Auguste Lepère

Born, Paris, 30 Nov 1849; died, Domme, 20 Nov 1918.

French printmaker and painter. From an early age he wanted to be a painter, but his father, the sculptor François Lepère (1829–71), stipulated that he also learn a craft that could provide him with a dependable livelihood. At 13 Lepère began an apprenticeship with Burn Smeeton ( fl 1840–60), an English wood-engraver working in Paris. He began exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon at the age of 20. In 1875 he showed a painting of the Commune at the Salon des Refusés, Guardpost on the Rue des Rosiers (Paris, Carnavalet), which won praise from Camille Pissarro and Armand Guillaumin. (Ten years later Lepère gave Pissarro’s son, Lucien, his first lesson in wood-engraving.) From the early 1880s Lepère’s wood-engraving business left him little time for painting. He only returned to it seriously after 1900, when success as a printmaker brought him a degree of financial security.

Lepère worked in many other media, including watercolour, ceramic decoration, etching, lithography and leather bookbinding; but it was as a woodcut artist that he made his greatest contribution. He played a major role in the transformation of the woodcut from a reproductive medium of illustration to an independent means of aesthetic expression. In 1875, when Lepère’s first signed reproductive wood-engravings began appearing in illustrated periodicals, his name appeared as draughtsman as well as engraver. In 1877 he began publishing wood-engravings based on his own compositions. The first appeared in Le Monde illustré (12 May 1877)—five little wood-engravings of the construction of Sacré-Coeur signed ‘after nature by M. Lepère’. This was unusual, given the strict division of labour prevalent in wood-engraving ateliers of the period. In the 1880s Lepère became known as an original wood-engraver through his contributions to cultural periodicals, particularly La Revue illustrée. He had, however, the more ambitious aim of establishing the woodcut as a medium that would be disseminated in the form of single-sheet prints, like etching and lithography. In 1888 he organized the Société de l’Estampe Originale, which published an album of ten original prints, including four wood-engravings in May 1888. Further albums appeared in 1889 and 1891. The following year André Marty purchased the rights to the L’Estampe originale title and continued to include single-sheet woodcuts—a tribute to Lepère’s campaign on behalf of the medium.

In 1889 Lepère broadened the expressive boundaries of the woodcut. He hand-coloured several of his earlier wood-engravings, produced a chiaroscuro woodcut (Basketsellers) and experimented with cutting and printing a colour woodcut from sidegrain pearwood with water-based colours in the manner of the Japanese (e.g. Le Palais de Justice). In March 1890 he contributed 23 woodcuts to the second Exposition des Peintres-Graveurs at Durand-Ruel’s galleries. He continued to produce and exhibit colour woodcuts, his most important work in the medium being The Convalescent (1892). His example may have encouraged Henri Rivière to produce woodcuts in the Japanese manner from 1889 and inspired experiments with the medium by Henri Guérard (1846–97) and Charles Maurin in 1890. Félix Vallotton, Maurice Denis, Aristide Maillol and Paul Gauguin took up the woodcut in the 1890s and by 1895 a full-scale revival of the medium was well underway.

In 1907 Auguste Desmoulins began publishing portfolios of three series of wood-engravings that Lepère had created for La Revue illustrée in the late 1880s. In 1913 the publisher-dealer Edmond Sagot produced an edition of the popular series Rouen illustré, originally made for the journal L’Illustration in 1888. Through these editions Lepère’s work was disseminated in European and American collections. A complete set of these series is in the British Museum (see [not available online]).

Lepère’s favourite subject was the city of Paris and its inhabitants. His work in the medium of woodcut is characterized by two distinct styles. His wood-engravings for illustrated periodicals and books are notable for their expressive, etching-like style, unmatched for the atmospheric qualities achieved through the manipulation of fine black-and-white lines. His woodcuts of the 1890s, on the other hand, often still done on the endgrain, are much broader in approach. Again, one of their most notable attributes is their atmospheric quality, though achieved through different means; for example, in works such as The Convalescent subtle effects were achieved by inking the line blocks in brown, blue and grey, and by adding flat colour blocks inked with transparent, water-based pigments in imitation of the Japanese.

Jacquelynn Baas. " Lepère, Auguste." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T050489 (accessed March 6, 2012).