Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/194

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from daily contact and contemplation of his subjects in the great European galleries.

Elbridge Kingsley spent his boyhood on a farm in Massachusetts. He loves Nature in all her moods. As early as 1882 he engraved on his wood block a scene in black and white no less faithfully than the artist on his canvas and easel. His work is no less a creation than the painter etcher's. His especial distinction in the use of the graver lies in his beautifully delicate tones and in his treatment of masses. In his work as a translator he reaches the artist's motif and mood. He has engraved some fine blocks carefully printed on Japanese paper which have never reached the English public, but in his engravings after the Barbizon School of Corot, of Diaz, of Daubigny, of Rousseau, and of Troyon, he succeeds in catching the elusory styles of these painters which stamps his work as of the highest order. In the Century (1889) there is a fine wood engraving by Kingsley after Théodore Rousseau's picture, The Ravines of Apremont, and in the Century (February, 1891), Twilight after Rousseau is a masterpiece of wood engraving.

Mr. Timothy Cole represents another phase of wood engraving. He is equally interpretative, and he reproduces from the canvases of the old masters the qualities of their styles. The bulk of his work has appeared in the Century Magazine in his remarkable series of wood engravings after the old masters in the leading galleries of Europe. The Dutch and the Italian Old Masters were published in England by Mr. Fisher Unwin, and the Old English Masters