Contemporary French Prints

Abstract

The exhibition of contemporary French prints now being circuited by the College Art Association has given us the opportunity to observe the various techniques of French engraving since Cézanne, and to emphasize certain essential points.It will be noticed first of all that most of the artists whose work is exhibited are not professional engravers but painter-engravers. We must take this opportunity to declare our preference for painter-engravers. A man may be expert at scratching a polished stone, at working on a copper plate, or at drawing a proof, he may be a first rate technician without having anything to say and this is unfortunately the case with many “specialists.” These men usually profess the utmost scorn for painter-engravers, considering them to be untrained apprentices, intruders who should be sent back to their own occupation. However as Bracquemand has rightly put it: “It is the masters, the painters themselves, who have really taught us about printing, for the engravers have only methodized and perfected the techniques of printing that the painters discovered. No engraver of portraits shows us more about the making of cuts than Van Dyck; no engraver of architecture has surpassed Canaletto or Piranese; no engraver of landscapes can tell more about the technical side of this process than Claude Lorrain or Rysdaël. These masters do not make engravings for the sake of the process alone, but in order to draw and model in their prints as they do in their painting.”