Size of the original etching, 14⅛ × 10¾ inches
Lepère. Belle Matinée. Automne
Size of the original etching, 7½ × 11¼ inches
Auguste Lepère has pursued a free course of development, rounding his capacities, and forming himself with balanced and reasonable attention to diversified interests. He was born in Paris in 1849. His father was the talented sculptor François Lepère, and he got, no doubt, from his father something of the latter’s taste for suggesting passion, even frenzy, in small but monumental figures. While quite young he studied with the English engraver Smeeon, and spent his first professional years in the service of illustration for Le Monde Illustré, L’Illustration, Le Magasin Pittoresque, and La Revue Illustrée in Paris, the Graphic and Black and White in London, and Scribner’s and Harper’s in America.
Tiring of this field, he tried all things. He became in turn a metal-chaser, a decorator of leathers, a ceramist, an etcher, a wood-engraver and a painter. If we consider him chiefly as an etcher, it must be with the full appreciation that any craft mastered by him is made subsidiary to the larger principles upon which all works of art are based, whatever the medium or process. He has consistently declined to fritter away his admirable technique upon technicalities undertaken for their own sake, and his work in etching as in painting is the work of an intellect concerned with the problems of rhythm and harmony, color, tone and form, which assail artists in every field.
As an etcher he received his initiation from Bracquemond, the most robust of temperaments and at the same time the most fastidious of technicians. Lepère has been worthy of his teaching. From the first he has sought to render his impression, recorded by a vision singularly prompt and synthetic, with precise care, patiently assembling all the complex virtues of his method to the task. To his slightest plate he has brought conscience and sincerity, and also a quality without which all the moral gifts with which human nature may be endowed would have availed him nothing as an artist: the rare capacity, that is, for retaining the freshness of his vision throughout a slow process of translation.
Before examining a few of his plates to discern their significant qualities, it will be interesting to consider his own words on the aim of the engraver: notes written with reference to the change in methods of reproduction from interpretation by means of the engraver’s art to the use of photography and the resultant processes. Even his notes on engraving for the purpose of reproduction, though less closely allied to the work of his riper years than the notes on engraving from nature as an original art, are excellent reading, since they throw a clear light upon his ideals and definite convictions:
“Formerly,” he says, “when an engraver had a work to reproduce, it was absolutely necessary for him to see it. He could then study it, comprehend it, and consequently extract its essential principle, simplify it, adapt it to his mode of expression, engrave it.
“If he had not the gift of composition, that of design was necessary in order to make his transposition; that of interpretation, in order to gather the idea of the creator of his model. His work was almost the equal of the work of an original engraver who usually interprets a composition or a model given by nature.