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It seems fair to say that Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) would scarcely have been a significant poet without Apollinaire, or novelist without Radiguet, or filmmaker without Bunuel. Certainly, he would not have made much contribution to the visual arts without the spur of his friendship and collaboration with Picasso. Almost all my lithographs by Jean Cocteau were conceived as illustrations to his own plays. They were printed by Mourlot in 1957. These rapidly-sketched works would not convince anyone that Cocteau was a great artist, but they do show, I think, how thoroughly he absorbed Picasso's intent playfulness of line. I like them very much - more so than the Picasso-esque bullfighter he contributed to Prints from the Mourlot Press in 1964. Actually, my favourite work of art by Jean Cocteau would be unreproducible on this blog. It is his painted fishermen's chapel in Villefranche-sur-Mer, just across from the Hotel Welcome where Cocteau lived for long periods. The walls of this tin

I first came across the work of the etcher Eug�ne V�der in issue 17 of the art revue Byblis (Spring 1926), which published his etching La rue Saint-Denis. I thought it a lovely piece of work, and was intrigued to find out more about its creator - especially as my copy was hand-signed by the artist. I think V�der probably signed every copy of this print. Usually in Byblis there were 105 hand-signed and 500 unsigned impressions, but in this case there seem to have been 105 in colour and 500 in black-and-white, all signed. Eug�ne V�der, La rue Saint-Denis Etching, 1926 Byblis was published by the art publisher Albert Moranc�. Moranc� was evidently equally struck by V�der's work, because the Winter 1926 issue of Byblis carries a full-page advertisement for a work to appear the following June from �ditions Albert Moranc�: Paris: 50 Eaux-Fortes originales en couleurs d'Eug�ne V�der, r�unies en un portefeuille d'amateur . There were to be 100 copies on Japon imp�rial at a subscrib

�douard Daliphard is the opposite of a household name. Until I acquired the etching below, I had never heard of him - and actually it took quite a bit of concentrated research to find out who the artist was or anything about him. But now I feel quite passionately that Daliphard deserves new study and re-assessment. The classic lost Impressionist is Fr�d�ric Bazille, who died in 1870 at the age of just 28. But �douard Daliphard is another case in point. Daliphard was born in Rouen in 1833. He studied under Gustave Morin at the Beaux-Arts in Rouen, and then under Joseph Quinaux at the Brussels Academy. He exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1864-1875, and is best known for melancholy twilight landscapes of scenes in Belgium, Holland, and France. He died prematurely in 1877; I do not know the cause, but the fact that he failed to exhibit in 1876 suggests an illness rather than sudden death. �douard Daliphard, Etched signature My etching by Daliphard is a street scene executed with an Impres

Today, the best-known figure of the American Painter-Etcher movement is undoubtedly Thomas Moran. Along with his wife Mary Nimmo Moran and brother Peter Moran, Thomas was a towering figure in American art - so much so that he even had a mountain named after him, Mount Moran in Wyoming. Although they were members of the New York Etching Club and its offshoot the American Society of Etchers, the Morans were based in Philadelphia, and stood a little aside from the core coterie of New York etchers. My sole etching by Thomas Moran is one of the most dramatic and striking of all the American etchings of the 1870s/1880s that I have seen. I believe the title of it is The Sounding Sea. Moran's 1884 painting The Much-Resounding Sea is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington; he also made an etching after this painting, which is reproduced as plate 47 in Alicia G. Longwell, First Impressions: Nineteenth-Century American Master Prints. This earlier image of breaking waves is much more

Although the first meeting of the New York Etching Club in 1877 was in the studio of J. D. Smillie, the meetings soon moved their regular venue to the studio of Henry Farrer, one of the club's co-founders and most active members. Etchings were printed on a press built by Farrer himself. Of all the Etching Club artists, I think Farrer is my favourite. Unlike R. Swain Gifford, the subject of my last post, Farrer did not favour a less-is-more economy of line. Instead his moody landscapes and seascapes are intensely worked, deeply bitten, and often almost impenetrably dark with cross-hatched lines. Henry Farrer, On New York Bay Etching, 1879 Henry Farrer, Marine Etching, 1880 Henry Farrer was born in London in 1843. He emigrated to the USA in 1863 at the age of twenty. Farrer was very much a driving force in the American etching revival. Most of his etchings are seascapes or landscapes, though the first, made in 1868, were views of New York buildings. Henry Farrer, The Lighthouse Etchi

The first meeting of the New York Etching Club was convened on 2 May 1877 at the studio of James David Smillie. About twenty artists were present, half of whom had never etched before. The centerpiece of the evening was therefore a practical demonstration. Smillie laid a ground onto a small etching plate, on which an Algerian landscape was drawn with an etching needle by Robert Swain Gifford, the image was bitten into the plate by immersion in a tray of mordant, and then the plate was printed by the physician and amateur etcher Leroy Milton Yale. James D. Smillie remembered the occasion in a note in the first illustrated catalogue issued by the club: "The smear of thick, pasty ink was deftly rubbed into the lines just corroded, and as deftly cleansed from the polished surface; the damped sheet of thin, silky Japan paper was spread upon the gently warmed plate; the heavy steel roller of the printing press, with its triple facing of thick, soft blanket, was slowly rolled over it, an