27. Maxime Lalanne
(1826-1887)
À Bordeaux (Vue Génerale)

(click on image to print)
Lalanne, À Bordeaux (Vue Génerale)

À Bordeaux (Vue Génerale)

Etching, 1866, Béraldi 10, Lalanne 8, Villet 25 i?/vi, 237 x 317 mm.. Fine impression on wove paper with good margins ; a central vertical crease is less visible in the print than in the scan here. Of all the nineteenth-century French etchers, Lalanne is clearly the most undervalued. A superb draughtsman and the acknowledged master of pure etching (he wrote the basic book on etching technique), his work was insufficiently catalogued until Jeffrey Villet’s fine new catalogue raisonné (2nd edition, 2006). Even now, states are sometime difficult to determine, due to the common practice at the time of masking the letters in printing to produce false proofs before letters. This may possibly be the case here, but the impression is fine enough, and the price low enough, to make the question academic. A wonderful image, and we have many others equally fine by him.