A walk along High Street

Eric Ravilious, High Street
Lithograph, 1938

Probably the most famous and sought-after English autolithographed book is High Street, with text by J. M. Richards and 24 colour lithographs by Eric Ravilious (plus two further lithographs on the front and back covers, and a wood-engraved title page). Copies change hands at very high prices – not because of Richards’ rather arch and superfluous text, but because of Ravilious’s stunning images. They seem to define the very essence of mid-twentieth-century Englishness. They depict a trim England in which everything and everyone knows its place. It is a vision, in fact, that already seems tinged with nostalgia, as if Ravilious could sense the imminent collapse of this safe, certain, ordered world. Though in one case, the cheesemonger Paxton & Whitfield in Jermyn Street, the shop façade and even the window display has survived to this day almost unchanged.


Eric Ravilious, Cheesemonger
Lithograph, 1938

Ravilious created the lithographs in 1936 and 1937, drawing directly on the stone in the studios of the Curwen Press, where he made his first lithograph, Newhaven Harbour, in 1936. The idea for an “alphabet of shops” came from the artist’s lover, Helen Binyon, and he first floated it to the Golden Cockerel Press, who were too small-scale to take it on. Undeterred, Ravilious worked on the lithographs anyway, apparently subsidized by Curwen, who were keen to encourage the idea of autolithographed books. Such books from France and Russia were admired and collected by Ravilious and his circle, and also by High Street’s publisher, Noel Carrington.


Eric Ravilious, Letter Maker
Lithograph, 1938

Noel Carrington was the brother of the Bloomsbury artist Dora Carrington. He was the publisher at Country Life Books, and was also to launch the lithographed Puffin Picture Books. Carrington was quite simply the perfect publisher for High Street Although not aimed at the same mass market as the Puffin Picture Books, High Street was not an expensive limited edition. It was published in an initial run of 2000 copies in 1938, and the lithographic stones were retained for future reprints. However the stones were destroyed by a German bomb in 1941, so the book has never been reprinted in any form – until this year, when the Mainstone Press will issue a new edition, with the lithographs reproduced by the four-colour process, and with unpublished sketches and watercolours for the project, and essays by Alan Powers and James Russell, under the title The Story of High Street.


Eric Ravilious, Submarine Engineer
Lithograph, 1938

The Story of High Street promises to be a hugely informative and well-researched book, if the articles by Powers and Russell in issue 15 of the magazine Illustration (Spring 2008) are anything to go by. For instance, Alan Powers not only identifies the rather surreal and unexpected Submarine Engineer as the shop of Siebe Gorman & Co. in Westminster Bridge Road, London, but also makes the delightful point that it was surely from Siebe Gorman that "Edward James hired the diving suit worn by Salvador Dalí at the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in the summer of 1936." It would be nice to think that this is the very suit depicted by Ravilious. Dalí nearly suffocated in it.


Eric Ravilious, Amusement Arcade
Lithograph, 1938

The idea of a book of shops was not completely original. Alan Powers points to F. D. Bedford’s The Book of Shops (1899) as one precursor; another is Faites votre marché by Nathalie Parain (Natalie Tchelpanova), published in the Père Castor series of lithographed children’s books in 1935.


Lucien Boucher, Enseignes
Lithograph, 1925

There is another powerful cross-Channel comparison to be made between High Street and a collection of 37 colour lithographs by Lucien Boucher, published by Marcel Seheur in 1925 with accompanying text by Pierre Mac Orlan, under the title Boutiques. There were 500 numbered copies of this, all on Arches, plus 20 hors-commerce copies numbered I-XX. Copies 1-4 each had 10 original drawings by Boucher, as well as the lithographs.


Lucien Boucher, La Pharmacie
Lithograph, 1925


Eric Ravilious, Pharmaceutical Chemist
Lithograph, 1938

There is some overlap in the businesses chosen – a butcher, a baker, a charcutier, a pharmacy. But there are also a number of shops in Boucher’s art deco vision of Paris that would never have occurred to Ravilious or Country Life. The horse butcher is one; the maison close, or brothel, is another.


Lucien Boucher, Maison close
Lithograph, 1925

Lucien Boucher, born in Chartres in 1889, was 14 years older than Ravilious, and survived him by 29 years; Ravilious was killed when the plane he was flying in as an official War Artist was lost in 1942, but Boucher lived until 1971. Of the two, Eric Ravilious has the greatest reputation today. Boucher is remembered mainly for the Art Deco lithographed posters he created for Air France. But although on a much smaller scale, Boutiques (and its sequel of 1926, Boutiques de la Foire) is just as lively, charming, and expressive of its era. Of all the 20th-century French prints I have acquired, these little lithographs by Lucien Boucher are among my favourites.


Lucien Boucher, Couleurs et vernis
Lithograph, 1925

Like Ravilious, Boucher has a love of the quirky and surreal; the two artists also share a love of letterforms. Where they differ is in their sense of composition and perspective. The vast majority of the Ravilious lithographs position the artist – and therefore the viewer – at middle distance from the shop, with attention focussed on the shop window, through which we peer as into another world. By contrast, although Lucien Boucher also loves shop windows and doorways, he readjusts his focus from subject to subject, now swooping in on the advertising sign of a shop specialising in artist’s paints and varnishes, now pulling back to show the sweep of the street in which a monumental mason is located. As for perspective, Boucher’s work is deliberately flat, with very little sense of depth; he doesn’t want us to forget we are seeing the world in two dimensions, not three.


Lucien Boucher, Le Manège d'aéroplanes
Lithograph, 1926

Boucher’s lithographs of fairground stalls and attractions for Boutiques de la Foire are just as delightful as his shops, from a merry-go-round for budding aviators to a modernist slide.


Lucien Boucher, Le Toboggan
Lithograph, 1926

I also have another set of prints by Boucher dating from the same year as Boutiques. These are woodcuts for Bérengier au long cul: Fabliaux du Moyen Age, published by Seheur in 1925 in an edition of 250 copies, each with the woodcuts in colour in the text, on Arches, and with a suite of the cuts in black-and-white on china paper.


Lucien Boucher, Woman and dog
Coloured woodcut, 1925

Some of these woodcuts are very witty in the way they play with the human form, elongating one woman to the same shape as her hound, and bulking out another to resemble her cow. This is a minor work compared to Boutiques, but it shows a similar graphic confidence, and demonstrates just what a versatile and talented artist Lucien Boucher was.


Lucien Boucher, Four men
Woodcut, 1925

I also have a single wood engraving by Ravilious, his contribution to the Cresset Press Apocrypha in 1929, The Song of the Three Holy Children.


Eric Ravilious, The Song of the Three Holy Children
Wood engraving, 1929

I don't suppose Eric Ravilious and Lucien Boucher ever met or had anything to do with each other, but I like to think of their art shaking hands across the channel, as each in his own way recorded and celebrated the shops and the atmosphere of London and Paris.

Sketches and impressions

Thinking about the natural affinity of the etching plate for the kind of quick loose sketches that one might fairly call Impressionist, which I discussed at the end of the last entry in the context of Jules Jacquemart, my mind turned to the great Dutch realist Jozef Israëls (1824-1911; father and teacher of the painter Isaac Israëls).


Jozef Israëls

Jozef Israëls was born into a Jewish family in Groningen. His parents wanted him to be a rabbi and Israëls had to struggle to realise his dream of becoming an artist. He studied first at the private Minerva Drawing Academy in Groningen under J. J. G. van Wicheren and C. B. Buys, before entering the Amsterdam atelier of the history painter Jan Adam Kruseman. In 1845 Israëls went to Paris, where he studied with Delaroche, Vernet, Pradier, and especially Picot. The influences of first Kruseman and then Picot directed him towards the Romantic tradition of history painting, but although he produced some work in this tradition (debuting at the Salon de Paris in 1855 with Le prince d’Orange s’opposant à l’exécution des décrets du roi d’Espagne), he soon abandoned this style, in favour of the plein-air painting he had encountered at Barbizon in 1846 and 1853, and in Oosterbeek, the Dutch equivalent of Barbizon.


Ferdinand Leenhoff, Les bons camarades
Interpretative etching after Jozef Israëls, 1879

From 1855, Israëls made frequent sketching trips to the little fishing village of Zandevoort. Fishermen became a favourite motif in his art, along with landscapes and scenes of peasant life.


Philip Zilcken, The sleeping child
Interpretative etching after Jozef Israëls, 1888

In 1871 he settled in The Hague, where he remained for the rest of his life. In his day Jozef Israëls enjoyed a huge success, both in Holland and in France. He remains one of the towering figures of the Hague School; the Dutch equivalent of Millet. Vincent van Gogh revered Israëls and Millet equally, often linking their names. In a letter of March 1884 he described them, along with Corot, Daubigny and Dupré, as “the great forerunners”.


Philip Zilcken, A young sempstress
Interpretative etching after Jozef Israëls, 1898

To call Israëls the painter an Impressionist would be absurd. It was the Dutch public’s appreciation of the realist works of artists such as Israëls that left them cold to the new art when Theo van Gogh tried to introduce Impressionism to Holland in 1888. The Dutch found the work “slapdash, ugly, badly painted, badly drawn, badly coloured, altogether miserable.” Vincent wrote to Theo, “that had also been my impression when I first arrived in Paris, my head full of Mauve, Israëls and other accomplished painters.”


Marcellin Desboutin, Les travailleurs de la mer
Interpretative drypoint after Jozef Israëls, 1889

My interpretative drypoint after Israëls’ Les travailleurs de la mer may serve to illustrate the solidity and definition of his work. Even though the drypoint itself is the work of the minor Impressionist Marcellin Desboutin, its brand of realism is recognisably pre-Impressionist.


Jozef Israëls, Enfants sur la plage
Original etching, 1879

But with Israëls’ own etchings, we are suddenly surprised by a lightness of touch that is decidedly Impressionist in its aims and its techniques, with all the details simply indicated by quick fresh lines rather than laboriously delineated. Israëls became interested in etching in 1870, and produced in all 30 plates, which are described and illustrated in the catalogue raisonné by H. J. Hubert, The Etched Work of Jozef Israëls. Israëls treated his etchings rather like sketches, printing them in small numbers to give to friends. They were not usually formally editioned, but occasionally Israëls allowed art revues such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts or L’Art, to print editions of them. This is the source of my proofs of two delightful etchings by Jozef Israëls, Enfants sur la plage and À Scheveningue.


Jozef Israëls, À Scheveningue
Original etching, 1879

Writing of the etchings of Israëls in L’Art in 1879, the critic Charles Tardieu describes them as a painter’s etchings, and deliberately links them to Impressionism by describing them as “esquisses et impressions”, sketches and impressions. The confidence and rapidity with which Israëls has sketched these scenes onto the etching plate gives a sense of intimacy and immediacy. There is also a real tenderness in his depiction of the bathing children and the resting fisherwoman. To my mind these simple etchings rank high in the art of Jozef Israëls, marrying the plein-air philosophy of the Barbizon and Hague Schools with the freshness and freedom of the Impressionists.

The interpreter's art

It’s hard to remember now that to a large extent both engraving and etching were once regarded as primarily a means of reproducing rather than creating works of art. I have an original etching by one of the acknowledged masters of the interpretative etching, Charles Waltner (1846-1925), signed and dated 1905 in the plate, entitled Portrait de Mlle G… C… (the pianist Germaine Chéné). This was only the sixth original etching made by Waltner, who had nevertheless by this time been a famous etcher for 30 years, and was the professor of etching at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. People were so accustomed to seeing etchings by Waltner “after” this or that master that the portrait of Germaine Chéné is wrily inscribed in the plate “d’après nature”.


Charles Waltner, Portrait de Mlle G… C…
original etching, 1905

Modern means of reproduction by photogravure and the four-colour process killed off interpretative etching and engraving, but at one time this art was held in extremely high esteem. The skill with which an artist such as Charles Waltner could mimic in black-and-white line the line, tone, and very essence of a colour oil painting was truly astonishing. I have at least 16 interpetative etchings by Waltner, after artists as varied as Rembrandt, Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Gustave Courbet, and George Romney.


Charles Waltner, Portrait de l’artiste
interpretative etching after Rembrandt, 1906

Probably the most technically astounding are the three large etchings of the Magi which Waltner made in 1876 after Rubens. Both the control and the freedom of Waltner’s line show the hand of a virtuoso. He interprets the art of Rubens with both a minute attention to detail and a swashbuckling vigour


Charles Waltner, Le Mage Grec
interpretative etching after Peter Paul Rubens, 1876

Waltner’s flexibility, and ability to find a true affinity with the artists whose work he interpreted, can be seen by contrasting works after the Old Masters such as Rubens or Rembrandt with his 1904 etching after Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, soleil voilé. Monet himself never took up printmaking, but if he had it is hard to imagine him making a better job of this etching than Waltner, whose soft and subtle plate, printed in sanguine, is suffused with the sun-laden vapour of a London fog.


Charles Waltner, Waterloo Bridge, soleil voilé
interpretative etching after Claude Oscar Monet, 1904

There were a number of masters of the art and craft of the interpretative etching and engraving working in France in the last half of the nineteenth century – to mention just a few, I have wonderful works by artists such as Henri Guérard, Gustave Greux, Achille Jacquet, Jean Patricot, Léopold Flameng, Eugène Gaujean, and Léon Gaucherel. Many of these men were also significant original artists. Sometimes this leads to a delicious fusion of talents, where the interpretative etcher would now be regarded as equally important as the artist being interpreted. Such is the case, for instance, with my etching after Jules Breton by Félix Vallotton.


Félix Vallotton, Le soir dans un hameau du Finistère
intepretative etching with drypoint after Jules Breton, 1889

Of all the artists working in this field, one was regarded by the French themselves as the undisputed genius of the genre. That artist was Jules Jacquemart (1837-1880).


Marcellin Desboutin, Portrait of Jules Jacquemart
original drypoint, 1876

Jacquemart produced many interpretative etchings Old Masters, which show a beautifully subtle skill and both lightness and sureness of touch. For instance I have Jacquemart etchings after Rembrandt, Fyt, Potter, and Ostade.


Jules Jacquemart, Paysage
interpretative etching after Rembrandt, 1877

Above all, Jules Jacquemart was famous for his meticulous etchings of objets d’art. For instance in the 1860s he was commissioned by the Louvre to produce 60 etchings of the French crown jewels.


Jules Jacquemart, Pendule de Marie-Antoinette
original etching, 1877

The catalogue raisonné of Jacquemart’s etchings published by Louis Gonse in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1876 lists 378 plates, to which could be added many more over the next four years. Considering Jaquemart died at the age of only 43 this is a serious oeuvre, and would be an important body of work if it consisted only of etchings such as the two reproduced above. But in fact, there is another, little-known side to Jacquemart’s work – a side that allies him, not as you might expect to the academic Salon artists, but to the Impressionists.


Jules Jacquemart, Chez Berne-Bellecour
original etching, 1875

My single example of this aspect of the art of Jules Jacquemart is the 1875 etching Chez Berne-Bellecour. It was made in the studio of the artist Étienne Prosper Berne-Bellecour, who was one year Jacquemart’s junior. The sitter is presumbably Mme Berne-Bellecour. Working side by side, the two artists each created an etching of the same subject. Sadly, I don’t have, and have never seen, that produced by Berne-Bellecour. But Louis Gonse had the two to compare, and declared Jacquemart’s version much superior, noting in particular its painterly qualities. Gonse writes that, “Celle de M. Jacquemart n’est qu’une impression à l’eau-forte, pour nous servir du mot à la mode, mais nous la préférons beaucoup à la planche plus étudié du peintre”: That of M. Jacquemart is just an etched impression, to use the word of the moment, but we greatly prefer it to the more studied plate of the painter. The word impression is italicized, to make sure that his readers pick up the reference to the Impressionists.

The First Impressionist Exhibition had been held only the previous year, in 1874, so Jacquemart was very quick to adopt the new style; he saw immediately how the sketch-like freshness of Impressionism, and its “less-is-more” aesthetic, could open new avenues for the etcher. In general the staid Gazette des Beaux-Arts was sceptical of the Impressionists, and I believe that Jacquemart’s Chez Berne-Bellecour was the first print published by the Gazette to be described as an “impression”.

Jacquemart’s premature death means that he only had four or five years to produce his various “impressions” and “effets”, and that they have been largely overlooked by art historians. But I believe he made an important contribution to early Impressionism, and that his story once again belies the easy assumption that the established Parisian art world was implacably hostile to the new art.

Lifting the veil

I recently acquired a set of lithographs by the artist Pierre Jacquot, about whom I know very little – but that little, I know in surprising detail. I know that he was born in Nancy, France, on the 15th of May 1929, at precisely a quarter past four in the morning.


Pierre Jacquot, Nostradamus, original lithograph

Somewhere on the web there is a full astrological chart for Jacquot, and in that lies the clue to the intrinsic interest of my lithographs. They were created to illustrate a lavish 1980 edition of the prophetic quatrains of Nostradamus: Centuries et autre prophéties de Nostradamus, présentées et commentées par Anne et André Barbault. This was part of the series Collection Gravure Contemporaine published by the art publisher Club du Livre, under the direction of Philippe Lebaud.


Centuries et autre prophéties de Nostradamus

The book was published in a total of 390 numbered copies: 22 on Japon nacré, 55 on handmade Auvergne, and 313 on Arches. There were also a small number of hors-commerce (not-for-sale) copies reserved for the artist and others who worked on the book, marked O.

Mine is one of these hors-commerce copies. It is printed on Japon nacré, the finest paper, and like the 22 numbered copies on Japon, it comes with a separate box containing two extra suites of loose lithographs: a signed suite on Auvergne, and an unsigned suite on Arches. The 55 copies on Auvergne had suites on Japon and Arches; the 313 copies on Arches were simply bound books.


The signed justification page

The 22 numbered copies on Japon also had an original gouache, which my copy probably never possessed (the whole thing is in near-perfect condition, and looks as it has never been opened or looked at). Each copy of the book was signed in pencil at the colophon by the artist, who signs simply Jacquot.


Pierre Jacquot, The Fool, original lithograph

So my starting point for looking at these remarkable lithographs – which were separately printed by Jacques Mourlot - was to try to understand their relationship to the text of Nostradamus. I was struck immediately by the strong astrological and tarot imagery used by Jacquot. I thought this was a rather clever solution to the problem of illustrating this incomprehensible text. The images are original and enigmatic, with a haunting edge of strangeness, almost as if the artist is peering into our world from some parallel dimension.


Pierre Jacquot, The Star, original lithograph

Then, searching for further information on Pierre Jacquot on the net, I stumbled across a site reproducing the same images, but describing them as a tarot set. Evidently the 22 main Nostradamus lithographs, not counting the frontispiece portrait of Nostradamus, were also issued as a Tarot portfolio, in 120 signed and numbered copies, printed on Arches. I do not know, but am guessing that they were printed by the same printer, for the same publisher, at the same time, as the Nostradamus sets. So far as I can tell the images were never published as a conventional tarot deck, but only as a print portfolio.

The justification page of Centuries makes no mention of the existence of the Tarot portfolio. I suspect this was a case of a publisher successfully killing two birds with one stone, and that once Jacquot decided to illustrate the Nostradamus book with tarot images, it seemed a good idea to also issue them separately to the tarot-collecting market.


Pierre Jacquot, The Tower, original lithograph

I’m not going to go into a learned discussion of the origins and meaning of the tarot, as it would all have to be stolen from Wikipedia (which has an excellent and informative article). I’m just pleased to have discovered Pierre Jacquot’s work, and intrigued to know if anyone out there has further information about it.

Neglected women artists I: Angèle Delasalle

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of blogs on neglected women artists. Of course the very term is tautologous: all women artists are neglected. Even those of the very top rank – Sonia Delaunay, Berthe Morisot, Gwen John, Winifred Nicholson – get only a fraction of the attention of male artists of similar stature. But you only have to look a little below the glossy accepted surface of art history to find women artists of real achievement and importance of whom, quite frankly, nobody has ever heard.

Angèle Delasalle is a case in point. She was well enough known in her day – I have essays on her from the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and the Revue de l’art ancien et moderne – and she merits a decent entry in Benézit, but she has been almost completely forgotten.


Angèle Delasalle

Delasalle studied under Jean-Paul Laurens, Jean Benjamin-Constant, and Jules Lefebvre. As an oil painter she specialised in portraits, landscapes, and female nudes, exhibiting at the Salon des Artistes Français from 1894 the Salon de la Société des Beaux-Arts from 1903, and with the Salon d'Automne from its foundation.

Delasalle first came to attention with history paintings, such as Cain and Enoch’s daughters in 1895, and the prize-winning oil Retour de la chasse at the Salon des Artistes Français of 1898; this was bought by the state and is now in the Musée de la ville de Poitiers. In 1899 a travel scholarship enabled her to spend time in Holland and England, where she absorbed the influences of Rembrandt and Turner. A 1902 exhibition at the Grafton Gallery drew from one critic the observation that her views of London were "more English than England herself" ; an etching of 1907, that I have not seen, is entitled simply Enfield.

In his essay “Peintres-graveurs contemporains - Angèle Delasalle” (Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1 October, 1912), Raymond Escholier lists 28 etchings by Angèle Delasalle, executed between 1904 and 1912. So far as I am aware, this is a complete catalogue of her etched work; I’ve not come across any reference to further etchings. Though they seem to be scarce as hen’s teeth, I’ve managed to acquire proofs of 9 of these etchings, 3 of them in variant printings.

Within those 28 etchings, Delasalle’s work is very varied. The only category I don’t have any example of is her etchings of big cats – tigers, lions, panthers – of which there are 7. The most likely of them to turn up, I guess, is Tigre dévorant sa proie, which was published by the Société des amis de l’eau-forte in 1908.

Wild animals are not a groundbreaking subject for a woman artist of the day, who might be looking back, say, to Rosa Bonheur. The female nude is another matter. Angèle Delasalle was among the first woman artists to take the female nude as one of her prime subjects, and she did so in a way that was immediately recognized as different. As Raymond Escholier wrote of her nude studies, “Ils sont autant des déshabillés que de nus”; they are naked rather than nude. He writes, “She simply paints the woman who is in front of her eyes.”

Delasalle exhibited a number of paintings of nudes, such as Femme à sa toilette at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1910, or Les baigneuses at the same Salon a year later. The best-known of these today is probably her sensually-slumped full-frontal nude Femme endormie, in the Musée d’Orsay. She also made four etchings of female nudes, of which the fourth shares the title of, and is probably an interpretation of, the painting Femme à sa toilette. I have proofs of the other three: Le déjeuner, Étude de nu, and Le repos.


Angèle Delasalle, Le déjeuner, etching, 1907

Le déjeuner, published by the Revue de l’art ancien et moderne in 1907, deliberately disrupts the male gaze by showing the nude model not in a provocative pose but relaxing, enjoying a well-earned break. She is shown from the back, cup and saucer in hand. This is the model as a working girl, not as eye-candy.


Angèle Delasalle, Étude de nu, etching, 1908

Étude de nu, published by the Revue in 1909 (though executed the previous year), is more conventional in its pose. The model is sitting resting her head on her elbow, with her right hand folded across her breast. She has a subtle air of resigned melancholy, “une intimité que l’heure fait un peu tragique” as the critic Raymond Bouyer wrote. Only when you look at the item of furniture she is sitting on do you realise that this bored beauty is another kind of working girl, for she is reclining on the kind of circular sofa found in the salon of a French maison close, or brothel. This subject would have been quite shocking for a female artist of 1909, which no doubt explains the deliberately bland title, Nude Study.


Angèle Delasalle, Le repos, etching, 1909

The third etching, Le repos, published by the Gazette des Beaux-arts, also in 1909, also plays with the taboo of female recognition of the role that prostitution played in French society. The model’s pose is evidently based on Manet’s scandalous Olympia, but where the model’s frank gaze back at the viewer seemed shocking and provocative in Manet, here it seems perfectly natural, even though Delasalle’s model is not, like Manet’s, coyly covering her pudendum with her hand.


Angèle Delasalle, Le couvreur, etching, 1910

This preoccupation with the naked woman as a working woman ties in with another unusual category in the art of Angèle Delasalle, which is paintings, etchings and drawings of men at work. There is a drawing of a miner in the Département des arts graphiques of the Louvre, and a painting entitled La forge in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen. I have two etchings exploring the working life of men, once again uncharted territory for a woman artist. The first, Le couvreur, depicts a roofer standing in a very masculine pose on the ridge of a roof, with Paris spread out below him. Etched in 1910, and published in 1912 by the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, it is based on a painting that Angèle Delasalle exhibited to great acclaim at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1902. Somewhere in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts around this date is a reproduction of a pencil drawing of the same subject. Ironically, considering the scarcity of Delasalle’s work, I have been been able to acquire three proofs of this etching – the standard issue printed in black on wove paper plus two rare variants on japan paper, one in black and one in red-brown.


Angèle Delasalle, Coin de fonderie, etching, 1910

The second study of workmen is a vigorous and dramatic etching of men in a foundry, entitled Coin de fonderie (or Coin de forge, according to Escholier). It was etched in 1910, and published by the Revue de l’art ancien et moderne in 1913, the last date of pubication for any etching of Delasalle that I have encountered. Writing in the Revue, the critic P. Lelarge-Desar compares this etching with an earlier work, L’abside de Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, from 1905. Superficially there is nothing in common between the violent clamour of a foundry and the stillness and peace of an ancient church, but Lelarge-Desar shows how Angèle Delasalle distils the essence of both subjects into a strong contrast between light and dark, the known and unknown.


Angèle Delasalle, L'abside de Saint-Germain-L'Auxerrois, etching, 1905

In choosing such subjects as the female nude and the working man, Angèle Delasalle was deliberately challenging current views on the appropriate subjects and the appropriate aesthetic values for a woman artist. In an age when women artists were usually praised for feminine virtues of delicacy and subtlety, Raymond Escholier noted in Angèle Delasalle “la virilité de son dessin”, the virility of her line. Raymond Bouyer, writing in the Revue de l’art ancien et moderne in 1911, also writes of her “qualités quasi viriles”. Writing in the Magazine of Art in June 1902 (quoted in Clara Erskine Clement, Women in the Fine Arts, 1904), B. Dufernex notes that, “Her characteristic energy is such that her sex cannot be detected in her work; in fact, she was made the first and only woman member of the International Association of Painters under the impression that her pictures – signed simply A. Delasalle – were the work of a man.” Once having elected her, it appears that the grandiose International Association of Painters had no means of rectifying their mistake.


Angèle Delasalle, Portrait de jeune homme, etching with aquatint, 1908

The same strength and power exhibited in Le couvreur and Coin de fonderie is evident in the Portrait de jeune homme, an etching with drypoint and acquatint. This young man has such presence you wouldn’t be surprised if he just strolled into the room. You certainly see in this etching why Angèle Delasalle became a sought-after portraitist. Perhaps her best-known portraits are that of her teacher Jean Benjamin-Constant, exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1902 and acquired by the Musée du Luxembourg (now in the Musée d’Orsay), and that of Clémence Royer in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes. The choice of the scientist Clémence Royer as a sitter is a telling one. Royer was a self-made woman, a ground-breaking scientist who was the first to introduce Darwin’s theory of evolution to France; she was tellingly praised, in words that echo the backhanded praise of Delasalle herself, as “almost a man of genius”.


Angèle Delasalle, L'allée de Meudon, etching, 1910

My last two Delasalle etchings are landscapes, The first is a cathedral-like arched walkway of trees, entitled either L’allée de Meudon or L’allée de Bellevue, depending on whether you believe the Revue or the Gazette. The Revue makes a point of the fact that this atmospheric scene was etched on the spot, en plein air, rather than back in the studio from a preliminary drawing.


Angèle Delasalle, À Montigny-Beauchamps, etching, 1911

This direct contact with nature is even more evident in the second landscape, À Montigny-Beauchamps. This, too, looks as if it was drawn directly on the etching plate in front of the motif. Interestingly, in discussing this work Raymond Bouyer leapfrogs back over the Impressionists to the Barbizon School, comparing it to the work of that great pre-Impressionist Paul Huet. I’ve been lucky enough to acquire both the standard issue of this etching on wove paper and one of a very few copies on Japan; when the pre-WWI Revue de l’art ancien et moderne issued de luxe editions of etchings in this way, there were typically 10 proofs on parchment and 30 on Japan.

Angèle Delasalle seems to me to not just an important, and scandalously neglected, woman artist, but an important artist per se. She had an independent eye, a vigorous line, a strong sense of composition, and an ability to convey both the vastness of nature and the intimate reality of a woman’s body, the hush of a church and the hubbub of a foundry. In her own day she won numerous prizes, and in 1926 she was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur – but in the years that have followed she has never been accorded the honour her art is due, not simply for its ground-breaking confidence but for its scope, its ambition, and its achievement.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

André Dignimont, Christmas
pochoir, 1943

A characteristic Dignimont scene of Christmas festivities in a maison close, hand-coloured with pochoir stencil by Maurice Beaufumé. From one of 132 separate colour suites of Dignimont's illustrations to La Belle Amour by Jean Galtier-Bossière. I hope all my readers are having this much fun today.

Rare, medium, well done

The different techniques of printmaking are often described, but it is rare to be able to compare the same image in several different mediums (or media, if you prefer). I have a few examples that allow me to make some tentative comments about the pluses and minuses of one medium or another for the expression of a particular artistic vision.

One is an image by Lucien Mainssieux (1885-1958) that I have as a pen-and-ink drawing, as an etching, and as a lithograph. It started, I would guess, as a simple pencil drawing of a young couple waking up in the morning – probably from life.


Lucien Mainssieux, L'Éveil, drawing

I would regard the pen-and-ink drawing as a firming-up of this initial (supposed-and-guessed-at) pencil drawing. It is one of a set of ink drawings I have for all the etchings by Mainssieux in the book La Nuit de Fès by the brothers Jérome and Jean Tharaud (real names Ernest and Charles Tharaud), published in 1930. The drawings are very close to the etchings, but of course they feel very different. Some of the preliminary drawings I have acquired are on very unprepossessing paper, but these by Mainssieux are on BFK Rives. The ink has absorbed happily into this lovely wove paper, and the resulting drawing has a sketchy impressionistic softness that really feels as if you were standing in the bedroom observing the scene.

The etching based on this drawing is a much harder, more definite, more intense image, bitten quite deeply into the plate and then hand-printed on Japan paper by Edmond Rigal. The book La Nuit de Fès is fairly typical of the French livre d’artiste or livre de luxe in being printed on a descending order of fine papers: 25 copies on Japan (of which 5 also had suites of the prints), 25 on Madagascar, 50 on Hollande van Gelder, and 750 on BFK Rives; as you can see, even the cheapest copies were on beautiful paper. There were also 40 hors-commerce (not-for-sale) copies, of which mine, with all the original drawings, was copy I. The hors-commerce copies were on a variety of the above papers, mine being on Japan.


Lucien Mainssieux, L'Éveil, etching

The immediately obvious difference is in the extraneous detail. The couple in bed are pretty much as in the drawing. The wall behind them is much more intensely worked with cross-hatching and the suggestion of a latticed headboard to the bed, whereas in the drawing this whole area is merely indicated with some insouciant scribbled lines. To the bottom right are a tea or coffee pot and two cups on a table, added since the drawing. The loss between the drawing and the etching is a certain spontaneity and immediacy; the gain is a greater specificity, more detail, and that indefinable texture and depth you get with an etched line rather than a drawn one. There’s always a sense of a third dimension in an etching.

My third example of this same image, titled L’Éveil (Waking Up), has none of this third dimension, for it is a planographic image – a lithograph, in which no line is etched or incised, as in intaglio prints such as an etching or engraving, or raised, as in relief prints such as wood engravings. Instead a lithograph is drawn on and printed from the flat plane of a lithographic stone (or zinc or aluminium).


Lucien Mainssieux, L'Éveil, lithograph

The lithograph retains the table with the pot and cups, eliminates the fussy etched detail of the headboard and wall, and adds some bits of decoration and a mirror on the far wall. It also reverses or flips the whole image. The result is not as immediate as the drawing, or as definite as the etching, but it has a sense of tenderness that neither of the others quite achieves.

The lithograph is one of a suite of 20 printed on vélin d’Arches, accompanying the first 20 copies of Éloge de Lucien Mainssieux (In Praise of Lucien Mainssieux), published by Bruker in 1950 in a total of 200 copies; the books were printed on vélin de Rives. Twenty years had passed between La Nuit de Fès and Éloge de Lucien Mainssieux, but this image evidently still haunted the imagination of the artist, so much so that he decided to reinterpret it as a lithograph as one of seven original prints for this celebration of his life’s work.

Only one of those seven prints, the etching/aquatint Medina, is in colour, and this is an indication, I think, of Mainssieux’s essential flaw as an artist, which is that he was a draughtsman, not a colourist. His etchings, drawings, and black-and-white lithographs are subtle and expressive. Their loose confident line and their characteristic subject matter of North Africa and the female nude both drew comparisons with the work of Henri Matisse. But Matisse was a master not just of line but also of colour, and there Mainssieux could not follow.


Lucien Mainssieux, Medina, colour lithograph, signed and justified 3/20

Lucien Mainssieux was born in Voiron (Isère), and studied under Jules Flandrin and Jean-Paul Laurens. Probably the biggest influence on his style, however, was his close friend, the printmaker André Dunoyer de Segonzac, another artist whose posthumous reputation is compromised because he was a master of black-and-white rather than colour. But what the art of Mainssieux does have in abundance is a sense of rhythm and harmony – not surprising, as Lucien Mainssieux was also an accomplished violinist, and the music and drama critic of the revue Le Crapouillet.