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But it is as an etcher or engraver, rather than as a painter, that Duerer's reputation was earned. His greatest engravings such as the Knight and Death, and St. Jerome in his Study set a standard in a new art which has never been reached by his successors. The first considerable employment of engraving, one of the most useful of the arts, synchronized with the invention of printing.

Now, Félicien Rops, the Belgian etcher, lithographer, engraver, designer, and painter, occupies about the same relative position to Honoré Daumier as Whistler does to Rembrandt. How seldom you hear of Rops. Why?

At the Paris Exhibition of 1889 the Grand Prizes for engraving were given to an English sketching etcher, Haden, and to two French etchers, Boilvin and Chauvel. In 1857, I and many others looked upon sketching as defective work, excusable only on the plea of want of time to do better. The omissions in a sketch, which when intelligent are merits, seemed to me, on the contrary, so many faults.

He wrote articles, helped to set up type and pull off the sheets, and generally assisted the man in charge, a very able young fellow called Sevrin. "The guiding spirit of that group was a fanatic of social revolution. He is dead now. He was an engraver and etcher of genius. You must have seen his work. It is much sought after by certain amateurs now.

A Dutch seventeenth-century etcher and draughtsman, Reiner Zeeman by name, attracted him. He copied, too, Ducereau and Nicolle. "An etching by the latter of a riverside view through the arch of a bridge is like a link between Meryon and Piranesi," says D.S. MacColl. Meryon also studied under the tuition of a painter named Phelippes.

What she said he did not know; his lack-luster gaze met hers. All dislike and disapproval seemed to have vanished from it; he saw her only as one sees a face in a daguerreotype of long ago, or looks at features limned by a soulless etcher. "Do you see it?" he asked. "What?" "Trees? Aren't those trees?" "I see nothing." "You do. You must. They are there."

This is what Camille Mauclair said of him at the time of his début: "An admirably skilful etcher, a draughtsman of keen vision, and a painter of curious character, who has in many ways forestalled the artists of to-day.

An etcher, in fact, a man famous in his field, had made them, Mrs. Phillips explained. "And at the other end of the shelf," she advised him, "is a poem in free verse, done by a real journalist who was here in June. See: 'Homage to Dunecrest' written with a blue pencil on a bit of driftwood."

The celebrity of an etcher and his previous achievements can only give hopes that he may be successful once more, but these hopes are far from a certainty.

That he was called the Rembrandt of Architecture is but another testimony to the impression he made upon his contemporaries, though the title is an unhappy one. Piranesi even in his own little fenced-off coign of art is not comparable to the etcher of the Hundred Guilder print, nor are there close analogies in their respective handling of darks and lights.