Apple Market, Viewed from the Pont Louis-Philippe, plate seven from Le Long de la Seine et des Boulevards
1890, published 1910
Medium
Wood engraving in black on cream Japanese tissue
Dimensions
Image: 17.3 × 9 cm (6 13/16 × 3 9/16 in.); Sheet: 22.5 × 15.2 cm (8 7/8 × 6 in.)
Classification
wood engraving
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
128529
Rights
Public Domain
Art Historical Context
Louis Auguste Lepère’sApple Market, Viewed from the Pont Louis-Philippe* captures a lively slice of daily commerce along the Seine in 1890. As the seventh plate in the series *Le Long de la Seine et des Boulevards*, the wood engraving invites viewers to pause on the historic bridge and observe vendors and shoppers gathered amid baskets of fruit. The intimate scale and delicate black linework on cream Japanese tissue convey both the bustle of the market and the quiet rhythm of the river below. Lepère was a leading figure in the late-nineteenth-century revival of wood engraving as a fine-art medium. Rather than using the technique merely for reproduction, he exploited its capacity for crisp detail and subtle tonal gradation, transforming an everyday Parisian scene into a refined print. Published in 1910, this impression now resides in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection of prints and drawings, where it exemplifies the artist’s skill at distilling urban vitality into a small, jewel-like composition.
About the Artist
Louis Auguste Lepère · 1849–1918
Louis-Auguste Lepère (1849–1918) was born in Paris on November 30 to the sculptor François Lepère, immersing him early in the artistic world. At age thirteen, he apprenticed in the studio of the English wood engraver Joseph Burn-Smeeton, training there from 1862 to 1867, and later attended drawing courses under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran at the Petite École (now École nationale supérieure des art...