Etchings (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 Excerpt: ...that he had scarcely the opportunity of "scorning," and of dying in an encumbering poverty: almost in obscurity and neglect. The relative positions of the two men now--the relative estimate of their engraved work--is matter for reflection, but not at all for amazement. In days when a decisive rapidity and economy of means is welcomed more, by people dans le mouvement, than a realization conspicuous for industry, there can be nothing remarkable in the circumstance that Vandyke is, if anything, a little unduly exalted, and that Hollar is--as certainly he is or has been--undervalued. It is hardly more than a generation ago that the position of the two was reversed; and it is characteristic of the English appreciation of Hollar, in the 'Fifties and 'Sixties, that Seymour Haden, whose tastes and whose opinions in Art matters were formed mainly in those decades, should have been of Hollar the strenuous and, as I think, for a time, the over-zealous advocate. He said once, in print, that when he was asked what he saw in Hollar, he could only answer, that he saw "everything" or "nearly everything." I remember--in later years--venturing to take him mildly to task upon that subject, and I asked him whether he saw Passion, whether he saw Imagination. And he yielded the point, very gracefully and cordially--as, on occasion, it was quite within his power to do. He admitted he had over-praised Hollar, or had praised him too universally--without critical qualification. And now it is my turn to insist upon--to be called on, one may say, to insist upon--what even then I was most absolutely prepared to admit, or to maintain: that is, that Hollar, though deficient in the gifts of the greatest, though wanting the impulse and the at times "whit...