Une Bergère
ca. 1852
Medium
Wood engraving
Dimensions
Sheet (Trimmed): 8 7/8 × 6 11/16 in. (22.5 × 17 cm) Image: 7 13/16 × 5 1/2 in. (19.8 × 14 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1933
Accession Number
32.36.9
Art Historical Context
**Une Bergère (A Shepherdess)**, created around 1852 by French artists Charles Jacque and Rouget, captures the charm of rural life through the intimate medium of wood engraving. collaborative print, measuring about ⅞ × 6⅝ inches, depicts a shepherdess—evoking timeless pastoral scenes of 19th-century France. Wood engraving, a technique where intricate designs are carved into wood blocks for printing, allowed for detailed, reproducible images that brought art to wider audiences via books and periodicals. In the mid-19th century, as Realism and the Barbizon movement celebrated everyday countrysi...
About the Artist
Charles Jacque|François Rouget
Charles-Émile Jacque (1813–1894) was a pioneering French painter, engraver, and illustrator whose career bridged the worlds of printmaking and pastoral painting. Born in Paris amid a difficult childhood, he apprenticed at age seventeen to a map engraver, mastering drypoint technique and producing his first etching in 1830—a copy of a head after Rembrandt. After serving seven years in the French Ar...