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JACQUES CALLOT
Nancy 1592 – 1635 Nancy
The Bohemians
Lieure 374 – 377 ii/iv
125 x 239 mm
The set of four original etchings, c1621-22.
The plates signed.
Second state of four, before the address of Israels,
as issued by Callot himself in Nancy.
The first three
impressions typically printed on laid paper with the watermark
of interlaced C’s of the Arms of Lorraine.
Fine impressions, with thread margins or trimmed to the plate.
Good condition.
The fourth plate with a tiny made-up paper loss
in the plate margin of the top left corner.
Opinions have varied on the interpretation of this set, which Callot designed to be read as a continuous frieze, and have to a certain extent come round again full circle.
The earliest commentator, Félibien, considered the subject to be the gypsies with whom Callot had (apocryphally?) first run away to Italy as a boy, only to be peremptorily brought back by his parents.
Sadoul dismissed this on the grounds that gypsies in Lorraine at this period were persecuted and would not have been allowed to carry arms. He interpreted them as mercenaries in the Thirty Years War, which was raging through Lorraine when Callot returned home (from his second much longer stint in Italy) in 1621.
More recently Marot showed that some of the exotic costumes are similar to other 16th & 17th century representation of gypsies.
The inscriptions etched into each of the plates include allusions to fortune-telling and theft which would also seem to support the theory of gypsies over that of camp followers.
The inscriptions translate as
- Plate 1 : The only things these poor fortune-telling beggars carry with them are things yet to come
- Plate 2 : Are these not fine messengers, straying through foreign lands?
- Plate 3 : Ye who take pleasure in their words, watch out for your blancs, testons and pistols (coins)
- Plate 4 : When all is said and done, they find that their fate is to have come here from Egypt to this feast
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WILLIAM STRANG R.A., R.E.
Dumbarton 1859 – 1921 Bournemouth
Strang was among those artists who were serial self-portraitists.
This study, aged forty, at work on a plate, was a commission from the German art periodical Pan.
Self Portrait
W Strang 282; D Strang 372 v/v
201 x 150 mm
Original etching with engraving, 1895.
The plate signed and dated.
Issued by Pan.
From the de-luxe edition, printed on deep cream Japanese vellum, with the Pan blindstamp in the lower margin and the pencil number 7.
Faintly mount-stained.
£200
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CAMILLE PISSARRO
St Thomas, Danish Antilles 1830 – 1903 Paris
It is suggested that Pissarro was influenced by Cézanne’s paintings of bathers (Cézanne’s two lithographs of male nudes, commissioned by Vollard in 1896, reproduce earlier paintings) when he took up the theme of peasant girls bathing, in a variety of media, in 1894.
A subject new to Pissarro and confined to a few years, in the mid-1890’s, the period which also coincided with his taking up lithography again.
The majority of Pissarro’s lithographs were produced at this time and ten of them treat of bathers.
Théorie de Baigneuses
Delteil 181
130 x 200 mm
Original lithograph, c1894-97.
From the edition of six, the only formal edition, issued posthumously in 1923.
Stamped with Pissarro’s initials (Lugt 613e) and numbered 5/6 in pencil.
Printed on green-grey chine appliqué.
Total ‘edition’ of 26 – including the 20 lifetime proofs, printed on chine or tinted papers.
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In a letter written in April 1894 to his son Lucien, Pissarro announced
“I have done a whole series of printed drawings (lithographs) in romantic style which
seemed to me to have a rather amusing side: Baigneuses, plenty of them, in all sorts
of poses, in all sorts of paradises. ”
He had already written, in January 1894, about proofs from two etched plates of Bathers
“ amazing!...perhaps too naturalistic, these are peasant women – in hearty nakedness!
I am afraid it will offend the delicate, but I think it is what I do best… ”
Pissarro’s bathers in Théorie de Baigneuses have a ‘modernist’ simplicity of form. Treated in broad lithographic washes, their monumentality is increased by the focus on the figures to the almost exclusion of the background.
The plate is full of life and movement. The pleasure of splashing in shady water on a sunny day, an Impressionist’s joy in light, yet a classic theme with a long tradition, at the very core of academicism.
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ADOLF VON MENZEL
Breslau 1815 – 1905 Berlin
Die Schlafende Näherin am Fenster
The sleeping Seamstress at the Window
Bock 1134 v/v
258 x 205 mm
Original etching, 1843.
The plate signed and dated.
A later impression, as reissued after the retouch.
On simile japan.
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A study of Menzel’s sister Emilie in the Berlin home they shared.
The open window, especially dominating the subject and parallel to the picture plane, filling a room with light, was a ‘new’ motif that attracted artists of the Romantic era.
Menzel, anticipating Impressionism, painted quite a number of small interiors with windows, or details of views from his windows.
Intimate images of his home and family, he considered them “private” pictures and never exhibited them in his lifetime; today they among his most admired works.
However, this etching, in similar mood, was published and made public.
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