Félix Bracquemond: An Etcher of Birds
By FRANK WEITENKAMPF
Chief of the Department of Prints, New York Public Library
Even the artist of various interests actively expressed,—the versatile artist, if that adjective be used without the suspicion of superficiality which is often its aftertaste—is very apt to become associated in the public mind with some one specialty.
Félix Bracquemond is known particularly well as an etcher of birds. Yet he has done many things, more than one well enough to have established a reputation. At twenty he painted, and exhibited at the Salon of 1853, a portrait of himself, in a manner that carries you back to Holbein, that even faintly suggests the spirit of Van Eyck in its precise and detailed utterance. The portrait clearly indicates his future activity, for he holds in his hand a bottle of acid, while etching tools lie on a table near him. His etched portraits are numerous, and include such comparatively free productions as the ones of Legros and of Meryon, and the large, minutely finished one of Edmond de Goncourt. The last named is a characteristic and typical example of Bracquemond’s art, which, even when most painstaking, somehow or other never seems labored. Bracquemond appears as a peculiar and interesting mingling of Teutonic thoroughness and Gallic esprit.
The characteristic elements in his portraits—“robustness, versatility and a resourceful mastery of technique”—are peculiar to all his work. The same artist who carefully and with honest and sympathetic adaptation translated such different products of painter’s personality as Millet’s Man with the Hoe and Meissonier’s La Rixe, as well as canvases and drawings by Holbein (the magisterial portrait of Erasmus), Corot, Gustave Moreau, Gavarni and Delacroix, also, under Japanese influence, etched numerous designs for ceramic ware (he was for a time a sort of artist director at the Haviland factory at Limoges), fishes and birds in swirling, decorative outline. In contrast to these last named are his numerous well-finished pictures of birds and mammals. His hares, moles and mice done with loving emphasis on the texture of their furry pelts. (The vision of happy days, seen by poor bunny suspended by one leg, was reproduced as far afield as Poland, in Tygódnik Illustrowány.) The birds, with the delightful and strong modeling of their bodies felt under the sleek surface of their feathery coverings.
A master craftsman, he has found delight, like Buhot, Guérard and Mielatz, in technical experiments, and his interest and skill in reproductive methods are illustrated in etchings, dry-points, aquatints, lithographs, photogravures retouched with etching, engravings in color, and plates showing combinations of processes. Burty once wrote: “He contrives by repeated use of the acid on certain parts of the plate to get a black which for depth and intensity has never been equaled.” And Meryon avowed of him: “I cannot etch. That one, there, he is the true etcher.”
His active interests, and his all-embracing outlook on the life about him, found expression in such occasional productions as the etchings of figures modeled in snow by French sculptors in Paris during the Commune; the symbolical lithograph of France defending himself against the Prussian eagle, while strangling his own imperial bird; the ceramic compliment to Uncle Sam: The Old World and Young America, or the very large plate done as a memorial tablet for Meryon’s coffin. His hand recorded the placid, rural beauties of Bas Meudon and the quick impression of a steamboat, amusingly described by Beraldi (see No. 185). And a bit of woodland, possibly in the Bois de Boulogne, in winter snows, in combination with a gaunt wolf probably studied at the Jardin d’Acclimatation (the Paris “Zoo”), gave him opportunity for his effective Wolf in the Snow, also known as Winter (Beraldi No. 180), which in its spirit of desolation might be many hundred miles from Paris.
And with all this, his etchings only have been spoken of here,—and they are about 800 in number. But the catalogue (issued in an edition of 220 copies) of his work exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (Salon) in 1907, includes not only etchings, but paintings, water-colors, pastels and designs executed in embroidered silk, ceramics, iron, cloisonné enamel, jade, wood and bookbindings.
Yet the late Walter S. Carter of Brooklyn, a most catholic print-collector, ventured fearlessly on the inviting but not always safe sliding pond of analogy, and proclaimed Bracquemond the “Michelangelo of ducks.” Without regard to the manner of the statement, we may accept the classification. For had Bracquemond never etched anything but his bird plates, he would have won his place in the annals of the fascinating art of needle and acid. Perhaps he realized that when he furnished a title-page design for the third volume, devoted to himself, of Beraldi’s “Graveurs du XIXᵉ Siècle,” consisting solely of a duck and a portfolio of prints. Much slighter in execution, but more significantly allegorical, was his frontispiece (Beraldi No. 480) for the catalogue of the second portion of the Burty collection. It represented a stand holding an open portfolio from which prints flying upward are gradually evolved into cranes. Ducks, however, have apparently been his special delight. He has pictured them in action, as in the delightful oblong picture of two ducks swimming (Beraldi No. 185) and in the equally, and amusingly, lifelike one of five ducks swimming hurriedly to a central point of common interest. Or in allegorical attitude, as in the Canard (Beraldi No. 116), the herald of “fake” news. He has observed the teal along the riverside and the Gambols of ducks (Beraldi No. 221), done with a simple and sympathetic delight in the doings of these water-fowl. Hardly ever, perhaps, has he better characterized the useful bird whose call, onomatopoetically imitated, has long served to characterize medical charlatanry, than in the plate known as The Bather or Canards surpris. The three birds, who have come down to their accustomed swimming hole only to find it already occupied by a comely young woman, are alive and moving. The beholder can fairly see and hear their wonder at the unwarranted intrusion on their rights, and regards their wagging tails with much of the fascination that Septimus and Wiggleswick (in W. J. Locke’s “Septimus”) felt in the same diversion.
While the duck apparently appealed most to him, Bracquemond was attracted also by other members of the family of Aves. The goose, cousin to the Anas, he showed collectively in Geese in a Storm (The Storm Cloud. Beraldi No. 219), which may be studied in the Avery collection at the New York Public Library, in a series of touched proofs in which the fortuitous effect of gradually added work in the sky gives somewhat the impression of a storm rising as you look at the consecutive proofs. Ducks in a Marsh also move under a lowering sky, and in It’s Raining Pitchforks (Beraldi No. 212) the flood-gates of heaven are fully opened, so that the water-fowl appear to find themselves doubly in their element.
Bracquemond sometimes labored through a number of states on a plate. The large portrait of Edmond de Goncourt was patiently carried through a number of progressive proofs. And in the process of thus searching for ultimate satisfactoriness he may give us such pleasant surprises as the fourth state of Morning Mists (Beraldi No. 779), a pheasant piece, with its delightful background addition of trees—an airy, light impression of early morning. He has done several landscapes of a lightness which approaches a Legros-like delicacy, so that it is perplexing to compare them with such a faithfully studied but somewhat hard plate as that of the duck perplexed at sight of a turtle (L’Inconnu, Beraldi No. 174), and to realize that the same hand did both. Venturing still farther into the field of ornithology, he depicted golden pheasants, partridges, swallows, with sympathy for his subject and an open eye for its artistic possibilities. The human element enters into these pictures very rarely, and then only when absolutely in place. So in At the Jardin d’Acclimatation (Beraldi No. 214), in which two stylishly dressed young ladies are looking at golden pheasants in an inclosure. Once, at least, in Sea-gulls (Beraldi No. 782), he felt and rendered the beautiful effect of a circling, gliding flight of gulls over rolling waves, in a graceful swirl of lines combining into a harmonious pattern.
The peculiar effect of this last named plate, with its mingling of Japanese and other influences, is in striking contrast to his early and most remarkable Haut d’un battant de Porte (Beraldi No. 110, done at the age of nineteen), in which the dead bodies of three birds of prey and a bat are shown nailed to a barn door, held up as a warning example in a not too smoothly flowing quatrain. To his plates of moralizing or emblematic intention, such as the one just referred to, or the Canard (Beraldi No. 116), he delighted in adding such inscriptions, generally in rhyme. His verses in such cases partake a little of the halting metre of those which poor Meryon attached to certain of his plates. Such etched letterpress additions appear also in Margot la Critique (Beraldi No. 113) and in Le Corbeau. The last named delineation of an old bow-legged crow presents a creature so weird, so uncanny, that without adventitious effects it appears as a symbol of some sinister power, felt though not realized. But a still more famous plate, because most strongly characteristic, is The Old Cock (the original drawing for which is owned by Samuel P. Avery), a masterly portrait of chanticleer, in all the dignity and pomp of his mature vigor and serene self-sufficiency. Here is the poem for this:
Hé, vieux coq,
Vieux Don Juan,
Vieille voix, tu t’érailles,
Toi-même tu seras
La pierre du festin fait à tes funerailles
Et les convives, las
De livrer à ta chair de trop rudes batailles
Se reposeront des dents et des bras
Racontant à l’envie, tes amours, tes combats.
He japonized this magnificent fowl in a purely decorative spirit, without the psychological element. And on the occasion of the visit of the Russian fleet to Toulon in 1893, he repeated and emphasized the theme to the verge almost of the grotesque, in a representation of the Gallic cock, a Hercules of his kind, with the aggressiveness of conscious strength, trumpeting forth his Vive le Tsar! with triumphant enthusiasm. This emblematic use of ornithological specimens has been already referred to in the case of the Canard. It appears notably also in Margot la Critique. The critic may note that Margot happens to be particularly unctuous in the state before the verses, but will not be otherwise adversely influenced by this etched philippic against his brethren.
But besides these many realistic studies of bird life there are just about as many of purely decorative interest, showing strong Japanese influence, and mostly executed for ceramic decoration. There are also decorative combinations of Reeds and Teal, Swallows flying in graceful curves and swirls, Lapwing and Teal swimming and flying. Here again we have an entirely different point of view. The loving study of nature, sometimes expressed in an uncompromising hardness in the reproduction of form or detail, or elsewhere in an almost playful lightness of touch in obedience to a passing mood, appears here with quite different results. Seemingly endless changes on the same theme of swirling, undulating curves of flying, running, strutting, swimming bodies of birds and fishes delight the eye with the rhythmic flow of ever recurrent accent on the pure beauty of line.
And at the end, when you have gone through the many portfolios of Bracquemond’s work, there occurs to you his own statement quoted by Clement Janin. It is to the effect that a work of graphic art must bear on its face, undisguised, the characteristics of the technique by which it was produced. A lithograph must be a lithograph; a wood-engraving a wood-engraving and not the imitation of an engraving on copper or of a photograph. A review of the arts of reproduction proves that this is not the truism it may seem. It is a basic principle in all art, and will bear earnest and repeated emphasis. And the notable recognition of this fact by Bracquemond is a prime factor in his success in the art that has meant so much to him.