''L'Estampe originale'' was a French

periodical Periodical literature (singularly called a periodical publication or simply a periodical) consists of Publication, published works that appear in new releases on a regular schedule (''issues'' or ''numbers'', often numerically divided into annu ...

publishing portfolios of original prints in a

limited edition The terms special edition, limited edition, and variants such as deluxe edition, collector's edition or expanded edition are used as a marketing incentive for various kinds of products, originally published products related to the arts, such as b ...

of 100 for subscribers. It produced nine issues quarterly between 1893 and 1895, containing a total of 95 original prints by a very distinguished group of 74 artists, including

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Count, ''Comte'' Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa (24 November 1864 – 9 September 1901), known as Toulouse-Lautrec (), was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist, and illustrator whose immersion in the colour ...

Gauguin Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (; ; 7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a French painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer, whose work has been primarily associated with the Post-Impressionist and Symbolist movements. He was also an influ ...

Renoir Pierre-Auguste Renoir (; ; 25 February 1841 – 3 December 1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that ...

Pissarro Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro ( ; ; 10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, St Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but t ...

, Whistler,

Paul Signac Paul Victor Jules Signac ( , ; 11 November 1863 – 15 August 1935) was a French Neo-Impressionist painter who, with Georges Seurat, helped develop the artistic technique Pointillism. Biography Paul-Victor-Jules Signac was born in Paris on ...

Odilon Redon Odilon Redon (born Bertrand Redon; ; 20 April 18406 July 1916) was a French Symbolist painting, Symbolist draftsman, printmaker, and painter. Early in his career, both before and after fighting in the Franco-Prussian War, Redon worked almost exc ...

Rodin François Auguste René Rodin (; ; 12 November 184017 November 1917) was a French sculptor generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin possessed a u ...

Henri Fantin-Latour Henri Fantin-Latour (; 14 January 1836 – 25 August 1904) was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers. Early life Born in Grenoble, Isère, Ignace Henri Jean Th� ...

Félix Bracquemond Félix Henri Bracquemond (; 22 May 1833 – 29 October 1914) was a French painter, etcher, and printmaker. He played a key role in the revival of printmaking, encouraging artists such as Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro to use ...

Félicien Rops Félicien Victor Joseph Rops (; 7 July 1833 – 23 August 1898) was a Belgian artist associated with Symbolism (arts), Symbolism, Decadence, and the Parisian , a member of the Les XX group. He was a painter, illustrator, caricaturist and a proli ...

and

Puvis de Chavannes Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (; 14 December 1824 – 24 October 1898) was a French painter known for his mural painting, who came to be known as "the painter for France". He became the co-founder and president of the Société Nationale des Beaux-A ...

. Almost all of

Les Nabis The Nabis (, ) were a group of young French artists active in Paris from 1888 until 1900, who played a large part in the transition from Impressionism and academic art to abstract art, symbolism and the other early movements of modernism. The me ...

contributed:

Pierre Bonnard Pierre Bonnard (; 3 October 186723 January 1947) was a French painter, illustrator and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. A founding member of the Post-Impressionist gr ...

Maurice Denis Maurice Denis (; 25 November 1870 – 13 November 1943) was a French painter, decorative artist, and writer. An important figure in the transitional period between impressionism and modern art, he is associated with '' Les Nabis'', symbolism, ...

Paul Ranson Paul-Élie Ranson (; 29 March 1861 – 20 February 1909) was a French painter and writer associated with Les Nabis. Biography He was born in Limoges. His mother died in childbirth, so he was raised and educated by his grandparents and his ...

Édouard Vuillard Jean-Édouard Vuillard (; 11 November 186821 June 1940) was a French painter, decorative artist, and printmaker. From 1891 through 1900, Vuillard was a member of the avant garde artistic group Les Nabis, creating paintings that assembled areas ...

Ker-Xavier Roussel Ker-Xavier Roussel (10 December 1867 – 6 June 1944) was a French painter associated with Les Nabis. Biography Born François Xavier Roussel in Lorry-lès-Metz, Moselle in 1867, at age fifteen he studied at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris; along ...

Félix Vallotton Félix Édouard Vallotton (; December 28, 1865December 29, 1925) was a Swiss and French painter and printmaker associated with the group of artists known as '. He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut. He painted portra ...

, and

Paul Sérusier Paul Sérusier (; 9 November 1864 – 7 October 1927) was a French painter who was a pioneer of abstract art and an inspiration for the avant-garde Nabis movement, Synthetism and Cloisonnism. Education Sérusier was born in Paris. He studie ...

. British artists included William Nicholson,

Charles Ricketts Charles de Sousy Ricketts (2 October 1866 – 7 October 1931) was a British artist, illustrator, author and printer, known for his work as a book designer and typographer and for his costume and scenery designs for plays and operas. Ricketts ...

Walter Crane Walter Crane (15 August 184514 March 1915) was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children's book creators of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Ka ...

and

William Rothenstein Sir William Rothenstein (29 January 1872 – 14 February 1945) was an English painter, printmaker, draughtsman, lecturer, and writer on art. Though he covered many subjects – ranging from landscapes in France to representations of Jewish synag ...

; besides Whistler,

Joseph Pennell Joseph Pennell (July 4, 1857 – April 23, 1926) was an American draftsman, etcher, lithographer, and illustrator for books and magazines. A prolific artist, he spent most of his working life in Europe, and developed an interest in landmarks, lan ...

was the only American. Commentators at the time and subsequently have unanimously praised the success of the publisher, André Marty, in collecting a stellar group of artists, and in many cases getting them to produce some of their finest prints. Together the group display the main currents in the diverse and vibrant Parisian art scene of the period. After the

Etching Revival The etching revival was the re-emergence and invigoration of etching as an original form of printmaking during the period approximately from 1850 to 1930. The main centres were France, Britain and the United States, but other countries, such as t ...

beginning in the 1850s, France saw another wave of productivity in printmaking in the 1890s, with a great variety of techniques, subjects, and styles. ''L'Estampe originale'' has a notably large number of figure subjects compared with typical prints from earlier decades, but there are many landscapes and city views, traditional in style and not, and a wide range of other subjects. The rising influence of

Art Nouveau Art Nouveau ( ; ; ), Jugendstil and Sezessionstil in German, is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. It was often inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and ...

is very apparent, but the more traditional styles of the Etching Revival are also well-represented. There is a great variety of printmaking techniques used, some of which would only have been possible in a relatively small edition of 100. Of the prints, 60 were lithographs, 26 in the various intaglio techniques (with a third of these using colour), 7 woodcuts, a

wood engraving Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using relatively l ...

and a gypsograph. A striking common factor is the high proportion using colour, in many different techniques, not just the lithographs. Each issue was printed in only 100 impressions. The first eight issues each had ten loose prints in a paper cover or wrapper; the last was entitled ''Album de clôture'' ("Closing album") and the fourteen prints were between two paper-covered boards secured by two cream

satin A satin weave is a type of Textile, fabric weave that produces a characteristically glossy, smooth or lustrous material, typically with a glossy top surface and a dull back; it is not durable, as it tends to snag. It is one of three fundamen ...

ribbons. This was apparently intended to now hold all the previous issues as well, and the title included a pun on "closure". Many buyers removed prints from the album to frame and hang, as had been anticipated. The prints were nearly all newly created for ''L'Estampe originale'', had different sizes, and were often printed on different papers; indeed not all were by the same printer. They were signed and numbered, and the margins embossed with a small blind stamp, common to all the series.

History

First incarnation

The title ''L'Estampe originale'' had an earlier life, under different direction but in a similar format and with some of the same artists, in 1888 and 1889. Three issues were published, the first of ten prints in 150 copies, costing 100 francs. The six or more artists contributing to the first issue included four who also made prints for the revived publication: Bracquemond, Henri Boutet, Henri-Patrice Dillon and Auguste-Louis Lepère, and the other issues, about which much is obscure, also used artists who appeared in the revived title. Lepère appears to have been a key figure in organizing the title. When Jacquelynn Baas was writing her article in 1983, no complete set of the early issues from the 1880s was apparently known to survive in any museum, and a note reported with some excitement that another print scholar "had recently seen a copy of the first issue" in a French private collection. The title as revived under Marty was "better-organized, better-known, and, it must be admitted, higher-quality", not to mention better value. Unless stated otherwise, references to the title in this article refer to Marty's issues. All the prints in the early three issues were

monochrome A monochrome or monochromatic image, object or palette is composed of one color (or values of one color). Images using only shades of grey are called grayscale (typically digital) or black-and-white (typically analog). In physics, mon ...

; the large number of images in colour, using a variety of techniques, is a striking feature of the revived issues. ''L'Estampe originale'' is also not to be confused with the similar but much cheaper ''

L'Estampe Moderne ''L'Estampe Moderne'' appeared in 1897-1899 as a series of 24 monthly fascicle (book), fascicles, each of 4 original Lithography, lithographs, priced at 3 francs 50 centimes and printed by Imprimerie Champenois of Paris. Many accomplished Europea ...

'', which also had two incarnations, the first of three issues in 1894–1895, and the more successful second of 24 issues in 1897–1899. These were all lithographs in a much larger print run, leaning more to

Second incarnation

The revived ''L'Estampe originale'' was published by the otherwise obscure, but evidently well-connected, figure of André Marty, about whom little is known. He published a number of books, mostly on history, but including one on printmaking in 1906, and became director of the weekly ''Journal des Artistes'' (of 17, Rue de Rome) in 1893, but left in 1894, taking ''L'Estampe originale'' with him. Marty bought the rights to use the title from the publishers of the 1888 project. None of the internal documentation of the enterprise is known to have survived, leaving much unclear for scholars. Apart from the nine portfolios, the only other activity of the ''L'Estampe originale'' imprint was in 1893, as publisher of ''Le Café-concert'', a book by

Georges Montorgueil Octave Lebesgue (; 5 November 1857, Paris – 24 April 1933, Paris) was a French journalist and writer. He is best known by the pseudonym Georges Montorgueil (), though he also wrote as 'Jean Valjean' (; after the protagonist of ''Les Misérables' ...

illustrated with lithographs (all in black apart from the lettering on the cover) by Toulouse-Lautrec and

Henri-Gabriel Ibels Henri-Gabriel Ibels (1867–1936) was a French illustrator, printmaker, painter and author. Biography He was born in Paris and studied at the Académie Julian along with artists such as Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. At the beginning of ...

, who both contributed to ''L'Estampe originale''. A short prospectus for the revived ''L'Estampe originale'' was published early in 1893, beginning "... the ''Journal des Artistes'' will publish ...". This explained the contents of the album, and listed 51 artists who had promised works; all but six, and these minor figures, later contributed. An "accompanying text" by the critic and arts civil servant Roger Marx was promised, and his "Preface" of some two pages did eventually appear in the sixth volume, effectively the only text in the project other than lists of the prints. The first album was promised for 30 March 1893; the initial subscription price was 150 francs for a year, for four issues with ten prints each. The price to later buyers would be 200 francs. This represented far better value for subscribers than the earlier issues of 1888/89. The price of the final issue, outside the annual subscription, and with more prints in the single issue, as well as the board covers, is not known. It is not known if the subscription offer sold out, but by 1898 it was reported that a complete set cost 600 francs, presumably on the art market rather than from the publishers. The project was probably always intended to be short-lived; a letter from

Camille Pissarro Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro ( ; ; 10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies). ...

to his son

Lucien Pissarro Lucien Pissarro (20 February 1863 – 10 July 1944) was a French landscape painter, printmaker, wood engraver, designer, and printer of fine books. His landscape paintings employ techniques of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism, but he also ...

(both contributors) dated 28 January 1894 referred to a lithograph he had already completed for "the last number of Marty's portfolio", which was not to be published for over a year. This indicates the degree of forward planning Marty used.

Count of prints

The 95 entries in the Stein and Karshan catalogue are made up as follows: * Eight issues of ten prints each, giving 80 (including two paper covers, for issues I and V) * Issue IX with fourteen prints (including a paper cover) *The blind stamp, sometimes cut from the margin and mounted separately by collectors (Cat. 15). Designed by

Alexandre Charpentier Alexandre-Louis-Marie Charpentier (1856–1909) was a French sculptor, medalist, craftsman, and cabinet-maker. Life and work From working-class origins and apprenticed to an engraver as a young man, he became a studio assistant to the innov ...

, who also had a lithograph in album VII, it shows a half-length nude woman seen from behind, with the title, set in an octagonal frame. It is just under two inches in each dimension, and is usually placed near a corner of the lower margin, where there is room, or in a quiet area within the composition. A small decorative woodcut by George Auriol, printed with the Preface in issue VI (Cat. 3) is counted as one of the prints. File:Charles Maurin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1890, NGA 33845.jpg,

Charles Maurin Charles Maurin (1 April 1856 – 22 July 1914) was a French painter and engraver in a variety of styles. Life and career Maurin was born in Le Puy-en-Velay (Haute-Loire, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes). He was awarded the Prix Crozatier in 1875, and us ...

, Portrait of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1890,

aquatint Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching that produces areas of tone rather than lines. For this reason it has mostly been used in conjunction with etching, to give both lines and shaded tone. It has also been used ...

printed in brown File:Georges Auriol - Trembling Woods - 1995.224 - Cleveland Museum of Art.tif,

George Auriol George Auriol, born Jean-Georges Huyot (26 April 1863, Beauvais (Oise) – February 1938, Paris), was a French poet, songwriter, graphic designer, type designer, and Art Nouveau artist. He worked in many media and created illustrations for the cov ...

, ''Trembling Woods'' (''Bois Frissonants''), 1893, colour lithograph File:Eugène Grasset - La Vitrioleuse.jpg,

Eugène Grasset Eugène Samuel Grasset (; 25 May 1845 – 23 October 1917) was a Swiss decorative artist who worked in Paris, France in a variety of creative design fields during the Belle Époque. He is considered a pioneer in Art Nouveau design. Biography ...

, ''La Vitrioleuse'' ("The Acid Thrower") 1894, lithograph with hand-stencilled colours.Translated as ''The Vitriol Thrower'' by Stein, but "oil of

vitriol Vitriol is the general chemical name encompassing a class of chemical compounds comprising sulfates of certain metalsoriginally, iron or copper. Those mineral substances were distinguished by their color, such as green vitriol for hydrated iron(I ...

" as a name for

sulphuric acid Sulfuric acid (American spelling and the preferred IUPAC name) or sulphuric acid ( Commonwealth spelling), known in antiquity as oil of vitriol, is a mineral acid composed of the elements sulfur, oxygen, and hydrogen, with the molecular formu ...

is very obsolete, and likely to confuse. File:De Boeddha Le Buddha L'Estampe originale (serietitel), RP-P-1922-161.jpg,

, ''Buddha'', chine collé lithograph, 1895 File:L'Estampe originale (BM 1949,0411.3271).jpg, ''Au Cirque'',

, 1893, 4-colour lithograph, 59.3 x 42.1 cm File:Street Pavers (Les Paveurs) MET DP834416.jpg,

, ''Street Pavers'' (''Les Paveurs''), 1894, etching with

surface tone In printmaking, surface tone, or surface-tone, is produced by deliberately or accidentally not wiping all the ink off the surface of the printing plate, so that parts of the image have a light tone from the film of ink left. Tone in printmaking me ...

File:Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao Tupapau) MET DP825300.jpg,

Paul Gauguin Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (; ; 7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a French painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer, whose work has been primarily associated with the Post-Impressionist and Symbolist movements. He was also an influ ...

, '' Spirit of the Dead Watching'' ("Manao Tupapau"), 1894, lithograph File:Couverture de l'Estampe Originale, RP-P-1949-607.jpg,

, cover for the ''Album de clôture'', 1895, lithograph File:Albert Besnard, Bathing at Talloires (La baignade à Talloires), 1888, NGA 4611.jpg,

Albert Besnard Paul-Albert Besnard (2 June 1849 – 4 December 1934) was a French painter and printmaker. Biography Besnard was born in Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, studied with Jean Bremond and was influenced by Alexandre Cabanel. He won ...

, ''Bathing at Talloires'' (''La baignade à Talloires''), etching and

, 1888/1894 File:Charles Guilloux - The Deluge - 2003.19 - Cleveland Museum of Art.tif, Charles Guilloux, ''The Deluge'' (''L'Inondation''), 1893, colour lithograph

Notes

References

*Baas, Jacquelynn, "The Origins of L'Estampe originale", in ''Bulletin of the University of Michigan Museum of Art'', Volume 5, 1983
google books
*Cate, Phillip Dennis, "Prints Abound: Paris in the 1890s" in ''Prints Abound: Paris in the 1890s: from the Collections of Virginia and Ira Jackson and the National Gallery of Art'', eds. Phillip Dennis Cate, Gale Barbara Murray, Richard Thomson, National Gallery of Art Washington, D.C., 2000, National Gallery of Art/Lund Humphries, , 9780853317944
full PDF
*Salsbury, Britany, and Conte, Lisa
"L'Estampe Originale: A Rare Print Portfolio Now Online"
Metropolitan Museum of Art blog, 6 March 2015 *Stein, Donna M., Karshan, Donald H., ''L'Estampe originale; A Catalogue Raisonné'', 1970, The Museum of Graphic Art, New York *"VG"
''L'Estampe originale''

Van Gogh Museum The Van Gogh Museum () is a Dutch art museum dedicated to the works of Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries in the Museum Square in Amsterdam South, close to the Stedelijk Museum, the Rijksmuseum, and the Concertgebouw. The museum opened o ...

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