow either to be the subject of a critical essay ; but in the record of an Art in which — as in so many others — it seems generally to be decreed to women, " Thus far, and no further," it is useful and satisfactory to note the closeness of obser vation and the skill of hand possessed by these two ladies. In Miss Armstrong the world some time ago recognized a par ticularly dainty draughtswoman ; and the little print which is , submitted here as an example of her talent, is a refined Genre picture. To Genre, too, belongs that which, so far as I have had the opportunity of knowing, is the happiest effort . of Miss Bolingbroke. It is singularly good ; the subject chosen pluckily, where only a Modern would have ventured to find it; 160 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. and then the theme pictorially conceived, in the true etcher's spirit — this admirable little dry-point is a vision of the factory, broad, luminous, and rich. One or two other dry-points by the same artist — dry- points of plump birds, and live stock of the farmyard — suggest the possibility that in her quest for themes Miss Bolingbroke may follow in the track of a great French man, and may meet with a success akin to some extent to that of Bracquemond's masterpiece, " Le Haut d'un battant de Porte." Mr. Percy Thomas — a graceful draughts man of ancient English buildings, and of the incidents of the River — must be reckoned almost as of the Old Guard, amongst the etchers of the present generation. He etched before Etching became fashionable ; and now that he has long been beset with friendly and accomplished rivalry, he yet proceeds to make additions to the bulk, and perhaps even to the range, of his labours. An inequality more marked than any we are wont to perceive in the work of an important master, tells, perhaps, to some extent, against his position. And though his manner is often pretty, and is generally refined, it is but seldom distinguished. He has worked, it may be, too much, and, it may be, not always in obedience to the spontaneous prompting. Yet his methods IjaMHufrnfa •<$*§ ¦ S&vT*. M. BOLINGBROKE. "AT THE LOOM." i PERCY THOMAS. " DORKING.' SOME OTHER ETCHERS. 165 have ever been legitimate, and he has at tained grace. His "Dorking" — with its long perspective of the sunny street in some hour of the summer afternoon— is a piece of agreeable and capable, and even of elaborate, sketching ; and his " Old Light house, Hastings " — one of the most entirely satisfactory of his coppers — has the charm of an admirable composition conveyed by simple and certain means. Among the other aquafortists practising from time to time amongst us — not to speak of the more recent of the promising recruits to the Society of Painter-Etchers, who have yet to make their history — mention should not be altogether omitted of Mr. W. L. Wyllie, whose popular marine subjects need evoke no opposition, even where, as exhibitions of the etcher's art, they scarcely deserve to attract. Again, there is Dr. Arthur Evershed, a ready and sensitive draughtsman with the needle, whose " Marsh Farm " is only one out of a score of evidences of his refined enjoyment of the quiet lines of uneventful lowland landscape. Sir Charles Robinson and Dr. Propert need by no means be for gotten. Mr. J. P. Heseltine has not per haps, exhibited much of late ; but he, as long ago as when he wrought that series of Etchings Mrs. Noseda published — it was some twenty years since — gave ample proof 1 66 ETCHING IN ENGLAND. of his placid, sympathetic observation of the ordinary land, and of his ability to re cord the charm he was not tardy in feeling. The etched work of Mr. Holmes May is, most of it, I think, more recent. It is a vigorous, independent sketching of land scape. It notes tree-form with energy and sky effects with refinement. That potent, brilliant, but eccentric Spaniard, fashionable naturally among the younger men for his unquestioned audacity of talent — I mean, of course, Goya — has been, it would appear, the chief inspirer of a few clever prints done recently by Mr. Rothenstein, in frank, fantastic illustration of Voltaire's "Pucelle d'Orleans." In Mr. Rothenstein's few things — too few as yet to permit us to really judge him as an etcher —we see, along with some inventiveness which is the artist's own, not only Goya's style, but Goya's method — an effective, dexterous mingling of the etched line with aquatint. Again, the Whistlerian spirit finds appro priate expression in the vivacious prints of Mr. Walter Sickert and of Monsieur Roussel — many of them engaging, interesting, and unconcealed impromptus, towards which any word of adverse criticism would be but ill-addressed. And, lastly, ere I turn to treat at greater length the work of one who is a born etcher, and an etcher chiefly — W. HOLMES MAY. " SUNRISE IN WALES. WF~v — „ — 3; 5 Hi, ,v Wk .HK|g* v 1 'i ' j* :SMfc£' ' ' ;-; . •-'Tw If ' ' ft! *.| • '% V- ' ll 1 fc- '/. . //.. Sis .- BpraBi mi.Wi a z g