It is not my purpose to discuss here the different merits of the different
schools. There are varieties of opinion regarding the excellence of the line
compared with the technic in the modern school of engravers. By the modern
school I mean the work of such men as Cole, Yuengling, Wolff, French, Smithwick,
and others. I refer to them that I may accent the stronger the medium which is
the subject-matter of this talk, namely, charcoal, in the hope that those of you
who propose to make reproductive illustrations your life-work may be tempted to
make use of charcoal as a medium through which to express your ideas and
ideals. oil paintings for sale
But before embarking on this phase of my subject it may be interesting for a
moment to go a little deeper into the earlier stages of this marvellous change
from boxwood to zinc. I remember distinctly the beginnings of an organization
well known in New York, and perhaps to many of you, as the Tile Club, to
which organization I can conscientiously say as much credit is due for this revival in
wood-engraving as to any other. Not that good wood-engravers did not exist
before its time, and not because it contained wood-engravers, for the club did
not have the name of one among its membership, but as containing a group of
painters who for the first time in aid of the art of wood-engraving in this
country lent their names and brushes to an illustrated magazine. Up to that time
there had been a wide gulf existing between the ordinary draftsman on wood and a
painter. This did not proceed from the prevalence of a certain disease among the
painters,abstract oil paintings for sale, known at the present time as an "enlarged head," but from the fact
that no artist accustomed to free-hand drawing and at liberty to wander all over
his canvas at will would bring himself down to working through a
magnifying-glass, a necessity, often, in transferring a drawing to wood.
With this discovery, however, of making available even the roughest drawing,
the simplest blot in color or a scratch in charcoal, and photographing its exact
textures upon a wooden block, the camera reducing it in size and thus
perfecting it, the artist immediately took the place of the draftsman, and at
the same time introduced into the work an artistic quality, a dash, a vim and
spirit entirely unknown before.
Three things were needed to utilize this marvellously useful discovery:
first, a painter of rank; second, an engraver who could express the textures and
technics of the several artists—that is, reproduce the exact values of an
original in wash, an original in charcoal, or an original in oil; and third, a
magazine with sufficient capital, taste, and intelligence to reproduce these
results upon a printed page. We had the painters, and the engravers developed
rapidly. The third requirement, of taste and intelligence, was found in Mr. A.
W. Drake, then
art director of Scribner's Monthly, and, after its merging into the
Century, the distinguished art director of the Century
Magazine. abstract art oil paintings
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