VALE, SAMUEL (1808-1881), engraver of the Lakes (q.v.), born in that province and trained in the ordinary business of lettering and commercial plates. He worked there throughout his independent career, supplying trade designs as well as the landscape prints upon which his reputation rests. He held no conspicuous academic distinction. The plates travelled more readily than their maker, and for a considerable time were better known than his name.
His Passage Boats of the Lakes (1841), a portfolio of six copperplates, shows the discipline of his earlier employment turned to artistic account. Rope, mast, and the edge of a warehouse roof are drawn with the assurance of a man accustomed to make a small line perform a precise office. But the boats are not specimens arranged for inspection. They interrupt one another; a sail hides the better part of a hull; the nearest wharf cuts off an object which a descriptive draughtsman would have contrived to exhibit entire. Vale makes the spectator take his place upon the shore, with the incomplete view that such a place allows.
The most successful plate of the portfolio is the landing in fog. Its distance is made by diminishing the number of strokes, not merely their darkness. A boat can be present with less assertion than its reflection. The method owes something to the Western landscape school, and particularly to Fenwick (q.v.), but Vale's attention remains upon a working shore. His water is a surface upon which someone must shortly put a cargo. The breadth of the scene does not abolish the small calculations of its use.
Winter Harbour (1852), a separate plate, is his principal work. Two vessels lie within the shelter of a pier; snow occupies much of the foreground, and the black opening beneath a shed supplies the heaviest accent. A track leads towards the vessels, bends behind stacked timber, and is lost. Nothing in the arrangement promises an incident. Its strength is the relation of sheltered darkness to exposed light, established by marks so sparing that an injudicious later wiping of the plate can coarsen the whole. Good early impressions are consequently much to be preferred, though the collector's enthusiasm for an early state has sometimes outrun his attention to the actual impression before him.
Vale's late work is unequal. His increasing facility in the rendering of tackle and weathered wood led him occasionally to finish the accessories beyond their proper importance. He was most himself when a necessity of the craft compelled a choice; prosperity sometimes allowed him to postpone it. The criticism is a limitation of his rank, not a reason for withholding one.
He died in 1881. The place of his work within engraving (q.v.) is particularly useful to remember when the reproductive plate is allowed to stand for the whole art. Vale did not reduce a large painted effect to a cheaper size. He thought in the line, the hollow cut, and the paper left untouched. The Commonwealth possesses greater painters of water; it has few artists who have made so little ink suggest so much cold air. (R. Q.)