La Rue des Chantres

Date 1862
Technique Etching
Price $2,750.00
Exhibitor Allinson Gallery Inc.
Contact the Exhibitor 860-429-2322
jane@allinsongallery.com
Buy From / See At This Exhibitor's Site

La Rue des Chantres. 1862. Etching. Schneiderman 85.v/vi. 11 3/4 x 5 7/8 (sheet 16 1/4 x 9). Edition 100 in this state (total printing unknown). the dolphin atop the spire has been replaced by a weathercock. A rich impression printed on cream wove paper. Provenance: deaccession of Baldwin-Wallace College, Berea, Ohio. 

The street was so named because the singers of Notre Dame once lived there. This is a composite view, based on separate drawings of the street which Meryon later aligned for the etching. The narrow street is filled with people: some soldiers possibly brawling with two policemen in their midst; a woman carrying bread, with a child; a howling dog. As in so many of Meryon's prints, a spire of Notre Dame rises in the distance.

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Charles Meryon was celebrated among artists and collectors alike during the nineteenth century for his etched depictions of Paris. These works combined a documentary eye on the French capital—which was then undergoing dramatic transformation from a medieval to distinctly modern city—with fantastic details that varied from the whimsical to the morbid. His first and best-known album, Eaux-fortes sur Paris, included twenty-two urban views inspired by the novels and poetry of Victor Hugo (1802–1885). This title page opened the series, and showed, as the art critic Philippe Burty described in his early monograph on Meryon, "a block of stone with fossils and moss imprints . . . symbolizing the physical foundations of Paris.

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Additional etchings by Meryon are available on the Allinson Gallery, Inc. website