The guardian angel

Carl Larsson
Before the Mirror
Reproduction of an oil self-portrait of 1909

Carl Olof Larsson was born to a poor family in Stockholm in 1855. At the age of 13 he entered the first rung of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. On graduating, like many other young Scandinavian artists, Carl Larsson travelled to France, then the centre of modern art. He soon gravitated to the Scandinavian art colony at Grez-sur-Loing. There he met his future wife, the artist Karin Bergöo. Carl Larsson is now best remembered for the watercolours he painted of their home and family life in Sundborn; these, by recording and popularising Karin Larsson's radical stripped-down decorative schemes and loose aesthetic-style dresses, created what we now think of as Scandinavian style. This style has proved so powerful and enduring that it still prevails in the furniture of Ikea and the clothes of Gudrun Sjödén.


Carl Larsson
Empire: Dansös vid göteborgs Teater, 1891
Etching
Published in 1892 by der Gesselschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in the survey of international etching Vervielfältigende Kunst der Gegenwart

The 1997 exhibition at the V&A, Carl and Karin Larsson: Creators of the Swedish Style (with an excellent catalogue edited by Michael Snodin and Elisabet Stavenow-Hidemark), rightly gave Karin equal billing and equal attention, a shifting of gender perspectives that has proved equally fruitful in assessing other Scandinavian artistic partnerships of the time, such as Anna and Michael Ancher, Marie and P. S. Krøyer, Oda and Christian Krohg, and Sigrid Hjertén and Isaac Grünewald, whose work was explored in the exhibition Nordic Artist Couples Around 1900 at the Skagens Museum in 2006, with a short but informative catalogue by Margareta Gynning.


Carl Larsson
Dagmar Grill
Lithographic facsimile after a colour drawing, 1904
Published in 1905 by der Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in Die Graphischen Künste

Carl Larsson’s oil paintings and murals now seem rather heavy-handed and overworked, but his watercolours have retained their freshness and charm, and the same is true of his etchings. Larsson made 112 etchings, aquatints, and drypoints; colour lithographs were also made from a number of his watercolours. Many of the etchings were published by the Swedish Association for Graphic Art, Föreningen för Grafisk Konst. His original graphics have been catalogued by Bertil, Gunnel and Svenolof Hjert in Carl Larsson: Grafiska Werk (1983), which unfortunately I have not yet seen.


Carl Larsson
Skyddsängeln, 1898
Etching
Published in 1905 by der Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in Die Graphischen Künste

Carl Larsson died in 1919. Because of the widespread distribution of his work in cheap reproductions – books, postcards, posters, calendars – and the sentimental context in which those reproductions have been published, he is perhaps not as widely admired today as he should be for the sheer draughtsmanship of his watercolours and etchings. Nor is it sufficiently recognized how important a development it was that a major male artist should make the home and the family the supreme focus of his life’s work.


Carl Larsson
Karin och Kersti
Etching, 1904
Published in 1905 by der Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in Die Graphischen Künste

The tenderness and delicacy of Carl Larsson’s depictions of Karin and their children, and his celebration of the home as a shared work of art, are very striking in their acceptance of the feminine as a vital component of the artistic life. Although Karin Larsson’s essential contribution to the Larsson’s experiment in living was subsumed in the more public and commercial of her husband, there is no doubt in the work itself that this was a partnership of supportive equals.


Carl Larsson
Modellen ved kaminen
Etching with aquatint, 1908
Published in 1909 by the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Paris

The finer points of Pointillism

Pointillism, invented by Georges Seurat, applies colour theory to painting in a radical way, substituting dots of colour for brush-strokes, and allowing the colours to mix naturally in the eye. It’s basically the same as modern colour printing, where all the colours in a reproduced image are made up of dots of black, cyan, yellow, and magenta. A remarkably wide range of artists adopted the Pointillist (or Divisionist) approach, if only temporarily, and at least three – Seurat, Signac, and Cross – produced masterpieces in it. But I never expected to find a monochrome Pointillist. His name was John Jack Vrieslander, a German artist, born in 1879, After studying at the Düsseldorfer Akademie from 1897 to1898, Vrieslander went to Munich, where he lived from 1901 to 1905. Then he moved to Paris, where he lived for the years 1905 to 1908. It must have been here that he encountered Pointillism (still an active force in neo-Impressionism, although Seurat had died in 1891), and experimented with it in his etchings. Both of my etchings by John Jack Vrieslander depict Parisian scenes, and were almost certainly executed there. The influence of Seurat is strongly felt.


John Jack Vrieslander, Place de la Concorde

They were published in 1910 by Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst to accompany a short article on Vrieslander’s etchings by Ernst Schulz-Besser. Schulz-Besser writes admiringly of Vrieslander’s elegance of line and mastery of the distribution of forms. He remarks, “His technique, as applied to these two etchings, appears somewhat laborious, but the elaborate method produces a refined shimmering effect.” Unfortunately one of my etchings, Place de la Concorde, is rather discoloured with yellow staining from the tissue guard, and foxing in the margins. It’s still an attractive piece, though. Luckily the second, Jardin du Luxembourg, is in much better condition.


John Jack Vrieslander, Jardin du Luxembourg

John Jack Vrieslander’s career does not seem to have taken off, and he is now a virtually forgotten artist. Besides his etchings, he published a number of portfolios of black-and-white drawings, often of theatrical or lightly erotic scenes, such as Varieté, Schlafende Frauen, Rose Mirliton, and Paris. Beyond that, I can’t find out much about him. He died in 1957, having long outlived his brief fame.

Barnett and Claudia Freedman

Reading Alan Powers’ excellent book Art and Print: the Curwen Story (Tate Publishing, 2008) got me thinking about the exciting flurry of artists’ autolithographed books in Britain in the 1930 and 40s. The Curwen Press was at the heart of this, though there were other fine printers specialising in this area, such as the Baynard Press. But presses wanting to encourage lithography (and in the case of Curwen, pochoir as well) still needed publishing patrons to make it all happen. They needed connoisseur’s book clubs such as the Limited Edition Club, and most especially they needed Noel Carrington. Carrington, the brother of the Bloomsbury artist Dora Carrington, was enthused by the cheap lithographed children’s books published in Russia and France, and wanted to introduce the same kind of work to the British market. He did this with a three-pronged attack: as publisher of Country Life Books, as editor of the Puffin Picture Books series for Penguin, and as proprietor of Transatlantic Arts. I was lucky enough to know Noel Carrington in his later years, and now of course am full of questions I wish I had asked him…

Anyway, this subject is so huge it needs to be cut up into small chunks, so I shall today just write about two of the artists associated with Curwen and with Carrington, Barnett and Claudia Freedman.


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

Barnett Freedman was born in Stepney, East London, to East European Jewish parents. Freedman studied under Paul Nash at the Royal College of Art, and it was Nash who introduced him to Harold Curwen of the Curwen Press, with whom Freedman had a long and fruitful association. Working with the artisans at Curwen (and also at their friendly rival, the Baynard Press), Freedman became one of the pioneers of colour autolithography in England. Barnett Freedman was also a successful commercial artist (producing posters for London Transport, for instance), and his love of lettering and typography is evident. Powers calls him “the undisputed master of the lithographic book jacket, poster or illustrated book between the wars”. Freedman was an official War Artist in WWII.


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

I don’t have much of Barnett Freedman’s work, but I do possess what I think to be his finest book, the two volume Lavengro printed by Curwen for George Macy’s Limited Editions Club in 1936, for which Freedman created 16 gorgeously evocative colour lithographs. Alan Powers reproduces one of these (“One day it happened that, being on my rambles”), and notes that “Freedman’s plates for this book were his first to develop a full colour range”. Learning how to create the painterly quality for which his lithographs are celebrated caused Freedman considerable effort. In her book Artists at Curwen (Tate Gallery, 1977), Pat Gilmour quotes a letter from Barnett Freedman to “My dear Ruth”, the wife of Oliver Simon, Curwen’s chief typographer:


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

“The misery occasioned by the enormous amount of work I have had to do for Lavengro – the getting up at six o’clock every morning for three months – the journey to Plaistow in crowded and overheated trains – the faces of wage slaves and breadwinners, their coughs and sneezes, their smells, their conversations and newspapers. The close approximations of their bodies to my own (this sometimes was not so bad)- the rush and roar of the works at North Street – the bickerings of the printers – the inexperience of the lithographic department making me often leave the works at eleven at night – all these things and many more are completely mitigated and relieved by your most kind and delightful letter.”


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

Of Barnett Freedman’s Lavengro lithographs, Pat Gilmour writes, “The colour pages are very subtle, employing to great effect rose-pink, tan, gold, blue and green in charmingly lit landscapes and character sketches.”


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

Barnett Freedman is quite rightly held in the highest regard by those who are interested in such things. But his wife Claudia is almost forgotten. She was born Claudia Guercio in Formby, Liverpool, of Anglo-Sicilian parentage. She studied at Liverpool School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Working initially under her maiden name, she took the name Claudia Freedman on her marriage to Barnett Freedman in 1930. Compared to her husband, Claudia Freedman's output was relatively small, but works such as the autolithographed book My Toy Cupboard (undated but published in the 1940s by Noel Carrington's Transatlantic Arts) show that she had a talent equal to his.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard

Their son Vincent was born in 1934, and My Toy Cupboard, one of the gems of the brief flowering of British autolithograpy in the mid-twentieth century, is an eloquent testament of a mother's love (even including one of Vincent’s own pictures signed with his initials, VF). It was printed not at Curwen, but at C. J. Cousland and Sons in Edinburgh.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard

Lavengro was published in a signed limited edition of 1,500 copies, and I imagine most of those copies are still sitting on a shelf somewhere. My Toy Cupboard was printed in an unnumbered, unsigned, cheap popular edition of goodness knows how many copies. I would be surprised if more than about 20 are still in existence.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard

There’s one in the Opie Collection in the Bodleian Library, but that’s the only one I’ve so far traced in a public collection. It is a tiny book, 130 x 95 mm (roughly 5 x 33/4”), 16pp long, printed on flimsy (probably wartime) paper, and only about a millimeter thick.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard

It’s a stunning little thing, probably literally worth its weight in gold.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard

Some forgotten post-Impressionists

All the etchings below were published by the revue of art and literature L’Artiste in the 1890s. L’Artiste had been going since 1831, and had been a second home to Delacroix and Baudelaire, and the staunch champion of the Barbizon School of artists. It ceased publication in 1904. Received opinion has it that by the 1890s the journal was in terminal decline, but at least in terms of the quality of the original graphics I believe this to be a harsh judgement. The original plates published in the 1890s – mostly etchings or lithographs – represent the current artistic movements of Symbolism and post-Impressionism with remarkable images, many by artists who are hardly remembered at all today. The major names contributing original work in these years are Félicien Rops (see my last post), Rops’ pupil Louis Legrand (about whom I’ll write separately), Henri Fantin-Latour, Charles Cottet, Alexandre Lunois, Edmond Aman-Jean, and Eugène Carrière. But for me the real surprises have been from the unknowns. For the first of these, William Julian-Damazy, author of a stunning impressionistic etching of the Place de la Concorde, I don’t even have a date of birth or death.


William Julian-Damazy, Place de la Concorde
Etching, 1892

Julian-Damazy is an incredibly shadowy figure. He was active from the 1880s to the 1920s, but I haven’t been able to turn up any background except that he was born in Paris.


William Julian-Damazy, La danse
Etching after Jules Chéret, 1892

François Courboin was born in 1865 and died in 1925. He seems to have been most active as an original artist in the 1880s and 1890s, after which he turned his attention increasingly to documenting the history of French printmaking. His Sur la plage is a beautiful little etching, harking back to the beach scenes of Boudin, which so inspired Claude Monet.


François Courboin, Sur la plage (Trouville)
Etching, 1892

Among other important works, Courboin wrote and compiled a massive four-volume Histoire illustré de la gravure en France, which was published between 1923 and 1929, the last volumes appearing posthumously. But looking at his lovely Étude of a Belle Époque lady with a chignon revealing a tantalising glimpse of the creamy nape of her neck, one can’t help regretting the triumph of the scholar over the artist.


François Courboin, Étude
Drypoint, 1894

Eugène Decisy is a slightly more substantial figure in art history. Born in Metz (Moselle) in 1866, Decisy studied under Boivin, Bouguereau, and Robert-Fleury. His Étude is an original aquatint, a study for the aquatint Bouillie d’avoine (“Porridge”) which he exhibited to acclaim at the Salon du Champ de Mars in 1892, and also at L’Exposition Internationale de Bruxelles in 1897. The study shows a young woman in a traditional Breton headdress; in Bouillie d’avoine this same women is shown cooking.


Eugène Decisy, Étude
Aquatint, 1892

Decisy was a member of the Société des Artistes Français, and exhibited at their Paris Salon from 1886. In 1898 he was also elected a member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. He died sometime around 1936.


Eugène Decisy. Hiver
Aquatint, 1895

The name of Eugène Delâtre (1864-1938) is one frequently mentioned in studies of French prints, but generally as a printer rather than a printmaker. The Delâtre family were “taille-douciers”, running perhaps the finest specialist studio for printing intaglio plates on a hand press. Eugène took over the studio from his father Auguste.


Eugène Delâtre, Parisienne
Colour etching, 1893

As an artist, Eugène Delâtre trained under his father and under the artist John Lewis Brown (who despite being saddled with a name “si terriblement anglais”, was in fact a Frenchman of remote Scottish descent). Eugène Delâtre in turn taught printmaking techniques to a host of modern artists, including Picasso.


Victor Vignon, Nature morte
Etching and aquatint, 1894

My final artist rescued from obscurity is Victor Vignon. Of them all, his is the most surprising disappearing act, for Vignon, known for landscapes and still lifes, is one of the direct links between the Barbizon School and the Impressionists. Victor Alfred Paul Vignon was born in Villers-Cotterets (Aisne), and died in Meulan (Yvelines). Vignon was a pupil of Corot around 1869. In 1874-1876 Vignon was living in Auvers-sur-Oise, in intimate companionship with Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne; like them, Victor Vignon no doubt had the freedom of the etching studio in the house of Dr Paul Gachet, who collected Vignon's prints. Victor Vignon's close association with various of the Impressionists, including Renoir, Degas, and Guillaumin as well as Pissarro and Cézanne, led to his exhibiting with the Impressionists in 1880 and 1886. In 1884 Vignon's own solo exhibition was a great success. Victor Vignon was also a friend of both Theo and Victor van Gogh. Original prints by Victor Vignon very rarely come on the market; none has been offered at auction since 1995.

My carnal life I will lay down

I’ve always been fascinated by the Shakers, and so was pleased to come across this etching of a female Shaker at the piano, leading the congregation in song – A Handful of Gospel Love, perhaps, or Walk Softly; Simple Gifts, or Come Life, Shaker Life. It could be any one of scores of haunting Shaker songs. It’s a softground etching (vernis mou, in French) with additional drypoint, and I think it a very powerful piece of work. The combination of the elongation of the woman’s body, the spidery agility of her fingers, and the transfixed intensity of her stare, combine to convey a sense of spiritual rapture and otherworldliness.

The artist has scratched the placename Buffalo and the date 88 in the plate with the drypoint needle. He has also etched in his own initials, F.R. And this is where this post takes a weird turn, because the author of this scene of joyful austerity is none other than Félicien Rops, the Belgian Symbolist known for his decadent and Satanic images of absinthe drinkers, prostitutes, and lost souls. I wasn’t even aware that Rops had visited the USA, never mind contrived to visit a Shaker community.


Félicien Rops
Une pianiste Shaker
Etching, 1888
ref: Exsteens 274 iii/iii

When published in its third and final state in the revue L’Artiste in 1893 (with the alternative title Diseuse de psaumes chez les Shakers), the etching was accompanied by a letter from Rops dataed 12 avril 1893 to “Mon cher Alboize” describing his experience. I won’t transcribe the whole letter, but here is the most relevant part:

Les dames qui aident les Shakers à reproduire leur sous-genre, passent leur dimanche à chanter des terribles psaumes, tristes à faire pleurer les oiseaux, et qui célèbrent les futurs voluptés et les petites folies d’outre-tombe. C’est moins gai que le Moulin-Rouge, mais à Philadelphie c’est déjà de la “festivité”.
Je suis arrive, avec l’astuce particulière des aquafortistes, à pénétrer dans un de ces salons piétistes, et j’en ai gardé une mélancolie que la lecture des articles du joyeux Brunetière n’a pu dissiper, depuis.
J’y ai croqué la Chanteuse de psaumes, car cela se chante, ou bien on les dit “mélopéiquement” comme à la Comédie-Française, et cela n’en est pas plus jolie. Voilà tout!

The rather wonderful word mélopéiquement means, I believe, in recitative.

The source

After my recent post on the various Secessions, I can’t resist posting this perfect representative of the art of the Vienna Secession. I particularly love the way the lettering is incorporated in the image. It’s an etching with aquatint by the German Symbolist Max Klinger, created in 1889. Two years earlier, Klinger (1857-1920) had met the older Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901), and this etching is a kind of tribute or homage to Böcklin. Essentially it is a playful reinterpretation of one of Böcklin’s classic images, the 1875 painting Flora. But Klinger uses Böcklin’s painting simply as a starting point, finding it necessary, among other adjustments, to remove the lady’s clothes.


Max Klinger
Die Quelle
Etching with aquatint, 1889

So this is no simple interpretative work, copying the original as closely as possible; it is a completely new work of art, wittily and gracefully commenting on its model. The title is Die Quelle (The Source), and it is item 325 in Hans Singer’s catalogue Max Klinger: The Graphic Work. The lettering etched in the plate reads, Die Quelle, mit benutzung eines bildes von Arn. Boecklin. Which in my translation means, The Source, with apologies to a painting by Arnold Böcklin. Benutzung literally means “making use of”.

Two intriguing portfolios

I have two portfolios of prints, one issued in 1884, the other in 1888, both entitled, Vingt-cing eaux-fortes par les principaux artistes modernes. The publisher is A. Lévy at the Librairie Centrale des Beaux-Arts, 13 rue Lafayette, Paris.


The portfolios

Of course the idea of a portfolio of etchings by the principal modern artists working in Paris in the 1880s sends shivers of anticipation down the spine. But as we say in England nowadays, “Calm down, dear. It’s a commercial.” There’s nothing in either set by any of the names that would nowadays seem obvious. And the artists are by no means all French, for they include four Italians and two Spaniards.


Title page etching by Henry Somm

Still, they are fascinating collections. The first thing I realised about them is that many of the etchings date from the late 1860s/early 1870s (so even in 1884 weren’t as moderne as all that), and were originally published by Alfred Cadart. Cadart, who founded the Société des Acquafortistes (1862-1867) was one of the principal forces behind the French etching revival. Between 1870 and 1875 he commissioned and published a large number of etchings, using Auguste Delâtre as his printer. But Cadart died in 1875, aged only 47. From the evidence of my etchings, his widow continued his business for some time (at least until 1880, as her imprint is on an etching by Lhermitte from that year), but evidently by the 1880s the rights had evidently been sold on. In the captions below I will give dates for the etchings when I am sure of them, but there is still quite a bit of research to be done.


Edmond Morin, Averse sur le boulevard, 1876

Lévy was a bookseller and publisher with a strong interest in etching. In 1875 he published the catalogue raisonné of the etchings of Charles Daubigny; the following year he published a collection of etchings by members of the Barbizon School, under the title Le paysagiste aux champs. So he was exactly the kind of person to capitalize on Cadart’s back catalogue.

How many copies of the portfolios were issued is unknown, but they seem to be very rare. I can’t find any record of copies at the Bibliothèque Nationale (though I will admit I’ve never found the BN’s website very easy to use), or any others for sale. So I don’t know if 1884 was the first, or 1888 the last, or if any were issued in the years between.


Adolphe Lalauze, La balançoire

My view is that Lévy was simply offering his customers a kind of lucky-dip selection from Cadart’s back catalogue. The covers and title pages of the portfolios are identical (with an etching by Henry Somm), and both have exactly the same four-page introduction by Roger Marx. The introduction makes no mention of specific artists or prints, and there is no list of contents, so it seems that the purchaser simply got a blind selection of prints.


Antonio Casanova y Estorach, Andalouses, 1877

The two portfolios even overlap, with 9 prints in common; though oddly all the etchings in the 1884 version are printed on china paper pasted onto a wove backing sheet (chine collé), while all those in the 1888 edition are printed directly onto laid paper.


Louis Lemaire, Vase de fleurs

The 1884 portfolio is in much less good condition than the 1888 one, with quite a bit of foxing. Foxmarks are the yellow-to-rust spots that bloom on paper that has been kept in a damp atmosphere that allows mould to grow. Unfortunately they can’t really be removed. But it still has some interesting items, including two etchings by Paolo Michetti one of the foremost artists of the Scuola di Resina, the Italian Impressionists. They are two wonderful pieces, in which the central figures emerge mysteriously from a mass of hasty scribbles. To put this find in context, only one etching by Michetti has been offered at auction in the last twenty years, and that was in 1990.


Paolo Michetti, Cueillette d'olives dans les Abruzzes, 1875


Paolo Michetti, L'enfant au panier, 1878

The 1888 portfolio, apart from being in excellent condition, has another surprise up its sleeve. Instead of 25 etchings, it has 32, plus 8 duplicates. There are also two copies of the title page and the introduction, so maybe at one point there were 50 etchings in all. The treasures here are quite remarkable. There are two copies of Giuseppe de Nittis’s masterly essay in Japonisme, La danseuse Holoke-Go-Zen.


Giuseppe de Nittis, La danseuse Holoke-Go-Zen, 1873

There’s an original etching by Léon Lhermitte, an artist so admired by Vincent van Gogh that in one letter of 1885 Vincent mentions him no fewer that 8 times, ranking him among “the great”.


Léon Lhermitte, Épicerie de village, 1880

There’s an etching by the Barbizon artist Charles Daubigny, Le pré des graves à Villerville, Calvados.


Charles Daubigny, Le pré des graves à Villerville, 1875

There are three etchings by François Feyen-Perrin, one of the most popular artists of his day, famed for his depictions of Breton fisherfolk.


François Feyen-Perrin, Mélancolie, 1870


François Feyen-Perrin, Les filles du pêcheur


François Feyen-Perrin, Derrière un jardin à Veules-en-Caux, no later than 1875

There are three original etchings by Charles Chaplin, who taught Mary Cassatt, as well as an etching after Chaplin by Félix Bracquemond.


Charles Chaplin, Roses de mai, 1877


Charles Chaplin, Avant le bain, 1876


Charles Chaplin, Les colombes, 1864


Charles Chaplin, Les bulles de savon, 1867


Charles Chaplin, Le miroir (etched by Félix Bracquemond)

And there is a copy of Deux idiots mendiants by Alexandre Falguière one of only two original etchings produced by this important realist sculptor/painter; I already have two proofs of his other etching, Caïn et Abel, so I now have his complete catalogue of etchings. This is one of the few etchings I can date to the year of publication of the portfolio, as Falguière's painting Les nains mendiants, on which this etching is based, was exhibited at the Salon of 1888.

Note on the above, added 4 August 2009: I have been puzzling since writing this how the Falguière etching could possibly date as late as 1888, as it was printed by Veuve Cadart, and I am sure she had given up the business way before that date. The etching is signed, and I now realise also dated, in the plate - all in reverse. Looking at it in a mirror, the date is clearly 1876. So the etching came before the painting. As with Caïn et Abel, which received two quite separate printings, in 1876 in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and in 1902 in the Revue de l'Art ancien et moderne (which mistakenly believed the etching to be previously unpublished), so Deux idiots mendiants was printed twice - in 1876 by the widow Cadart, and in 1888 by L'Artiste, in which the title is given as Nains mendiants - Grenade. The later printing is also distinguishable from the first because it was printed by Taneur, not Cadart. Why it took so long for Falguière to exhibit his painting of this scene, I don't know. But at least the story of Falguière as an etcher begins to make more sense. Both of his etchings date to the same year, 1876, and each exists in two separate editions. This also accords with my theory that Lévy's portfolios were simply a means of shifting Cadart's unsold stock, and apart from Somm's title page did not contain any new work.


Alexandre Falguière, Deux idiots mendiants, 1876

Enjoy the pictures, and for those interested, here is the complete list of works in the two portfolios. They include three completely anonymous works, with no etched signature or printed credit. I append photos of these at the end of this post, and if anyone has a clue as to the artists, I would be very grateful.


Alberto Pasini, Abbrutimento


Édouard Toudouze, Woman fishing


Jules Lefebvre, Rêve


Frédéric La Guillermie, Jeune Bretonne vannant du blé noir au bord de la mer, 1874


Edmond Hédouin, Interior with mother and child, 1876


Célestin Nanteuil, Jacintha, 1866

Vingt-cing eaux-fortes par les principaux artistes modernes, 1884:

Anonymous
Two women walking in a wood

Camille Bernier (1823-1902)
Une ferme en Bannalec (etched by Edmond Yon, 1836-1907)

John Lewis Brown (1829-1890)
Washington

Alfred Louis Brunet-Debaines (1845-1939)
La rue d’Orléans à Pont Audemer

Charles Chaplin (1825-1891)
Les bulles de savon
Les colombes

Alfred Alexandre Delauney (1830-1894)
Tour de la Giralda, à Séville

Edmond Hédouin (1820-1889)
Interior with mother and child
Croquis d’une figure

Frédéric Auguste La Guillermie (1841-?)
Jeune Bretonne vannant du blé noir au bord de la mer

Adolphe Lalauze (1836-1906)
Le guet-apens
La balançoire
Le malade imaginaire
Cancalaise
À sept ans

Louis Eugène Lambert (1825-1900)
Envoi (etched by Edmond Yon)

Jean-Paul Laurens (1828-1921)
François de Borgia devant le cerceuil d’Isabelle de Portugal (etched by Edmond Yon)

A. Lefort (dates unknown)
Girl knitting

Francesco Paolo Michetti (1851-1929)
Cueillette d’olives dans les Abruzzes
L’enfant au panier

Louis Monziés (1849-?)
Amateur de tableaux

Célestin François Nanteuil (1813-1873)
Jacintha

Alexandre Protais (1826-1890)
La garde du drapeau (etched by Edmond Yon)

Jules Jacques Veyrassat (1828-1893)
Intérieur d’écurie à Samois
Men with horses at a farmhouse

Vingt-cinq eaux-fortes par les principaux artistes modernes, 1888 (duplicates from 1884 marked with a star):

Anonymous
An art auction
Girl gathering flowers

Antonio Salvador Casanova y Estorach (1847-1896)
Andalouses

Charles Chaplin
Avant le bain (2 copies)
Les bulles de savon*
Roses de mai (2 copies)
Le miroir (etched by Félix Bracquemond, 1833-1914)

Charles-François Daubigny (1817-1878)
Le pré des graves à Villerville

Alfred Alexandre Delauney
Tour de la Giralda, à Séville*

Alexandre Falguière (1831-1900)
Deux idiots mendiants (Les nains mendiants)

François Nicolas Augustin Feyen-Perrin (1826-1888)
Derrière un jardin à Veules-en-Caux
Mélancolie
Les filles du pêcheur

Alberto Maso Gilli (1840-1894)
Una tentazione

Édmond Hédouin
Interior with mother and child (2 copies)*

Adolphe Lalauze
Le guet-apens (2 copies, one entitled À Les)*
Ah! Tout doux! Laissez-moi de grace, respirer (2 copies)
La balançoire*
Le malade imaginaire (2 copies)*
Hét Éves Vagyok (this is the same etching as À sept ans)*

Louis Eugène Lambert
Kedélyes Fészek (this is the same etching as Envoi)*

Jules Lefebvre (1836-1911)
Rêve

Louis Marie Lemaire (1824-1910)
Vase de fleurs (2 copies)

Léon Lhermitte (1844-1925)
Épicerie de village

Ricardo de Los Rios (1846-1929)
Incroyables

Edmond Morin (1824-1882)
Averse sur le boulevard

Giuseppe de Nittis (1846-1884)
La danseuse Holoke-Go-Zen (2 copies)

Alberto Pasini (1826-1899)
Abbrutimento

Alexandre Protais
La garde du drapeau (etched by Edmond Yon)*

Frédéric Regamey (1849-1925)
Coquelin – Rôle de Tabarin

Édouard Toudouze (1848-1907)
Woman fishing

Jules Jacques Veyrassat
Intérieure d’écurie à Samois*


Anonymous, Two women walking in a wood


Anonymous, An art auction


Anonymous, Girl gathering flowers