same indication that engravers were degenerating into specialised craftsmen as was exhibited by the wood engravers of a later period. Too often a great cry has gone up from engravers that the public has been unappreciative, but this little peep behind the scenes shows that the engravers themselves were doing their best to strangle their own art.
There is in the various series of portraits produced in the first half of the nineteenth century a lack of strength and ruggedness in the delineation of character, this is particularly noticeable in comparison with line engravings of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century of the same subjects. The softness of effect in steel graving is more suitable for the rendering of portraits after Lawrence. The illustration we reproduce of Vandyck's portrait of Henrietta Maria, the queen of Charles I., by H. T. Ryall, is a very worthy translation in line of this celebrated portrait. (Opposite p. 208.)
In landscape there is an equally wide range of subjects for the collector of steel engravings to choose from. In the various art publications alluded to, and in the earlier volumes of the Art Journal, he may find steel engravings by the hundred representative of this prolific period. For the present we shall make no allusion to the great school of line engravers who worked under the direction and through the inspiration of Turner in producing masterpieces in steel engraving which distinguished the art as practised in the middle nineteenth century. The work of these men is dealt with in the next chapter.
The following engravers of the early nineteenth
