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In many of the drawings the earlier work has been done with red or black chalk and then rubbed down and the drawing redone with either a brush and some of the chalk rubbed up with water and gum or a silver-point line of great purity, while in others he has tinted the paper with water-colour and rubbed this away to the white paper where he wanted a light, or Chinese white has been used for the same purpose.
None but devils could think of etching every rock outcrop with wind-lines, or skinning it down to its glistening nerves with sand-blasts; of arranging hills in the likeness of pyramids and sphinxes and wrecked town-suburbs; of covering the space of half an English county with sepia studies of interlacing and recrossing ravines, dongas, and nullahs, each an exposition of much too clever perspective; and of wiping out the half-finished work with a wash of sand in three tints, only to pick it up again in silver-point on the horizon's edge.
Choti had many canvases completed, some six feet long, and he also did excellent silver-point heads of the villagers. Tahitians were indifferent models, as they were not much interested in pictures, not seeing objects, as we do, and found posing irksome. Only Choti's friendship for them, his bonhomie, and many merry jokes in their tongue could keep them still for his purposes.
Something must be said of Duerer's employment of the water-colours, pen-and-ink, silver-point, charcoal, chalk, &c., with which he made his drawings. But when one comes to broad washes, large masses of light and shade, the expression of atmosphere, of bloom, of light, he is wanting in proportion as these effects become vague, cloudy, indefinite, mist-like.
His art is akin to the art of silver-point, which, as is known, is an art of directness of touch, and final in the instant of execution, leaving no room whatever for accident or untoward excitement of nerve. We shall wait long for the silver suggestiveness such as Barrymore gives us when Peter gets his first glimpse of Mary, Duchess of Towers.
Yet, just as, in the use of charcoal, the "something that does not follow exactly the will" is infinitely more subtle than in the use of the palette-knife to represent rocks or stumps of trees, so in the pen or silver-point line this element, though reduced and refined till it is hardly perceptible, still exists, and Duerer takes "the advantage of its hints."
As to the other branches of art, namely, pen-and-ink, silver-point, lead-pencil, sanguine, chalk, charcoal, water monochrome, oil monochrome, pastel, painting in oil, painting in water-colors, wood-engraving, etching and dry-point, aquatint and mezzotint, lithography, he had more or less tried every one of them.
Elliott's studio in Rome ten years ago, has been his warm patron. It was for her he made his well known silver-point portrait of the late King Humbert, which she carries with her on all journeys. It has, indeed the boldness of line inseparable from good silver-point drawing, where a stroke once laid on is indelible and no "working over" is possible.
As a training to the eye and hand also, it is of great value, as no rubbing out of any sort is possible, and eye and hand must work together with great exactness. The discipline of silver-point drawing is to be recommended as a corrective to the picturesque vagaries of charcoal work.
It was a drawing, in silver-point, of an orange-tree in mingled fruit and bloom an exquisite piece of work, of a Japanese truth, intricacy, and perfection. Fenwick looked at it in silence. These silver-point drawings of Welby's were already famous. In the preceding May there had been an exhibition of them at an artistic club.
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