In France the triumphs which painter-etching achieved in the Netherlands had but a faint echo: Callot and Claude Lorrain have already been mentioned. Painters like Lebrun or Largillière left the graphic arts to the engravers; they viewed their skillful translations of painting into black and white as the work of colleagues, not craftsmen. We have noted the influence of Watteau on the “etcher-engravers”; he himself handled the etching-point at times, in a few sketchy plates; Boucher, Fragonard, and others dabbled in etching a little, nothing more. Jean Jacques de Boissieu and Jean Pierre Norblin, the latter an enthusiastic student of Rembrandt’s perplexing technique, should be mentioned as leading exponents of etching before the great nineteenth-century revival to which we shall presently turn. Now we must leave France, with the classical engravers at the helm, their formula spreading far and wide and with the vignettists busy on their portrayal of French society at the end of the _ancien régime_. As Watteau had shown us the customs of the grandfathers, at the beginning of the century, so Saint-Aubin, Eisen, Moreau, and other clever artists show us the life of the grandchildren: a society bound up in the pursuit of pleasure, blindly rushing on toward exile or the guillotine of the French Revolution. [Illustration: PLATE FROM THE CAPRICHOS Francisco Goya] Before proceeding to English prints, let us glance at the one prominent figure in Spanish etching: Francisco Goya. A painter-etcher of intense feeling, fiery, impulsive, he feels acutely the evils under which his country is groaning. In an art largely allusive and bitterly satirical, he conjures before us an abyss of human wretchedness, greed, and misrule in those strange “Caprichos” from which an illustration has been selected. In other series he shows with the same graphic power the hazards of the bull-fight, and again the fearful consequences of warfare. Filled with his thought, he compels the copper to express the intensity of his conception. His medium is whatever will convey the message, usually an etched outline, modeled into with aquatint in a bold sketchy manner. His few, rare lithographs have the same powerful characteristics, and it is this energy of expression which makes his prints distinctive and desirable. VIII ENGLAND