Loguivy le Soir (Loguivy at Evening)
Henri Rivière (French, 1864-1951), Loguivy le Soir (Loguivy at Evening), 1904,Plate 7 for Le Beau Pays de Bretagne. Published by Eugène Verneau, Paris. Color lithograph. Signed in blue crayon lower right and numbered 37 [also signed in the stone]. The full sheet with full margins, 9 x 14, the sheet 19 x 23 5/8 inches. In good condition, some soft folds well outside of the image.
Provenance: ex Collection Ernest Shapiro
A fine atmospheric impression, with the intentionally subdued colors effectively contrasting.
Rivière was one of the most creative artists of his time – he created a form of shadow theatre at the Chat Noir in Paris in the late 1880’s; later he helped originate color printmaking in woodcuts and lithographs; he was a photographer and etcher as well. Much of his work was influenced by the Japanese woodcut tradition, and that’s evident in Loguivy le Soir, which, although it is lithography, has the look of a complex woodcut.
Rivière first visited Brittany in 1884, spending most of his summers there until 1916. Together with bustling Parisian life, rural Brittany was the subject for most of his landscape works.