Description
Marguerite DuFay Dans son Repertoire, Louis Anquetin – Mounted Special Edition Re-Print
Designed by Louis Anquetin (French, 1861 – 1932) and printed 1894. This is a limited edition, number 930/2000, lithograph print reproduced by the Sunday Times.
Anquetin was a painter and illustrator, who trained in Paris under Bonnat and Cormon. In 1887 he, Emile Bernard, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec became friends and formed the Ecole du Petit Boulevard, opposing both Impressionism and academicism. He turned to painting Paris street scenes and bohemian life.
He also illustrated for newspapers and later turned to theatre design and decorative arts, providing tapestry designs for the preeminent weaving houses of Gobelins and Beauvais. Around 1887, Anquetin and Bernard developed a painting style inspired by Japanese art and stained glass, using flat regions of colour with black outline. This style was named “cloisonnism” by critic Edouard Dujardin.
He eventually fell from the public favour after abandoning the modern movements in the mid 1890s to study the methods and allegorical themes of the Old Masters, such as Ruebens. In 1907 he met Jacques Maroger, a young artist who shared his interest, with whom he collaborated. He died in Paris.
This two-sheet design is his first poster. At a time when female instrumentalists were not taken seriously, Marguerite Dufay was a “comique excentrique” performer (comic eccentric) who entertained at Parisian music cafés in the late 19th century. Hiatt, who thought the poster was both hilarious and a masterpiece, decribed DuFay as “merely a woman of impossible fatness who performs at various Paris music-halls on the trombone.” Along with conventional instruments, such performers made music with non-instruments, such as bottles, anvils and hammers. Hiatt said of the poster:” The mirth of the thing is victorious and infectious; one seems almost to hear the coarse laugh; the ample body in the green dress seems to move as one stares at it. In line, in movement, this poster is…a veritable masterpiece” (Hiatt p. 113).
We have a few French poster paintings for sale.
Size 25 x 35 ” approx. Framing can be arranged at cost.
