Market Day on Blvd. Edouard Quinet, Paris
Lester George Hornby (1882-1956), Market Day on Blvd. Edouard Quinet, Paris, c. 1910, etching, signed in pencil lower right and numbered (8/30) lower left [also signed and titled in the plate lower left. In excellent condition, with small margins (trimmed just outside of the plate mark top and sides, a bit more space below), 6 x 8 7/8, the sheet 6 3/8 x 9 3/8 inches.
Provenance: Kennedy Galleries, New York (with their label intact)
A fine impression, printed in a dark brown ink on thick laid paper, with a strong layering of plate tone wiped slightly more towards the middle of the composition to highlight the donkeys and the activity underneath the central market tents.
Hornby moved from Massachusetts to Paris in 1906, and made that his home base for several years while he traveled throughout Europe.
The critic Rowland Thomas wrote in 1910 “Hornby is beyond doubt a master etcher with such power of eye and hand as our generation has hardly known before. Not since Whistler posed with the Universe on his needle point has anyone scratched on solid metal lines of such electrifying, such insolently simple conciseness as these- a new old Paris leaps transfigured and revealed for those who will glory in her.”
Hornby often numbered prints in terms of his hoped for sales rather than in terms of the actual number of impressions printed; hence this print, rarely encountered, may in fact have been issued in less than 30 impressions.