6. Auguste Lepère
(1849-1918)
Le Matin, Carrefour des Forts de Marlotte (Morning, Crossroads of the Route of the Forts de Marlotte)

(click on image to print)
Lepère, Le Matin, Carrefour

Le Matin, Carrefour des Forts de Marlotte (Morning, Crossroads of the Route of the Forts de Marlotte)

Wood engraving, 1889, from Forêt de Fontainebleau, Lotz-Brissonneau 199 ii/ii, 230 x 152 mm. Very fine impression on japan tissue with full margins, signed in pencil, one of only ten proofs of the second state before publication and well before the Desmoulin edition; a few spots of very pale staining. Before Lepère there were no wood engravings that even resembled this one. It is not just that the subject is poetic and of no news value; it is that the technique has been refined to the point where shifting patterns of light and movement are portrayed with the utmost delicacy and the natural poetry of the scene emerges in a way no other print making technique could match. And this is the point of this much under-appreciated technique: that what is possible in the hands of a true artist and master technician is something quite as unique as Dürer’s engravings or Whistler’s Venetian etchings, or Buhot’s “paintings on copper.”