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Showing posts with the label Leon Roger Miles

Keeping Impressionism at bay

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The French art critic L�on Roger-Mil�s is best-known today for his 1897 book Art et Nature , which included original etchings by Pissarro, Renoir, Besnard, and Renouard among other Impressionist delights. So I was interested to acquire a copy of the only book of poems by Roger-Mil�s, Les Veill�es Noires (Gloomy Evenings), published in 1889 by Paul Ollendorf, in an edition of 400 copies. I knew it was illustrated with original etchings. Surely it also would be full of Impressionist masterpieces. Well, not quite. Instead,  Les Veill�es Noires is an object lesson in looking down the wrong end of the telescope. That's not to say the etchings - brilliantly interpreted and printed by Auguste and Eug�ne Del�tre - aren't good. Some of them are fantastic. But the artists chosen by Roger-Mil�s to illustrate this milestone book are a roll-call of talented men who missed out on their place in art history by sticking with the academic aesthetic of the Salon de Paris and turning their back