16. Félix Buhot
(1847-1898)

La Place des Martyrs et la Taverne du Bagne (Martyrs’ Square and the Jailhouse Tavern)

(click on image to print)
Buhot, La Place des Martyrs

La Place des Martyrs et la Taverne du Bagne (Martyrs’ Square and the Jailhouse Tavern)

Etching, drypoint, aquatint, roulette and stop-out, 1885, B/G 163 iii/iii, 335 x 447 mm. Very fine and rich impression in brown-black ink on thin japan paper with good margins, signed with the red owl stamp. The Place des Martyrs was just down the street from Buhot’s residence on the Boulevard de Clichy and was a popular nighttime gathering place. The Tavern welcomed its clients by having them denounced, and sometime manacled, by men dressed as prison guards, and led inside to be waited on by others in jail garb and chains in a dark room decorated with bath scenes (the sound of the word bagne is close to that of bain or bath). It was a very fashionable cabaret and its owner was a former convict in a French penal colony. The print is decorated with verses evoking the ambiance of the place by Jean Le Fustec, a Breton bard, druid, Parisian journalist – and friend of Buhot.