. Prints; a brief review of their technique and history . 3 PRINTS new phase in art. All this seems a reaction, aprotest against the mental attitude, the setstandards and ideals of the eighteenth cen-tury. The vignette, so gay and graceful inthe hands of p]isen, Gravelot, or Moreau,had lost much of its esprit in the heavier,more sober style of the Empire. The classi-cal engraver was still in power, on the Con-tinent as well as in England, where Boydellissued, in 1803, his monumental series ofillustrations to Shakespeares plays in largefolio plates. On the other hand. Constablehad broken away f
. Prints; a brief review of their technique and history . 3 PRINTS new phase in art. All this seems a reaction, aprotest against the mental attitude, the setstandards and ideals of the eighteenth cen-tury. The vignette, so gay and graceful inthe hands of p]isen, Gravelot, or Moreau,had lost much of its esprit in the heavier,more sober style of the Empire. The classi-cal engraver was still in power, on the Con-tinent as well as in England, where Boydellissued, in 1803, his monumental series ofillustrations to Shakespeares plays in largefolio plates. On the other hand. Constablehad broken away from the accepted stand-ards of landscape composition; he paintedhis native countryside as he saw it. Eng-land frowned upon him for this heresy, buthis art was joyfully acclaimed in arises everywhere a buoyant, youthfulspirit, conscious of infinite possibilities, filledwith unbounded aspirations. The leaders inthe movement emancipate themselves fromthe sterile cult of precedent; they blaze newtrails into the vast unknown, in their search 124. H r O Kl O o 3 ECH THE NINETEENTH CENTURY for truth. Kants philosophy, Darwins the-ory of evolution, sufficiently denote thetrend of the times; in literature, this is theperiod of Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, ofManzoni, of Goethe, of Nodier, Balzac, Vic-tor Hugo. Barrye carries realism into hissculpture and such men as Delacroix, De-camps, and Celestin Nanteuil carry roman-ticism into French painting and Frenchprints. Men, these, whose imaginative soulsrebel against petrified classicism and formal,abstract beauty, and this protest of theyoung and ardent against the tyranny of theold and accepted order of things has beenheard ever since, — sometimes the voiceof coteries, sometimes that of individu-als: Constables, for instance, which helpedFrance in its remarkable awakening. Hissimple creed was faithfully transposed interms of mezzotint by David Lucas. Unfor-tunately these effective landscape mezzo-tints are so fleeting in their
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