Stormy Sunset, Jouy-le-Moutier

Art Historical Context

Louis Auguste Lepère’s *Stormy Sunset, Jouy-le-Moutier* captures a fleeting moment of dramatic weather in the French countryside. Created in 1893, the etching reflects the late-nineteenth interest in atmospheric landscape scenes, when artists sought to convey the changing moods of nature rather than merely record topography. Jouy-le-Moutier, a village northwest of Paris, provided Lepère with the kind of rural subject he frequently explored during this period. As an etching printed on cream wove paper, the work demonstrates the medium’s ability to render delicate lines and subtle tonal gradations. The small plate size—just over three by four inches—invites close viewing, allowing the viewer to appreciate the fine cross-hatching that suggests roiling clouds and the last glow of sunlight breaking through. Lepère was a leading figure in the revival of original etching in France, and this print exemplifies his skill at translating transient light effects into the precise language of the etched line. Today in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection of prints and drawings, the work offers a quiet reminder of how nineteenth-century printmakers turned everyday landscapes into poetic statements about time and weather.

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...