Félix Bracquemond
He played a key role in the revival of printmaking, encouraging artists such as Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro to use this technique.
[1] Unusually for a prominent artist of this period, he also designed pottery for a number of French factories, in an innovative style that marks the beginning of Japonisme in France.
In 1856, Edmond de Goncourt became close friends with Bracquemond, and they both shared a love of Japanese art, the engraver having been the first to discover an album by Hokusai.
Altogether he produced over eight hundred plates, comprising portraits, landscapes, scenes of contemporary life, and bird-studies, besides numerous interpretations of other artist's paintings, especially those of Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Gustave Moreau and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.
He also befriended Théodore de Banville, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Gustave Geffroy, Félix Nadar and all the elites residing in Nouvelle Athènes.
In June 1862, he joined the Société des aquafortistes founded by the publisher Alfred Cadart with the help of the printer Auguste Delâtre.
[4] On his advice, Jean-Baptiste Corot, Jean-François Millet, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro began to practice engraving.
In 1888, Auguste Lepère created with Félix Bracquemond, Daniel Vierge and Tony Beltrand, the magazine L'Estampe originale, in order to interest artists and amateurs in the new processes and trends of engraving, particularly in color, and Henri Rivière worked from this date on "The Thirty Six Views of the Eiffel Tower", from 1888 to 1902.
[2] In 1856, Bracquemond discovered a collection of Manga engravings by the Japanese Hokusai, typical of the pictorial genre known in Japan as Kachô-ga, depicting flowers and birds with insects, crustaceans and fishes, in the workshop of his printer Auguste Delâtre, after having been used to fix a consignment of porcelain.
In 1867, Bracquemond was also one of the nine members of the "Société du Jing-lar" with Henri Fantin-Latour, Carolus Duran and the ceramist Marc-Louis Solon, who met monthly in Sèvres for a Japanese dinner, to which this service would have been destined.
He lingered on ceramics for a special praise of Rousseau, whom he defended against his English imitators: "I had refused all allusions necessarily too briefly to this admirable and unique service, decorated by Bracquemond with Japanese motifs borrowed from the poultry yard and the fish ponds, the most beautiful crockery I have ever known.
Mallarmé quoted Deck, Collinot and Rousseau, who had "totally renewed French ceramics": "I should particularly mention, as a translation of the high Japanese charm made by a very French spirit, the table service asked, boldly, for the master Aquafortiste Bracquemond: where struts, enhanced with joyous colors, the ordinary hosts of the poultry yard and fish ponds."
A close friend of Édouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, and Henri Fantin-Latour, he is represented in the latter's paintings, Hommage à Delacroix, 1864, preserved in Paris at the Musée d'Orsay[12] and Toast with the Truth of 1865, destroyed by the artist.
He is also the author of a book entitled Du dessin et la couleur, published in 1886, very much appreciated by Vincent van Gogh,[15] and a study on woodcutting and lithography.
[16] Indeed, it was he who recognised the beauty of the Hokusai woodcuts used as packing around a shipment of Japanese china, a discovery which helped change the look of late 19th-century art.
