Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
"Although active in many artistic spheres, Félix Bracquemond led the revival of original printmaking and the growing enthusiasm for oriental art in the early 1860's. Born in Paris, young Bracquemond trained as a lithographer, gaining a great deal of skill and technique from Joseph Guichard, a pupil of Ingres.
Bracquemond was also a painter and exhibited with the Impressionists in the Salon des Refusés in 1863, as well as in other Impressionist exhibitions of 1874, 1879 and 1880. He preferred the graphic arts to painting, and became one of the first European artists to discover the beauty of Japanese woodcuts.
Tradition has it that Bracquemond received a set of porcelain from Japan and found that the plates had been wrapped with the prints of Hokusai. Bracquemond enthusiastically showed the prints to his Impressionist friends, who were intrigued by their flat, bold, asymmetrical composition.
Bracquemond was extremely prolific, producing over eight hundred etchings, including portraits, landscapes, scenes of contemporary life, and bird-studies, besides numerous interpretations of other artists’ paintings, especially those of Meissonier, Gustave Moreau, Millet and Corot.
Here Bracquemond adapts an image that had been developed by Jean-François Millet through a series of compositions twenty years earlier. Millet illustrated the newborn lamb, the young shepherdess and the anxious ewe as a tableau of rural life and the interdependence of men and animals. Bracquemond aligns Millet’s grouping in a vertical composition that concentrates the interaction of the figures, while maintaining in black and white the diffused sense of light moving from the open fields through the arching branches of the gated hedge.
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