Print Specifics:
- Type of print: Etching - Original antique print
- Year of printing: not indicated in the print - actual: 1886
- Original artist: David Cox
- Etched by: ---
- Editor: Philip Gilbert Hamerton
- Condition: 2 (1. Excellent - 2. Very good - 3. Good - 4. Fair)
- Light age toning of paper.
- Printing plate mark around the image present.
- Light waterstain & surface abrasion in the lower right corner of print, please see the photo for extent
- Dimensions: 10 x 13.5 inches, including blank margins (borders) around the image.
- Paper weight: 2 (1. Thick - 2. Heavier - 3. Medium heavy - 4. Slightly heavier - 5. Thin)
- Reverse side: Blank
Notes:
- Green color around the print in the photo is a contrasting background on which the print was photographed.
- 1 inch = 2,54 cm.
An excerpt from the description that accompanied the print:
- Nothing, in the execution of the great masters, is more
remarkable than their broad and simple manner of painting. How simply
Titian painted, and our own Gainsborough and Reynolds! How different
their work is in this respect from that of many inferior artists ! The
reason is that they never painted without imagination, and therefore
were delivered from the tyranny of those qualities in nature that
importune the painter who observes and does not imagine. The same
quality of simplification is conspicuous in the whole of Girtin's work,
and in that of David Cox. To my mind there is something profoundly
satisfactory in the independence with which Girtin left unfurnished
spaces in his drawings. The unimaginative inventors of recipes for
composition would have told him to put groups of figures or cattle in
his unfurnished spaces, and to cut his quiet lines with buildings, but
he never would put a figure or a building where his own imaginative
sentiment did not feel the need. There are many drawings by David Cox
which depend on the simplicity in the use of material for their lasting
effect upon the mind. 'The Windmill' that Mr. Brandard engraved for us
is a case in point. Nothing in the whole composition is sufficiently
interesting to set up a conflict with the windmill.
- Substitute,
mentally, a pretty piece of architecture for the cottage and the
interest would be too much carried to the right. Observe how the
little interest there is diminishes gradually like a dying cadence in
music, the dormer windows are nearest the mill, then you have the
chimney, and after, that nothing but a low roof. The only tree that
shows some slight elaboration is near the centre of the drawing, that
behind the cottage to the right is a mere blot. Never was composition
less obtrusive, and yet you have it everywhere. The windmill is a sort
of triangle with a steep side to the left, and a more sloping side to
the right. A similar diminution to the right is repeated in the
cottage and figures. A broadly curved sweep in the mass of darker
cloud is repeated in a steeper curve by the birds. Lastly, whatever
arrangements of minor material may have seemed advisable, the artist
has be found in those numerous compositions in which the one dread of
the artist is that some part of his work may be condemned as
uninteresting. To escape from this criticism he fills it from end to
end with heterogeneous matter, and amuses the vulgar spectator by
putting the materials of half-a-dozen pictures that might separately
have been satisfactory into one inconsistent
- accumulation.
[Source, The Portfolio for 1886, pp. 70].
- NOTE: PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON (1834—1894)
was an English artist and author. In 1866 he published his standard work
on Etching and Etchers. He was also an art critic to the Saturday
Review. In 1870 he established an art journal of his own, The Portfolio,
a monthly periodical, each number of which consisted of a monograph upon
some artist or a group of artists, frequently written and always edited
by him. The monographs were accompanied by the original prints taken from
the plates, etched by the eminent etchers of the day solely for the purpose
of being published in The Portfolio.
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