L'estampe moderne

In the 1890s various French publishers issued lavish albums of original prints. There was L’épreuve, edited by the artist Maurice Dumont monthly between December 1894 and December 1895; L’estampe originale, a quarterly edited by André Marty between 1893 and 1895; L’estampe moderne, published in five fascicles between November 1895 and March 1896 under the editorship of Loÿs Delteil; and the publication I am considering today, also called L’estampe moderne, published monthly between May 1897 and April 1899.


L'estampe moderne numéro 1, cover design by Alphonse Mucha

L’estampe moderne was edited by Charles Masson and H. Piazza, and printed and published by Imprimerie Champenois, Paris. Each monthly instalment came in a paper cover (which itself incorporated an original lithograph by Alphonse Mucha), and contained four original lithographs. Each issue cost 3 francs 50 cents if purchased in Paris (4 francs elsewhere), or you could subscribe by the year for 40 francs in Paris, 43 francs elsewhere. Subscribers were tempted with two extra lithographs a year, the “planches de prime”.


Girardot's Femme de Riff beneath its tissue guard

Each lithograph had its own tissue guard, printed with extracts from poetry or contemporary literature of relevance to the image. Most of the lithographs were printed directly on the main sheet of thick wove paper, but some were printed on various papers and then tipped on the backing sheet. In all cases the sheet is stamped with the blindstamp of a woman’s head in the bottom righthand corner.


The L'estampe moderne blindstamp

As this information is quite hard to come by, I am going as best I can to set out here the contents of the 24 issues of L’estampe moderne, though as I only have 21 of the folios (and am therefore missing 12 plates and one planche de prime) the information is going to get hazier towards the end. I’ll give the first number in full, but I won’t illustrate all 87 of the plates I have; for those interested they are all listed on Idbury Prints, along with biographies of all the artists.

Numéro 1, mai 1897


Alphonse Marie Mucha, Incantation: Salammbô (première prime)


Louis-Auguste Girardot, Femme du Riff


Maurice Réalier-Dumas, Corinne


Louis Malteste, Marchande de lacets


René Ménard, Automne

Numéro 2, juin 1897


Alphonse Marie Mucha, Salomé
Émile Berchmans, Renouveau
Armand Berton, Rieuse


Georges de Feure, Retour

Numéro 3, juillet 1897
Paul Balluriau, Crépuscule


Gaston de Latenay, Le parc


Marcel Lenoir, Invocation à la Madone d’onyx vert


Louis Rhead, La femme au paon

Numéro 4, août 1897


Gaston Darbour, Jeune fille aux coquelicots


Henri Héran, Fleur de mai
Émile-Auguste Wéry, Bretagne
Charles Léandre, Noël

Numéro 5, septembre 1897
Henri Bellery-Desfontaines, L’illusion
Antonin Calbet, L’inconnue
Maurice Eliot, Printemps


Armand Point, Légende dorée

Numéro 6, octobre 1897


Charles Doudelet, La chatelaine
Auguste François Marie Gorguet, Andante nocturne
Armand Rassenfosse, Danse
Paul Jouve, Le jugement de Paris

Numéro 7, novembre 1897


Marc-Henry Meunier, L’heure du silence


Henri Jacques Édouard Evenepoël, Au square
Alphonse-Jacques Lévy, Rabbi-Elischa l’aveugle
Jacques Wély, Fleur de Lande

Numéro 8, décembre 1897


Franz M. Melchers, La phalène des iles de la mer
Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, Belle d’antan
Lucien Simon, Les marguilliers
Henri Boutet, Dans les coulisses

Numéro 9, janvier 1898
Edmond François Aman-Jean, Sous les fleurs
Camille Bellanger, La blanchisseuse
Paul Albert Laurens, Le bain des nymphes


Gustave-Max Stevens, Solveig

Numéro 10, février 1898


Auguste Donnay, Artemis


Auguste Louis Lepère, Loups de mer
Albert Émile Artigue, Albine
René François Xavier Prinet, Manon

Numéro 11, mars 1898


Hans Christiansen, L’heure du berger


Robert Engels, Le passant
Jeanne Jacquemin, Saint Georges
Ernest Laurent, Soir d’octobre

Numéro 12, avril 1898


Louis Rhead, Jane (deuxième prime)


Henry Detouche, Dans les ronces


Richard Ranft, L’écuyère
Fernand Louis Gottlob, La promise
Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, L’espérance

Numéro 13, mai 1898


Gaston Bussière, Brunnhild
Étienne Dinet, Jeux de fillettes à Laghouat
Henri Fantin-Latour, Immortalité
Auguste Roedel, La romance

Numéro 14, juin 1898
Jules-Gustave Besson, Au pays noir



Adolphe Giraldon, Lutèce


Henri Le Sidaner, La ronde


Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Bal de barrière

Numéro 15, juillet 1898
Maximilienne Guyon, Maris Stella
Henri Martin, Dante rencontre Béatrix


Fernand Piet, Un marché en Zélande
Eugène Trigoulet, Le chemin de la mort

Numéro 16, août 1898
Eugène Delâtre, Kacia


Henry-Gabriel Ibels, Pantomime
Paul Leroy, Joueuses d’osselets
Manuel Robbe, Menuet d’automne

Numéro 17, septembre 1898
Jacques Baseilhac, La soupe à la chambrée


Charles Huard, Pêcheurs à la ligne
Jules Alexis Muenier, Le retour des champs
Paul Renouard, Avant le ballet

Numéro 18, octobre 1898


Henri Bellery-Desfontaines, L’enigme (troisième prime)
Louise Breslau, Fillette à l’orange
Maurice Desvallières, Porteurs d’amphore


Francis Jourdain, Les cygnes
Adolf Muller, Bouderie

Numéro 19, novembre 1898
Louis Borgex, Les sardinières
Jules Léon Flandrin, La chevelure
R.-A. Ullmann, Tristesse sur la mer


Angelo Jank, Le femme au perroquet

Numéro 20, décembre 1898
Fernand Cormon, Cité lacustre
Henri-Patrice Dillon, Polchinelle


Paul César Helleu, Parisienne
Victor Émile Prouvé, Le baiser

Numéro 21, janvier 1899
Firmin Étienne Maurice Bouisset, Bouquetière


Charles François Prosper Guérin, Sirène


Henri Jules Guinier, Nuit douce
François Joseph Guiguet, La lampe

The remaining plates are, in alphabetical order of artist
Donat-Alfred Agache, Impéria
Émile-Louis Bracquemond, Portrait
Edward Burne-Jones, Beauty
Raphaël Collin, Le depart
Marguerite Delorme, La poupée
Guillaume Dubufe, L’enfant
Jeanne Granes, L’aïeule
Eugène Grasset, Dans les bois
Louis Weldon Hawkins, Liseuses
Ferdinand-Jean Luigini, La servante
Luc-Oliver Merson, Salomé (quatrième prime)
Lucien Hector Monod, La voix des sources
Adolphe Willette, Valmy

Of the lithographs illustrated in this post, my own three favourites are Evenepoël, Au square; Ranft, L’écuyère; and Rhead, La femme au paon.

Poster boys

Pierre Bonnard
France-Champagne
Reduced-size lithograph reproduced by Fernand Mourlot, 1952

The lithographic poster was one of the defining artistic advances of the latter half of the 19th century, culminating in the wonderful graphics of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Pierre Bonnard was just making a name for himself in poster design, producing marvellous images such as France-Champagne of 1889 for the printer Ancourt, when he made the mistake of introducing Toulouse-Lautrec to Ancourt. As soon as Bonnard saw the wonders Toulouse-Lautrec was producing, he bowed out of poster art.


Jules Chéret showing one of his posters to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

But Toulouse-Lautrec, although he was artistically the towering figure of the French lithographic poster, was not the godfather of Belle Époque poster design. That title belongs to Jules Chéret. Chéret created over 1,000 posters. He also had his own lithographic printing shop, which opened in 1866 under his own name and from 1881 operated as a branch of the larger Imprimerie Chaix (the x is sounded, so it is pronounced something like sheikhs, I believe).


Jules Chéret
Folies bergères
Reduced-size lithographic poster, from Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1884

Chéret was born in Paris in 1836, into a poor family. He went to England to be apprenticed as a lithographer, and when he returned to Paris he used his new skills to revolutionize French poster design and printing. He retired to Nice, and many of his vibrant and joyful posters, as well as his rather slickly sentimental paintings, can be seen in that city’s Musée des Beaux-Arts.


Jules Chéret
Pan
Reduced-size lithographic poster, from Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1884

The large-sized wall posters created by artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Chéret were printed in large numbers, and quite quickly the printers started to reserve quantities for sale to art lovers. But there was a problem: the sheer size of these posters meant few people were able to display them. Chéret solved this problem by creating reduced-size lithographs of posters by over 90 Belle Époque artists, printed by Imprimerie Chaix and issued in monthly portfolios of four posters at a time, under the title Les maîtres de l’affiche. Between 1895 and 1900 Chéret published 240 of these domestic-sized posters, plus 16 special lithographs for subscribers. About a quarter of the posters were by Chéret himself, but other artists included Toulouse-Lautrec, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Félix Vallotton, Alphonse-Marie Mucha, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Charles Léandre, Adolphe Willette, and Maxfield Parrish.


Jules Chéret
La danse
Lithograph for the programme of the fête of 5 August 1900 at the Elysée Palace
Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1900

I have made a semi-conscious decision not to enter the poster market, but I have inevitably picked up a few along the way. From Les maîtres de l’affiche I have posters by two artists in whom I have an interest, Henri Jacques Édouard Evenepoël and Henry-Gabriel Ibels. Both of these artists also contributed to a similar monthly portfolio of original lithographs, L’estampe moderne, published from May 1897 to April 1899, which I will discuss in a coming post.


Henri Evenepoël
Anvers et son exposition
Les maîtres de l'affiche, pl. 116, 1898

Evenepoël was born in 1872 in Nice, to Belgian parents. His first studies were in the Brussels Académie, in the atelier of Blanc Gorin, but then he moved to Paris, where he studied alongside Rouault and Matisse in the studio of Gustave Moreau. Evenepoël’s art was influenced by Art Nouveau and also – especially in his organisation of space – by Nabis artists such as Bonnard and Vuillard. His close friendship with Matisse and other future Fauves suggests how his work might have developed, but we will never know, for in 1899 Henri Evenepoël died of typhoid fever at the age of just 27. When a devastated Matisse broke the tragic news to Albert Marquet, Marquet replied with a nonchalance that may pass either for peasant wisdom or extreme insensitivity, “Oh well, if people didn’t die, they’d have to be killed.”


Henry-Gabriel Ibels
Mévisto
Les maîtres de l'affiche, pl. 78, 1897

Henry-Gabriel Ibels, five years older than Evenepoël, was one of the founders of the Nabis, having studied with Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, Ranson, and Sérusier at the Académie Julian. Ibels was also a disciple of Gauguin. As a lithographer, Ibels benefited from the advice of his friend Toulouse-Lautrec, with whom he collaborated on an 1893 suite of prints, Le café-concert. Among his own pupils was the great etcher of Paris scenes, Eugène Bejot.


Jean Carlu
La République
Poster tipped in to Arts et métiers graphiques, 1933

The main point of difference between a poster and a stand-alone lithograph is that a poster incorporates lettering. In a great poster design, the lettering is integral to the composition of the image, and the letterforms reflect the artist’s aesthetic. In the 1890s, Art Nouveau typefaces wind themselves in sensuous curves around the image; forty years later, the blunt modernism of the type on Jean Carlu’s Cubist-inspired poster for La République announces the arrival of a very different, machine-age sensibility. Carlu was born in 1900, and only died in 1997. He trained as an artist after losing his right arm in an accident at the age of 18, and his many posters are distinguished by their elegant clarity of line and their mastery of form and space.

The fast rise and long slow fall of Édouard Chimot

Édouard Chimot
Sous les voiles du soir
Etching and aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

The career of Édouard Chimot is a study in how a talented artist can be overtaken both by changing tastes and by outside events. Famous in the 1920s, Chimot is now almost completely forgotten.


Édouard Chimot
La montée aux enfers
Etching and aquatint for La montée aux enfers, 1920

Chimot was born in Lille on 26 November 1880, and died in Paris on 7 June 1959. He studied under Jean-Baptiste Levert and Alexis Mossa at the École des Arts décoratifs in Nice, and then under Pharaon de Winter at the Beaux-Arts, Lille. The course of his early career is unclear. He seems to have first exhibited in 1912, rather late at the age of 32, and perilously close to the outbreak of World War One, which would cause a four-year hiatus in his career, so that Chimot was 39 by the time he really made his mark on the Paris art world.


Édouard Chimot
La fille du sultan
Etching and aquatint for La montée aux enfers, 1920

Both oil paintings and drawings by Chimot do come on the market, usually depicting female nudes, but he devoted most of his energy to etching, often for fine press limited edition books. The first of these, Les après-midi de Montmartre, with a text by René Baudu, appeared in 1919, but these etchings of “petites filles perdus” were made in 1914, before the outbreak of WWI. They record the last gasp of the decadent Montmartre of Toulouse-Lautrec.


Édouard Chimot
Le café-concert maudit
Etching and aquatint for La montée aux enfers, 1920

In his art, Édouard Chimot was always to hark back to the Symbolist style that dominated the 1890s but was already superseded by Art Deco, Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstraction by the time his own career was in full swing. He felt a special affinity with Decadent authors such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Pierre Louys, and those who followed in their footsteps such as Henri Barbusse, Jean de Tinan, and Maurice Magre. Chimot was particularly close to Magre, illustrating his books La montée aux enfers (1920), Les soirs d’opium (1921) and Les belles de nuit (1927). In 1924, Le Figaro rather flatteringly described Magre as “an anarchist, an individualist, a sadist, and an opium addict”, adding, perhaps less convincingly, “he is a very great writer.”


Édouard Chimot
Les rencontres dans le port vieux
Etching and aquatint for La montée aux enfers, 1920

What happened to Chimot during WWI, I do not know. Presumably he was called up to serve on the Western Front. But after the war, he hit the ground running. He already had the etchings for Les après-midi de Montmartre. These were published in 1919, followed in a whirl of activity by La montée aux enfers and Les soirs d’opium by Magre, Le fou by Aurele Partorni, L’enfer by Henri Barbusse, La petite Jeanne pâle by Jean de Tinan, and Mouki le delaisse by André Cuel, all illustrated with original etchings between 1920 and 1922. In 1921 Chimot also found the time to found a magazine, La Roseraie: Revue des Arts et des Lettres, published by the printer and publisher La Roseraie under Chimot’s artistic direction.


Édouard Chimot
La treizième année
Etching and aquatint for La montée aux enfers, 1920

The journal La Roseraie folded after a single issue, but it pointed the way to Chimot’s future career, as artistic director of Les Éditions d’Art Devambez (see my previous post on Devambez), where between 1924 and 1931 Chimot oversaw the production of a wonderful array of livres d’artiste, illustrated by artists such as Pierre Brissaud, Edgar Chahine, Alméry Lobel-Riche, and Tsuguharu Foujita. Chimot reserved some plum texts for himself, including Les chansons de Bilitis by Louys (1925), La mort de Venise by Barrès (1926), Les belles de nuit by Magre (1927), and Parallèlement by Verlaine (1931).


Édouard Chimot
La nuit
Etching and aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

During the glittering decade of the 1920s, Chimot was forming not just artistic but literary alliances, with writers such as the Surrealist Gilbert Lély, who dedicated the first publication of Ne tue ton père qu’à bon escient to Chimot in 1929. On 23 October of that year, Édouard Chimot must have felt gloriously launched on his late-started career. At the age of 49, he was a significant figure in the Paris art world, a generous patron of his fellow artists, and himself an artist with a public hungry for his late-Symbolist nudes, “soumises à leurs passions mortelles et délicieuses”, as the writer André Warnod put it.


Édouard Chimot
Devant la glace
Etching and aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

The following day came the Wall Street Crash, which wiped out the market for fancy limited editions. When the last of the books in production for Devambez, Chimot’s own edition of Parallèlement, was published in 1931, the game was up. That year a monograph on Chimot by Maurice Rat was published, with a preface by Maurice Magre, in the series Les Artistes du livre, adding the final full stop to the glory years of Édouard Chimot.


Édouard Chimot
Un hémisphère dans un chevelure
Etching and aquatint for Le Spleen de Paris, 1926

The rest of Chimot’s life seems to have been a struggle to re-establish himself, during which his art deteriorated and his reputation was eclipsed. In the 1930s he self-published a number of books in the vein of the Devambez productions, such as an edition of La Belle Carolina by Louis René Talon in 1936. The first such self-published work was the anonymous album of colour lithographs, Chats (“Pussies”), published “À l’enseigne de l’auteur qui ne veut pas dire son nom” (“At the sign of the author, who does not wish to say his name”). The 15 lithographs are all depictions of “sexes féminin”, featuring some outlandish fashions in pubic hair. It is the kind of production one can imagine some rich but vulgar connoisseur sharing with his friends over the after-dinner brandy and cigars.


Édouard Chimot
Les chants du bar
Etching and aquatint for Les belles de nuit, 1927

Chimot’s move with Chats away from the intensely-charged, almost mystical eroticism of his work in the 20s, towards the lubricious eroticism of the clandestine book market, with editions of works such as Pierre Louys’s scabrously obscene Trois filles de leur mère, heralds a real decline in his work. The effect of this was to be felt especially in the years after WWII, when almost all Chimot’s work, by this time facile and shallow, was to be aimed at collectors of erotica, with editions of texts such as Lady Chatterley, Fanny Hill, and Prelude Charnel, all published by Éditions Deux-Rives.


Édouard Chimot
Son amie
Etching and aquatint for Les belles de nuit, 1927

Chimot’s work in the last three decades of his life shows a sad falling-off from his pinnacle of activity and achievement in the 20s, though inevitably in an artist so richly talented there are flashes of grace and brilliance. In the last year of his life appeared an interesting-sounding work, which I have not seen, Les belles que voilà: mes modèles de Montmartre à Séville, a collection of 16 nudes, though whether the plates are reproductions or original prints I am unsure.


Édouard Chimot
Lady Chatterley
Dryoint for Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1950

It appears that after the Fall of Paris, Chimot took refuge in Spain, for his publications during the Second World War all appeared in Barcelona, and mostly illustrate Spanish-language texts.


Édouard Chimot
Nude
Lithograph for Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1950

There is a bibliography of Chimot’s illustrated books by J. L. Bernard, Édouard Chimot, 1880-1959: bibliographie des oeuvres illustrés, which was published in an edition of 200 copies in 1991. I have not yet seen a copy of this, but I would be surprised if its author did not share my view that the crucial decade of Chimot’s career was that between the end of WWI and the Wall Street Crash. It was during this time of frivolity and excess that Édouard Chimot created the haunting and compelling images by which his name will endure.


Édouard Chimot
Prelude Charnel
Drypoint for Prelude Charnel, 1957

Faire la modernité durable

Although Impressionism quickly spread and mutated around the world, one thinks of it in its origins as a purely French movement, the province of Monet, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Pissarro, Cézanne, Guillaumin, and Morisot, with Mary Cassatt the sole interloper from abroad.


Portrait of Giuseppe de Nittis by H.T. (possibly Henri Toussaint, 1849-1911)

But there was also an Italian among the group, Giuseppe de Nittis (known in France as Joseph de Nittis). Giuseppe de Nittis was born in the town Barletta in Puglia on 25 February, 1846, and died young at the age of just 38, on 21 August 1884, from a catastrophic stroke. He died in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, having moved to France in 1867 on the advice of the minor Impressionist Marcellin Desboutin, whom he met by chance in Florence. Restless in the confines of academic art, de Nittis had already been expelled from the Instituto di Belle Arti in Naples for indiscipline.

In Paris, de Nittis studied under two stalwarts of the academic old guard, Gérôme and Meissonier; at the same time he was under contract to the dealer Goupil to paint genre pieces. But his sympathies were with the newly emerging Impressionist aesthetic. Already in Italy in the 1860s de Nittis had become involved with the Barbizon-influenced group of progressive Tuscan artists known as the Macchiaioli, becoming friends with its leading light, Telemaco Signorini, and exhibiting with the group. In Paris, Degas befriended him, and asked him to exhibit with the Impressionists (before they had earned that initially-derisory name). Giuseppe de Nittis contributed 5 works to the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, though unlike the core members of the group he did not completely forsake the traditional world of the Paris Salon.

Giuseppe de Nittis had considerable success in France, and was particularly admired for his paintings of Parisian woman and street scenes, for his pastels, and for the subtlety and freshness of his etchings and drypoints, which are very lightly worked, with details suggested rather than over-elaborated, and daring use of blank space. The conservative Gazette des Beaux-Arts published five prints by de Nittis between 1876 and 1885, and a sixth hitherto unpublished plate in 1913. By contrast it was not until 1907 that the Gazette published original work by Renoir or Morisot.


Giuseppe de Nittis
Route de Castellamare
Etching after his own painting, 1876

I have (or, in the case of Femme assise sur un canapé, had) four of the prints contributed by de Nittis to the Gazette. The first was Route de Castellamare in 1876. Etched by de Nittis after his own painting exhibited in the Salon of the same year, it shows an Italian peasant couple sitting by the roadside, eating grapes. This realistic, even slightly sentimental subject was the artist’s entrée to the straitlaced world of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, and his subsequent contributions were much more clearly allied to Impressionism. Even in this less adventurous print one can see in such details as the man’s hobnailed boots the clarity of vision which de Nittis meant when he spoke, as he often did, of “the eye of an artist”.

In 1881 the Gazette published Étude dans mon jardin to illustrate an article by Alfred de Lostalot on “Les pastels de M. de Nittis”. I haven’t seen this plate. In 1884 the Gazette published two further previously unpublished etchings, Jeune femme and Vue prise à Londres, this time accompanying an obituary of de Nittis by Ary Renan, a poet and artist who had been a pupil of Puvis de Chavannes, and who was deeply influenced by Gustave Moreau and the Symbolists. By this time, the Gazette was beginning to catch on to Impressionism, and was also publishing prints by Félix Bracquemond, as well as etchings by Henri Guérard after Manet and the Danish Impressionist Peder Severin Krøyer. Both of the de Nittis etchings seem to me to be typical of early Impressionism – the portrait of a young woman as charming and fresh as a Renoir, the London scene as atmospheric and brooding as a Buhot.


Giuseppe de Nittis
Jeune femme
Etching and drypoint, 1884

Interestingly, in his obituary Ary Renan tackles head on the question of whether de Nittis should be counted among the Impressionists, who were still the subject of jibes and scorn. Renan regards the art of de Nittis as a kind of bridge between Impressionism and public taste. He writes, “But what will become more and more apparent is that, without knowing it, he rehabilitated the Impressionist school, of which he was not a member. Under the cover of his virtuosity, he was able to freely penetrate the mind of the public with one part of the doctrine of Impressionism – the good part.” (Sous le couvert de ses dons de virtuose, it faisait pénétrer en franchise, dans l’esprit du public, une partie de la doctrine de I’impressionisme,- la bonne; I think I've translated this right, but would welcome corrections.) In his work, Renan says, the modern movement was fixed without being slowed (fixi sans être ralenti), which I guess means that de Nittis established a form of modernity that was both true to the ideals of Impressionism and acceptable to the general public, without compromising the movement as a whole. His aim, Renan says, was to make modernity last (faire la modernité durable).


Giuseppe de Nittis
Vue prise à Londres
Etching, 1884

The following year, the Gazette published one of Giuseppe de Nittis’s last etchings, Jeune femme vue de dos (which I haven’t seen), and also an etching by Guérard after one of de Nittis’s London paintings, Une marchande d’allumettes à Londres.

In 1913 the Gazette published one last de Nittis etching from an unpublished plate, Femme assise sur un canapé, which is also known as Étude [Femme assise le torse dénudé]. The nude model in this delicate study looks straight at you out of the image, in a way that irresistibly recalls Manet. I believe the sitter is Léontine Gruville, de Nittis’s wife and frequent model, who survived him by 30 years.


Giuseppe de Nittis
Femme assise sur un canapé
Etching, published posthumously in 1913

A generous bequest of works by Léontine forms the basis of the collection of the Giuseppe de Nittis museum in Barlatta.

Americans in Paris

American artists were, understandably, latecomers to Impressionism. There’s a time lapse of about a generation. Young American artists who had gone to Paris to have their art formed by the classical wisdom of tutors at art schools such as the Académie Julian were often as shocked by their first encounter with Impressionism as were the general public. When Julian Alden Weir – then studying under the classicist Jean Léon Gérôme – saw the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, he was repelled. “I never in my life saw more horrible things,” he wrote. His teacher would have concurred. When the French state was offered the collection of Gustave Caillebotte after his death in 1894, Gérôme was one of those violently opposed, describing the paintings of Monet and Pissarro as “rubbish”. Although half of Caillebotte’s collection was eventually accepted, forming the core of the Impressionist holdings of the Musée d’Orsay, the other half was refused, and is now in the Barnes Foundation. In this short survey of some North American etchers in Paris between the First Impressionist Exhibition and the First World War, I include Canadian artists as well as citizens of the USA; some, like Donald Shaw Maclaughlan, are claimed by both countries.


George Charles Aid (1872-1938)
La Meuse à Dordrecht
Etching, 1903

The American Impressionist George Charles Aid was born in Quincy, Illinois. After studying in Saint Louis, Aid went to Paris in 1899 to study at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens and Jean Benjamin-Constant; his fellow students included Charles Cottet. George Charles Aid lived in Paris until 1912, sharing rooms in Montparnasse with the American Impressionist painter Richard Emil Miller. After a spell in Italy, George Charles Aid returned to America, settling in the artists colony at Tryon, North Carolina, where he died in 1938. Aid's etchings were strongly influenced by those of Whistler, and were brought back to public notice after a period of neglect in the 1977 exhibition The Stamp of Whistler at the Allen Memorial Art Museum. His etching La Meuse à Dordrecht shows a vigorous and powerful control of black-and-white.


Frank Milton Armington (1876-1941)
Bruges: le quai Long
Etching, 1909


Frank Milton Armington
Une rue à Nuremberg
Etching, 1912

The Canadian Impressionist Frank Milton Armington commenced his art studies in Toronto before travelling to France to study at the Académie Julian under Jean Benjamin-Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens, and at the Chaumière under Lucien Simon. Frank Milton Armington divided his career between France and Canada, exhibiting widely on both sides of the Atlantic. His wife Caroline Armington was also a noted etcher.


Clarence Alphonse Gagnon (1882-1942)
Vue de Rouen
Etching 1905


Clarence Alphonse Gagnon
La tour de l’horloge à Dinan
Etching, 1908

Clarence Alphonse Gagnon was born in Montreal. He studied under William Brymner, then went to Paris to study under Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian. He was elected a full member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1922. He spent most of the inter-war years travelling in Europe, but returned to Canada in 1936. There was a retrospective exhibition at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec in 2006 - Clarence Gagnon: Dreaming the Landscape.


Lester George Hornby
Marchande de fleurs
Etching, 1914

Lester George Hornby was one of the founders of Rockport School in Massachussetts. After studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, Hornby went to Paris to study under J.-P. Laurens at the Académie Julian. Lester George Hornby is particularly remembered for his technically-complex etchings; there is a catalogue raisonné by Peter Falk.


Donald Shaw Maclaughlan (1876-1952)
La ruelle du pêcheur
Etching, 1903


Donald Shaw Maclaughlan
Paris ancien: l’église Saint-Séverin
Etching, 1903


Donald Shaw Maclaughlan
Paris moderne: la rue Gustave Flaubert
Etching, 1903

Donald Shaw MacLaughlan is claimed by both Canada (where he was born) and America (his family moved to Boston in 1890), but in fact he produced most of his art in France (where he studied at the Beaux-Arts, Paris) and Italy. His etchings are catalogued in Bruette, Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Donald Shaw MacLaughlan.


Orville Houghton Peets (1884-1968)
Constructeurs de barques à Concarneau
Etching, 1904

Orville Houghton Peets studied in France under J.-P. Laurens and Baschet, returning to America on the outbreak of WWI, where he became a member of the artists' colony in Woodstock. There is a large collection of the etchings and woodcuts of Orville Houghton Peets in the Cleveland Museum of Art; Peets was born in Cleveland.


Maurice Sterne (1878-1957)
Coney Island
Etching, 1904

Maurice Sterne was born in Memel, Latvia, and emigrated first to Russia and then to New York. From 1894-99 he attended the National Academy of Design, studying briefly with Thomas Eakins. He first exhibited with William J. Glackens in 1902. From 1904-7 he lived in Paris. From 1916-18 Maurice Sterne was married to Mabel Dodge, the friend and patron of D. H. Lawrence. There are 8 works by Maurice Sterne in the Phillips Collection. For further information, see Mayerson, Shadow and Light: The Life, Friends and Opinions of Maurice Sterne.


Everett Longley Warner (1877-1963)
Montreuil-sur-mer
Etching, 1904

Everett Longley Warner was born in Vinton, Iowa. Warner studied at the Art Students' League in Washington and New York before travelling to Paris in the early 1900s to continue his studies at the Académie Julian. Greatly influenced by the American Impressionists such as Childe Hassam, Everett Longley Warner settled in the Old Lyme Art Colony, known as the American Barbizon. Many of Everett Longley Warner's etchings are in the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme. His work was surveyed in Fusscas, The Art of Everett Longley Warner.


Herman Armour Webster (1878-1970)
La rue Brise-Miche en 1900
Etching, 1906


Herman Armour Webster
La place de l’hôpital à Strasbourg,
Etching, 1913

Born in New York and educated at Yale, Herman Armour Webster discovered Paris and its artistic ferment in 1900, and moved there in 1904 to study at the Académie Julian, where he was taught by J.-P. Laurens. There Webster befriended the etchers Fred Chadwick and Donald Shaw MacLaughlan, and was enthused by the etchings of Meryon and Whistler. From 1905, etching supplanted painting at the centre of Webster's art. Webster specialised in city scenes and landscapes; in his love of every corner of Paris he rivalled his friend, the etcher Eugène Béjot, who had taught Herman Armour Webster at the Académie Julian. Webster also travelled extensively in Europe, usually with Donald Shaw MacLaughlan as his artistic companion. One of the finest etchers of his day, Herman Armour Webster achieved a high reputation both in France and in the United States, where he exhibited frequently.


Julian Alden Weir (1852-1919)
Petite fille
Drypoint, 1911

Julian Alden Weir was born at West Point, New York. His elder brother John Ferguson Weir was also a notable painter, working in the landscape traditions of the Hudson River and Barbizon Schools. Julian Alden Weir studied in Paris in the 1870s, enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1873, just in time to catch the first Impressionist Exhibition of 1874, and as noted above to be scandalized by the new art. It was not until the 1890s that Weir fully understood the Impressionist revolution, and incorporated the lessons of the Impressionist aesthetic in his own art. Julian Alden Weir is today regarded as one of the most important American Impressionists, along with his close associates Albert Pinkham Ryder and John Henry Twachtman.