A great etcher before God

Before Impressionism shook everything up, the printmakers of the French etching revival had two icons. The first was Rembrandt. Many etchers – for instance Norbert Goeneutte – started out by copying Rembrandts. Rembrandt’s mastery of light and shade, and his masterly use of the drypoint needle to add intricate detail to the etched plate, were the model to be followed, and his very name had a talismanic quality.


Lisière d’un bois Vendéen
Etching after Victor Hugo by Henri Guérard, 1876

The second icon was the writer Victor Hugo. Etchers found in Hugo’s prose the exact literary equivalent of an etching plate, deeply bitten, fiercely cross-hatched, brimming with tension and possibility. Artists such as Célestin François Nanteuil found a never-failing well of inspiration in Hugo’s work.

This veneration of Hugo reached its apogee in the short-lived weekly journal Paris à l’eau-forte, which was published between 1873-1876. In 1876 its editor, Richard Lesclide, pronounced Victor Hugo the greatest etcher of the century. He argued that, “It is not necessary, to be a great etcher before God, to produce etchings.”

Hugo was in fact a keen amateur artist – many of his drawings now hang in the Maison de Victor Hugo in the Place des Vosges. But he never did take up etching. To make up for this deficiency, Lesclide commissioned the great etcher Henri Guérard to produce two etchings after drawings made by Hugo while working on his novel Quatre-vingt-treize.


Une forêt dans le bocage
Etching after Victor Hugo by Henri Guérard, 1876

These are very powerful works, both showing woodland scenes. Guérard, as well as producing fine work in his own right, was highly-regarded as an interpretative etcher; he was for instance entrusted with the task of making etchings after paintings by Édouard Manet.

When Paris à l’eau-forte failed, Richard Lesclide became Victor Hugo’s secretary; the Boswell to his Johnson.

The back of an artist

Norbert Goeneutte, Le dos d’un artiste

This wonderfully fresh etching is by the unpronounceable Impressionist, Norbert Goeneutte. Well, I suppose his name can be pronounced, I just hope nobody ever asks me to do it. Published in 1876 by Paris à l’eau-forte, it is titled simply, The Back of an Artist. But which artist?

The answer is almost certainly Goeneutte’s friend and fellow-Impressionist Henri Guérard (sometimes called Henry, Henri-Charles, or Charles-Henri Guérard). Goeneutte often seems to have worked in Guérard’s studio at 4, rue Frochot, which is just off the Place Pigalle and overlooks the Boulevard de Clichy – another etching of Goeneutte’s from the same year shows the view from Guérard’s studio window.


Norbert Goeneutte, Le boulevard de Clichy

Both men were friends of Édouard Manet; Guérard was married to Manet’s pupil Eva Gonzales and, after her death, to her sister Jeanne. Guérard, one of the finest etchers of the day, also etched plates after Manet’s paintings, and assisted Manet in printmaking, amassing in the process probably the finest collection of Manet prints (now in the permanent collection of AIC). You can see his image in Manet's 1878 painting Au Café (in the Oscar Reinhart collection at Winterthur), in which he poses in La Brassserie de Reichshoffen with the actress Ellen Andrée.


Henri Guérard, La rue Chevert

I have quite a few etchings by Guérard, some in his early style based on the study of Rembrandt, mostly in his mature Impressionist style, as well as interpretative etchings by him after artists such as Corot, Courbet, and Whistler; the art of the 19th-century interpretative etching is a subject I’m going to have to save for another day, but Guérard was one of its masters.


Henri Guérard, Tête de jeune fille

Henri Guérard was describe by the 19th-century prints expert Beraldi as "having in his head an imagination that explodes in a thousand capricious directions". He was a great collector of prints, and encourager of other printmakers, and also an important figure in French Japonisme. The Hokusai etching below is almost certainly etched by Guérard after a Hokusai drawing, though the editor of Paris à l’eau-forte, Richard Lesclide, pretends it was etched by Hokusai himself.


Hokusai, Une partie d'échecs
etched by Henri Guérard?