Only last month a distinguished New York daily paper, in reviewing a recent exhibition, said:

"There really is nothing left to say about Mr. Smith's water-colors. They appear with such unfailing regularity and are always so much the same. Nothing in the present collection will surprise those who know his work—and who does not? The artist's facility is undiminished, his industry untiring, but to look for any fresh inspiration in his work or a hint of anything but a conventional vision has long been a vain hope."

I should be discouraged if I thought that this was the last word on my work. I know better, because I am making a collection of such criticisms, showing the rating of our several painters. These summings up of mine will be extremely valuable as marking the changing taste of the public; for I have never supposed that either ill will or downright ignorance formed the basis of current criticism. The critics are merely expressing the trend of public opinion. It is not new to our age. Diaz, so one story goes, once came stumping (he had lost one leg) into Millet's cottage at Barbizon fresh from the Salon. Millet had been painting nudes—the most exquisite bits of flesh-painting seen for many a day, and as modest as Chabas "September Morn."

"What do they say of my things?" asked Millet.

"That you are still painting naked women," replied Diaz.

Millet was horrified.

"I paint naked women! I never painted one in my life."

Hence "The Angelus" and "The Sowers" and the other masterpieces of clothed peasants.

In 1825 Constable writes in answer to a scurrilous attack made on his so-called "puerile" efforts:

"Remember the great were not made for me, nor was I for the great. My limited and abstractive art is to be found under every hedge and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth while picking up. My art flatters nobody by imitation: it courts nobody by smoothness: it tickles nobody by politeness: it is without either fol-de-rol or fiddle-de-dee. How can I hope to be popular?"

Ruskin's attack on Whistler is another case in point. A lawsuit followed and Whistler recovered one farthing damages, and had the effrontery to dangle it under the great critic's nose that same night at a reception where they both met, followed by the remark:

"Beat you, old man."

Even Mr. Thackeray went out of his way in his "art notes" to belittle and ridicule Sir Thomas Lawrence because he lacked what he called the "virility of his progenitors and associates."

* * * * *

And now for my own system.

I use a heavy, gray charcoal paper, which is made by Dupre & Company, No. 141 Faubourg St. Honore, Paris, and which costs about ten cents per sheet, measuring about 40 x 30 inches each. This paper is evenly ribbed but without the intermittent bands seen often in the lighter charcoal paper, known as "Michelet," sold everywhere in our own art stores. Dupre will send this paper to anybody who applies for it.

This paper I wet on both sides and thumb-tack over an oil canvas the size of the picture to be painted. It dries tight as a drum, and the canvas backing protects it from puncture or other injury.

On this surface I make a full and complete drawing in charcoal of the subject before me, not in outline, but in strong darks, jet-black, many of them—a finished drawing really, in charcoal, which could be signed and framed. This is then "fixed" by a spray of alcohol and gum shellac, thrown by means of a common perfume atomizer, the whole apparatus costing less than one American dollar.

On this I begin my color scheme in both opaque and transparent color, recognizing the "natural facts" already explained to you, that is, the skies and high lights being solidly opaque, the shadows being equally transparent. This process requires certain modifications to be made in the darks of the original drawing. The dense black shadow under the eaves of a roof, for instance, are not in nature as black as the charcoal, but perhaps a rich, warm brown. If the ground is in sunlight, it is a dull, golden yellow and reflects the yellow glow of the sand beneath. Or it may be a blue reflection, or even of a reddish tone. These hard blacks then must be glazed in such a way as to preserve the power of the shadow obtained by means of the under charcoal, and yet keep it transparent (all shadows being transparent) and at the same time preserve its true and proper tint.

This glaze is done by using the three semi-opaque primary pigments—found in every color-box—namely:

Light red,

Cobalt-blue,

Yellow ochre.

These colors, of course, form the basis of all intermediate tones, and from them all intermediate tones can be made.

These three colors are at the same time semi-opaque, their opacity being just sufficient to tint the hard black of the coal, while never clogging or muddying its transparency.

So it is with the millions of other tones in the whole composition, when such perfectly transparent colors as brown madder, Indian yellow, and indigo are used as a glaze, altering and modifying the undertone of charcoal to any desired tint and at the same time preserving the all-important thing—its transparency.

In conclusion, let me say that I fully recognize that I am addressing students whose training enables them to understand perfectly this explanation, and that further instructions are therefore unnecessary.

One thing, however, may be accentuated, and that is the use of plenty of clean water. Another is that you should keep your palettes separate. For myself, I make use of a common white metallic dinner-plate, known as iron-stone china, costing another ten cents, for my sky-palette, squeezing the color-tubes in a row around its edge and my Chinese white below them on one side toward the bottom. For my transparent palette, I use an ordinary moist sixteen-pan color-box, being always careful never to blur it with even a brush stroke of body color (Chinese white); and for my opaque work, an oval white metal palette, with thumb-hole, and indentations around its edge into which I squeeze the contents of my moist water-color tubes, my Chinese white being heaped up in a little mound near my thumb.

The result may be seen in some of the illustrations accompanying this text.



CHARCOAL

Before going into the value of charcoal as a medium in the recording of the various aspects of nature in black-and-white, it will be wise to review the several mediums in general use, namely, etching, pen and ink, lithographic crayon, and charcoal gray in connection with Chinese white; it will be well, also, to note the various mechanical processes in use for the reproductions of these drawings on white paper.

Those of you who have seen the early illustration in Harper's Magazine of the late fifties will recall the work of "Porte Crayon" (Colonel Strother), drawn on wood by the artist and engraved by such men as A. V. S. Anthony and John Sartain. You will also recall how some twenty-five years later an effective and marvellous change took place in the quality of these reproductions, being by far the most unique and rapid in the history of any art of the century. In less than ten years, between 1876 and 1886, came this sudden awakening to the necessity of better work from the burin, followed by an enormous commercial demand for such results, until by common consent the American engraver first rivalled and then surpassed the world. If we search for the cause we find that, like many other inventions developing others of still greater importance, as the telegraph developed the telephone, electric light, and the phonograph, this marvellous change is due entirely to the discovery and possibility of photographing direct from the original upon the boxwood itself, producing with an instant's exposure a complete reproduction of the original drawing, with all its texture, gradation, and quality, not only doing away entirely with the intermediate draftsman, as was the case with "Porte Crayon's" work, but obtaining a result impossible to the most skilful of the artists on wood of his day.

Another important feature in the discovery was the possibility of reducing a drawing to any size required, thus fitting it exactly to the necessities of the printed page. Before these discoveries, as you well know, from the time of Albert Duerer down to Linton and engravers of his school, the original drawing of the painter was redrawn by the use of lead-pencil, Chinese white, and India-ink washes upon the wood itself, giving as close an imitation as possible of the original. Some painters—illustrators, if you please, in those early days—in fact, made their original designs direct upon the wood. The effects of light and dark were then cut out in lines, curved or otherwise, with suitable cross-hatchings, as the necessity of the drawing required, or left comparatively untouched.

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.

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, 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.

When the Tile Club was formed in New York it consisted of a group of men (I was its scullion for seven years, its entire life, and, being thus an honored servant, was familiar with its many affairs) who represented at the time the leading spirits of the different schools: William M. Chase, Arthur Quartley, Swain Gifford, A. B. Frost, George Maynard, Frank D. Millet, Alden Weir, Edwin A. Abbey, Charles S. Reinhart, Elihu Vedder, William Gedney Bunce, Stanford White, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and one or two others. The club was limited to eighteen members, there being twelve painters and six musicians. If I am not very much mistaken, not a single painter of this group had ever drawn upon a wooden block, and yet each one of them, as the records of our periodicals have shown, was admirably qualified for illustrative work. At the time, the illustrations in Harper's and Scribner's, compared with the illustrations of to-day, reminded one of the early primers of the New England schools, with their improbable trees and impossible animals.

I remember distinctly the first meeting of the Tile Club, in which the subject of drawing for Scribner's Monthly was first mooted, and I do not believe I overestimate the importance that the position of the club, taken at that time, has had and still has—not as a club, for it was dissolved some years back—in the influence its personal art has wielded upon the printed pages of the day.

The first magazine article was the account of a trip that we made down on Long Island, illustrated by the club, entitled "The Tile Club Abroad," each man choosing his own medium—oil, charcoal, water-color, etc.; the results of which were published in the then Scribner's Magazine, and engraved by a group of men who afterward placed the art of wood-engraving in America side by side with the best efforts ever obtained by the English and German periodicals, and one of whom, Yuengling, took the gold medal of excellence both in Paris and Munich.

With this difference in textures, the difference between a drawing in charcoal and one made in oil, it became necessary to invent new modes of expression with the burin. A simple line which might express the round of the cheek or the fulness of the arm, and which would answer for the uniform drapery of the old school, would not serve to explain the subtle quality of one of Quartley's moonrises or the vigor and dash of one of Chase's outdoor figures sketched in oil.

So it came about that in searching to express these new qualities, never before seen upon a block, the technic of the new school was developed.

The next important result was the creating not only of a new school of wood-engraving, but of an entirely distinct department for art workers, the school of the illustrator; and so we have Abbey, Reinhart, Quartley, and, later, Church, Smedley, Dana Gibson, and dozens of others whose names will readily come to your minds and of whose careers I have already spoken.

But the burin was too slow, even in the hands of the skilful engraver, for the necessities of the hour. It was also too expensive; a drawing which a magazine would pay the artist $50 for would often cost $200 to engrave in the hands of a master like Yuengling or Cole. Again photography was called into use. The "straight process," so called, of the phototype printer, reproducing a pen-and-ink line drawing on a zinc plate which could be immediately run through a Hoe process, was perfected. You all remember, doubtless, an illustrated daily published in New York, called The Daily Graphic, illustrated by this process. This process, however, was only possible where pen-and-ink drawing or a very coarse lead-pencil drawing was used in making the original, because it was necessary that spaces of white should exist between each separate line or mass of black. This process, however, utterly failed in all India-ink drawings. Where these drawings covered the white of the paper, if ever so delicately, the result was a dense black upon the plate.

Then came a race between all the inventors interested in such discoveries, both here and abroad—a race to perfect a process which would produce from such wash drawings an exact reproduction upon the printed page, giving all the gradations of the original and doing away not only with the draftsman but with the wood-engraver. To Professor Vogel, of Berlin, I believe—although an American, Ives, claims it, and some say justly—is due the credit of perfecting what is known as the half-tone, or screen process: many others claim that Herr Meisenbach first perfected this most important discovery.

As the wash drawing had no lines, and as it is absolutely necessary that photo-printing should have lines—that is, clean spaces of black between white—these lines were supplied by laying a sheet of plate glass over the drawing upon which the lines were cut by a diamond and through which the original could be clearly seen. Of course, the light falling upon the edges of these several diamond cuttings made little points of brilliant white between which the several blacks and whites could be seen. This, without going very much further into the mechanical details, is the basis of the half-tone process.

While this had its value, it had also its demerits, one of which was the total extermination of the American wood-engraver, except for a few men like Timothy Cole, whose genius and skill made it possible for them, by the excellence of their work, to survive the great difference between twenty cents a square inch for transferring on zinc and twenty dollars a square inch for engraving on wood.

There are, however, results in the half-tone process which I hold are infinitely superior to the work of any wood-engraver of the old school. While it is true that there is no really positive rich dark for any part of the composition—for, of course, the light specks are everywhere, thus lightening and graying the dark—and while we lose by such defects the richness of wood-engraving, we also get the exact touch of the artist in no more and no less a degree, particularly no less. How often have I seen an exquisite drawing of Abbey's or Du Maurier's almost ruined by the slipping of the burin the one-thousandth part of an inch! How infinitely superior are the originals of John Leech's immortal caricatures in Punch to the reproductions, all because the shadow line under an eye, or that little dot which denotes the difference between amusement and curiosity in the expression of a face, has been cut away the thousandth part of a hair-line! The processes of the half-tone, however, are ever accurate and the reproduction given you is exact—with the foregoing restrictions.

Then again, in landscape effects and in some portraits, the uniformity of tone, the certainty of every touch being reproduced, the exact balancing from dark to light, all result in better work than can be done by the ordinary engraver.

And yet, with all the half-tone's advantages, I must admit that Yuengling's head of the "Professor" and many of his wood-cuts in an illustrated edition of "Sir Launfal," published some years ago, and much of the work of such masters as Cole, Wolff, Yuengling, and others, stand as monuments for all time to the skill of hands that no process will ever excel, for they put into it that something which the bath of vitriol will never furnish, a bite of the acid of their own genius.

Since these earlier days a new departure has been made, until now reproductive processes have been brought to such perfection that there is hardly any texture or color scheme that can not be matched. Note, if you will, Howard Pyle in color—rich in yellows and reds, with black and white spaces as an enrichment. Note also A. I. Keller's transparent work in charcoal gray. Note particularly the reproductions in the magazines of F. Walter Taylor's drawings in charcoal, in which the very texture of the coal is preserved. And, if you will permit me, note the half tones of my own charcoal drawings now on exhibition in the adjoining gallery. So perfect is the reproduction that one is careful not to smudge his fingers in turning the leaves of the publication in which they are printed.

This being the case (and the printers must be thanked as well for their share in the results), I earnestly hope that some of my brother illustrators—the more the merrier—will seriously consider the value of charcoal as a medium for illustrative work. There is no subject, I assure you, that the sun shines on or its light filters into, or any phase of nature, be it rain or storm, fog, snow, or mist, including marines, figures, sunrises and sunsets, blazing heat and cool, transparent shadows, that cannot be visualized by it.

I hold, too, that by its use qualities can be obtained impossible to be found in either etchings, lithographic crayon, wash, or pen and ink—especially the velvet of its black.

Charcoal is the unhampered, the free, the personal individual medium. No water, no oil, no palette, no squeezing of tubes or wiping of tints; no scraping, scumbling, or other dilatory and exasperating necessities. Just a piece of coal, the size of a cigarette, held flat between the thumb and the forefinger, a sheet of paper, and then "let go." Yes, one thing more—care must be taken to have this forefinger fastened to a sure, knowing, and fearless hand, worked by an arm which plays easily and loosely in a ball-socket set firmly near your backbone. To carry out the metaphor, the steam of your enthusiasm, kept in working order by the safety-valve of your experience, and regulated by the ball-governor of your art knowledge—such as composition, drawing, mass, light and dark—is then turned on.

Now you can "let go," and in the fullest sense, or you will never arrive. My own experience has taught me that if an outdoor charcoal sketch, covering and containing all a man can see—and he should neither record nor explain anything more—is not completely finished in two hours it cannot be finished by the same man in two days or two years.

For a drawing in charcoal is really a record of a man's temperament. It represents pre-eminently the personality of the individual—his buoyancy, his perfect health, the quickness of his gestures. All these are shown in the way he strikes his canvas—compelling it to talk back to him. So also does it record the man's timidity, his want of confidence in himself, his fear of spoiling what he has already done, forgetting that a nickel will buy him another sheet of paper.

Courage, too, is a component part—not to be afraid to strike hard and fast, belaboring the canvas as a pugilist belabors an opponent, beating nature into shape.



As for the potterer and the niggler, the men and women whose stroke goes no farther back than their knuckles, I may frankly say that charcoal is not for them. The blow is a sledge blow going from the spinal column, not the pitapat of a jeweller's hammer elaborating the repousse around a goblet.

Remember, too, that the fight is all over in two hours—three at the outside—the battle really won or lost in the first ten minutes, if you only knew it: when you get in your first strokes, really defining your composition and planting your big high light and your big dark. It is all right after that. You can taper off on the little lights and darks, saving your wind, so to speak, sparring for your next supplementary light and dark.

Remember, too, that when the fight is over you must not spoil what you have done by repetition or finish. Let it alone. You may not have covered everything you wanted to express, but if you have smashed in the salient features, the details will look out at you when you least expect it. There are a thousand cross lights and untold mysteries in Rembrandt's shadows which his friends failed to see when his canvas left his studio. It is the unexpressed which is often most interesting. Meissonier tells his story to the end. So do Vibert, Rico, and the whole realistic school. Corot gives you a mass of foliage, no single leaf expressed, but beneath it lurk great, cavernous shadows in which nymphs and satyrs play hide-and-seek.

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. That there are some subjects better than others, I will admit. For me, London, its streets and buildings, come first, especially if it be raining; and there is no question that it does rain once in a while in London, making the wet streets and sidewalks glisten under its silver-gray sky, little rivulets of molten silver escaping everywhere. When with these you get a background—and I always do—of flat masses of quaint buildings, all detail lost in the haze and mist of smoke, your delight rises to enthusiasm. Nowhere else in the world are the "values" so marvellously preserved. You start your foreground with, say, a figure, or an umbrella, or a cab, expressed in a stroke of jet-black, and the perspective instantly fades into grays of steeple, dome, or roof, so delicate and vapory that there is hardly a shade of difference between earth and sky. Or you stroll into some old church or cathedral, as I did last summer when I found myself in that most wonderful of all English churches—and I say it deliberately—St. Bartholomew's the Great, over in Smithfield.

Other churches have I studied in my wanderings; many and various cathedrals, basilicas, and mosques have delighted me. I know the color and the value of tapestry and rich hangings; of mosaics, porphyry, and verd-antiques; of fluted alabaster and the delicate tracery of the arabesque; but the velvety quality of London soot when applied to the rough surfaces of rudely chiselled stones, and the soft loveliness gained by grime and smoke, came to me as a revelation.

This rich black which, like a tropical fungus, grows and spreads through St. Bartholomew's interior, hiding under its soft, caressing touch the rough angles and insistent edges of the Norman, is what the bloom is to the grape, what the dark purpling is to the plum, mellowing from sight the brilliancy of the under skin. And there are wide coverings of it, too, in this wonderful church, as if some master decorator had wielded a great coal and at one sweep of his hand had rubbed its glorious black into every crevice, crack, and cranny of wall, column, and arch.

Certain it is that no other medium than the one used could give any idea of its charm. Neither oil, water-color, nor pastel will transmit it—no, nor the dry-point or bitten plate. The soot of centuries, the fogs of countless Novembers, the smoke of a thousand firesides were the pigments which the Master Painter set upon his palette in the task of giving us one exquisitely beautiful interior wholly in black-and-white.

So it was in the Temple when I was searching for Mr. Thackeray's haunts.

What of alterations, scrapings, patchings up, and fillings in have taken place in these various courts and their surroundings, I did not trouble myself to find out. Nothing looks new in London after the fogs and soot of one winter have wreaked their vengeance upon it. Whether the facade is of brick, stone, or stucco depends entirely on the thickness of the soot, packed in or scoured clean by winds and rains, or whether the surface is ebony or marble, as may be seen in many of the statues on Burlington House, where a head, arm, or part of a pedestal chair has been kept white by constant douches.

As for me, I was glad that these old haunts of Mr. Thackeray and his characters are even blacker to-day than they might have been in his time. For the soot and grime become them, and London as well, for that matter. A great impressionist, this smoke-smudger and wiper-out of detail, this believer in masses and simple surfaces, this destroyer of gingerbread ornaments, petty mouldings, and cheap flutings!

* * * * *

And now for a few practical data as to my own way of handling the coal, which may be of value as coming from one who has profited these many years by its infinite possibilities.



The paper is the same I use in my water-colors, a delicate, gray, double-thick charcoal paper, laid in parallel ribs, if I may so express it, and having sufficient body and tooth to catch and hold the faintest touch or the strongest stroke of the coal. The gray of this paper serves as the middle tone of the drawing, the different gradations of black in the coal giving the darks and the careful use of white chalks the high lights.

These gradations are obtained by the use of a few simple processes, by which various textures can be given, starting, for instance, from or near the foreground, where the grit of the charcoal is used to bring the nearer details into clear relief, the several larger gradations and textures giving aerial perspectives being produced by a broad sweep of the hand, forcing the grit of the coal into the crevices of the paper, the result being what I may term the first plane or nearest atmospheric value; the house a square away, if you please—provided the subject is a street—being the second plane.

Beyond this, farther down the street, is found, it may be, another house or other object. Now try your thumb, rubbing your hand-smoothed charcoal into a finer and closer mesh: and for the still more atmospheric distances down this same street, use next a rag, then a buckskin stomp, and last of all a stiff paper stomp, each in turn producing a more atmospheric gray as the distances fade—the last, the paper stomp, being as soft as a wash of India ink. (See diagram.)

All these you may say are tricks. They are—my own tricks, or rather use of the means which lay at my hand, which long experience has taught me to employ, and which any one of you will no doubt better in your own handling of the coal.

These planes being secured, any light higher than the prevailing rubbed-in tone can be wiped out clean to the grain of the paper by a piece of ductile rubber. Any darker dark, of course, can be obtained by retouching with the coal.

The chalk now comes into play for skies, broad sunlight effects, or crisp, sparkling lights. The whole work is then "fixed," as I have already explained, by the use of gum shellac and a common perfume atomizer.

And with this condensed statement I must bring this my last talk to a close, remembering as I do that I have been addressing a body of students who are already familiar with one or more mediums, and who, with these few spoken memoranda and a finished drawing before them, will solve at a glance mysteries baffling to the layman.

* * * * *

BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH

FELIX O'DAY.

THE ARM-CHAIR AT THE INN.

KENNEDY SQUARE.

THE TIDES OF BARNEGAT.

THE ROMANCE OF AN OLD-FASHIONED GENTLEMAN.

COLONEL CARTER'S CHRISTMAS.

FORTY MINUTES LATE.

THE WOOD FIRE IN No. 3.

THE VEILED LADY.

THE UNDER DOG.

IN DICKENS'S LONDON.

ENOCH CRANE. A novel planned and begun by F. Hopkinson Smith and completed by F. Berkeley Smith.

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

THE END