Sachi Yanari-Rizzo, Curator of Prints & Drawings
As many of us take weekend getaways during what’s left of summer, it makes me think of 19th century French printmaker Adolphe Appian who was among a wave of artists escaping to the quiet countryside to create.
As rail connections around Paris improved, many middle-class urban dwellers took refuge in the rural outskirts during the summertime and weekends. They sought an antidote to the noise and activity of a city that was transforming and modernizing. From around 1830 to 1870, a group of painters worked in the forest of Fontainebleau, 35 miles southeast of Paris. It offered 42,000 acres of woods, marshes, and meadows. Many people, nostalgic for the past, appreciated its preindustrial, unspoiled state. The artists, such as Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny, later became known as the Barbizon School, named after the village at the edge of the forest where the Auberge Ganne inn was located, one of their informal meeting places at day’s end.
Like the forest of Fontainebleau and its hamlets, small villages east of Lyon attracted landscape artists, like Adolphe Appian. Born in Lyon, Jacques-Barthélemy Appian (known as Adolphe) studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in his hometown at the age of fifteen, one of the earliest art schools outside of Paris. He took a class in fabric design as the city had a long history in the silk industry. He later studied with painters François Grobon and Augustin Thierriat.
At the time, the French art academy and the annual Paris Salon, the most important juried art exhibition in the country, promoted Neoclassical subjects and a style emulating the Renaissance and classical antiquity. Landscapes, largely Italian, panoramic, and idyllic, were used as backdrops to historical, biblical, and mythological themes.
Artists sketched and painted naturalistic studies in the open air, satisfying their desire to experience nature directly. They were precursors to the Impressionists, often finishing their paintings in the studio. Moving away from the popular trends, they painted more intimate views of local areas and translated their firsthand observations into more personal responses to the landscape, rather than idealized. Artists looked back to examples of 17th century Dutch landscape paintings and etchings and to English painter John Constable, whose Hay Wain (1821) was exhibited in Paris in 1824.
Portability of materials and the invention of tube paint were key to working outdoors. Artists could also transport lightweight copper plates prepared with a ground for etching, ready for sketching with an etching needle, like a drawing.
In 1852 Appian moved to Crémieu, east of Lyon, where he found abundant inspiration in the picturesque towns in the area, including Optevoz, where Corot painted. That year Appian met Daubigny and Corot, who had taken up etching in 1845. Appian painted with them in the former province of Dauphiné in 1852 and 1853 and joined them at Fontainebleau in 1854 and 1856.
In Marais de la Burbanche (1868) Appian depicts a view of three herons wading in a wetland area along the Ain River upstream from Lyon. The etching shares the same composition with the painting Temps gris, Marais de la Burbanche (Gray weather, Marsh of the Burbanche), that was exhibited in the 1869 Paris Salon. In the painting, he used soft greys and greens in the trees and foliage and feathery strokes to create diffuse forms, contributing to a tranquil, romantic mood, in a style reminiscent of Corot.
It is possible that the etched version was intended as a graphic reproduction of his Salon painting, which was common practice at the time. His friend Daubigny used them to help promote his career. Original, non-reproductive etchings appeared first in the mid-1840s and became more common in the early 1850s.
Perhaps Appian’s etched version is more interpretation than reproduction. It possesses a different character than the painting, as it evokes an impression rather than pure description in the rendering of light, atmosphere, and water. Appian captures the placid nature of the marsh with narrowly spaced, steady hatch marks that capture the reflections in the water. He uses a thin film of ink, or plate tone, and delicate lines for the clouds in the sky to extend a sense of atmosphere. Appian created another etching the same year of the Burbanche area. Although larger in size, with its vertical format, it is a narrow, tree-lined view on the Ain River.
Alfred Cadart, a champion of printmaking, particularly etching, was a print publisher, known for portfolios with original prints. Appian’s plate was printed in the first volume of his journal L’Illustration Nouvelle, and later the plate was used in P.G. Hamerton’s Etching and Etchers.
After Appian’s visit to Italy in 1871 his work began to change. The colors in his palette grew lighter, perhaps influenced by the effects of the bright sunlight. In the etching Barque de Pecheurs (1874), Appian backlit his subject; silhouetted figures are more an extension of the fishing boat than a subject. The hazy sky is made up of horizontal lines that begin to merge with the ripples in the water at the faint horizon line, suggesting it is late in the day as the sunlight begins to fade.
In later prints, Appian’s etched marks are more rapid and loose, as seen in Venice Scene (1876). The artist displays his continued love for depicting water and the lives of fishermen. A line of architectural structures and small boats are seen in the distance, lightly etched to give a sense of depth to the work through aerial perspective.
Appian exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon, where he was awarded a gold medal in 1868. His work was on display at the University Exhibition in London (1862) and Universal Exhibition in Paris (1889) where he received an honorable mention. He is most remembered for his prints: 90 etchings, 33 monotypes, and four lithographs from 1853 to 1896.