3-028-682 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Shepherd Seated at a Fountain," facsimile of an etching by Berghem, 1870. 'To those admirers of Nicholas Berghem's landscapes, &c., in oil, who may be unacquainted with his etchings, the painter's mastery of the etcher's tools may be a surprise. The characteristics of his pictures will, however, be readily recognised in the fine etching which we reproduce by a cognate art. There is the same happy introduction of appropriate figures and animals; there is the same unfailing sense of the picturesqueness in the disposition of those figures and animals in relation to the other portions; and there is the same genuine pastoral feeling pervading all. Nicholas Berghem, like so many other painters of the Flemish and Dutch schools, was a well-practised and skilful etcher. He used the more advanced resources of the art without losing much of that frank suggestiveness which is the most essential charm of the etching-needle pur et simple. This present important example, well known to collectors, is signed and dated "Berghem f. [fecit - ie made], 1652," and is minutely described in Barsch's "Peintre-Graveur." It was exhibited in the Leeds National Exhibition of Works of Art'. From "Illustrated London News", 1870.