34. Eugène Loizelet (1842-1882)
after Jean-Baptiste Isabey (1767-1855)
Le Petit Coblentz, Boulevard de Gand Sous le Directoire

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Loizelet, Le Petit Coblentz

Le Petit Coblentz, Boulevard de Gand Sous le Directoire

Etching and aquatint with hand coloring, 1878, Bibliothèque National Inventaire 5, Béraldi 13, 307 x 356 mm. A fine impression on white wove paper with good margins, expertly and effectively hand colored ; some pale foxing in the margins. First, it is necessary to clear up confusions. The print has nothing to do with the city of Coblenz in Germany, nor with the city of Gand (Ghent) in Belgium. Rather, Le Petit Coblentz was a name given to a section of the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris, then (under the Directoire, 1795-99) known as the Boulevard de Gand. This gives Isabey the opportunity to portray (sometime viciously) some of the fashionably-odd society of the time. Included are the great dancer Vestris, Mme. Récamier on the arm of the writer and politician Dominique Joseph Garat, Prince Murat, Napoléon Bonaparte and Talleyrand. Isabey himself, in a somewhat self-deprecatng image, is at the far left. The original watercolor, dating from ca. 1798, is in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris, but Loizelet has done a splendid job of preserving the image as a print.

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