Description:
Two men bundling faggots by a river; man wading through the river; trees and windmills in the background
Label Text:
Apprenticed to a firm of engravers at age thirteen, Lepere spent the first twenty-five years of his long career as a wood engraver, rising from apprentice to head of a small printing business of his own. Most of his work before 1889 consisted of many hundreds of highly refined engravings on wood for the illustrated press. By the late 1880s photographic processes were rapidly displacing hand engraving, and then Lepere turned increasingly to etchings and woodcuts. These two media dominated his work thereafter (although he did some lithographs and painted all his life), and it was thanks to them that he finally won widespread recognition as an original artist. He took a major role in the revival of woodcuts that characterized the 1890s. Like others, he took inspiration from the techniques of Renaissance prints and Japanese woodcuts. Often he wrote about the joy he took in discarding the illusionistic modeling of wood engraving, cut with burins in hard end-grain wood, in favor of the more primitive technique of cutting with knives into softer side-grain wood. In a letter of 1908 he defined the woodcut as "mediocre for the finesse of modeling and shading, superior in its robustness, its beautiful large contours, its flat patches of black, its large white cutouts . . . . A kind of initial language of the art of engraving, a kind of crude product of nature -- a robust peasant -- without tricks and without finesse." This association of technique with peasant was seldom voiced by artists but could have been the motto of Pissarro or Gauguin.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=MH+1962.96.M.RII |
