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A pleasant picture one can fancy of his life at this period; he was with his own people, for whom his love was tender; busy with brush, pencil, and etching-needle; he was strengthening his powers of observation, developing and perfecting his style, occasionally producing work that won for him renown in Leyden; and, gradually, he gathered round him a small group of earnest fellow-workers, chief among them Lievens, Gerard Dou, and Van Vliet, the last two, though but slightly his juniors, looking up to him as master.
This Alfred Kubin has done; with his etching-needle he has aroused images from the plate that alternately shock and exalt; occasionally he opens the valves of laughter for he can be both witty and humorous. His Slavic blood keeps off the encroaching danger of himself taking his own work too seriously. I wish his German contemporaries boasted such gifts of irony.
We have the dash and the chic with skates which Frenchmen show with the etching-needle, and the Canadian, on the other hand, is apt to decline into the mere prettiness which is the fault of English etchers. Skating has been, within the last few years, a very progressive art. There was a time when mere speed, and the grace of speed, satisfied most amateurs.
Remember, also, that just as the blunt end of a bit of charcoal is many, many times larger than the point of an etching-needle, so are its resources for fine lines and minute dots and scratches just that much reduced. It is the flat of the piece of coal that is valuable, not its point. As to what can be done with this piece of coal, I can but repeat, everything.
The mediums of oils and tempera are especially adapted to the requirements of those who see things rather as a diaper of shapes than as a map of lines; while for these last the point of pen, burin, or etching-needle offers the most congenial implement.
It could not be an etching-needle for the same reason; and it was not a surgical appliance at least it was not like any surgical instrument that was known to me. I turned it over and over and cudgelled my brains; and then I had a brilliant idea. Was it a reed pen of which the point had been broken off?
Many of them express the freer qualities of real pen-drawing an autographic character in the line-work akin to that secured in original etching. The pen is an instrument that works best on a small scale, in which it can be manipulated flexibly in the fingers; in this it is like the etching-needle itself.
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