Bulletin 19, 1972

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Cézanne, Vollard, and Lithography: The Ottawa Maquette for the "Large Bathers" Colour Lithograph

by Douglas W. Druick

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Notes

1 Lionello Venturi, Cézanne: son art - (catalogue raisonné, 2 vols.; Paris: Paul Rosenberg, 1936), cat. no. 1157. The Venturi catalogue does not include the Ottawa maquette. Subsequent references in text to a work listed in the Venturi catalogue will be indicated by the abbreviation V. followed by the catalogue number.

I would like to thank the following without whose assistance this study would have been impossible: Miss Riva Castelman, Curator, Department of Prints, Museum of Modem Art, New York; Mr Martin Gordon, Martin Gordon Gallery, New York; M. Marcel Guiot, Paris; Miss Una Johnson, New York ; Mr Harold Joachim, Curator of prints and Drawings, The Art Institute of Chicago; M. Marcel Lecomte, Paris; Miss Anne Lockhart, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Drawings, The Cleveland Museum of Art; M. A. C. Mazo, Paris; Mr R. G. Michel, Paris; MI Edmund Pillsbury, Curator of European Art, Yale University Art Gallery; M. Hubert Prouté, Paris; Miss Elizabeth Roth, Curator, Prints Division, New York Public Library; Miss Donna Stein, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints, Museum of Modem Art, New York; Mrs Marc Steinberg, Saint Louis; Mrs Florence Weil, Saint Louis; Mr Mark Weil, Washington University, Saint Louis. I am indebted to Ms Anne Coffm Hanson, Yale University for her valuable suggestions.

2 Venturi lists only three etchings: V. 1159, 1160, 1161. Paul Gachet, in his study of the etchings, lists and reproduces five. Cf: Paul Gachet, Cézanne à Auvers: Cézanne graveur (Paris: Les Beaux-Arts, 1952).

3 Gachet, op. cit.

4 Ambroise Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, trans. 
V. M. Macdonald (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), p. 247. 

5 André Mellerio, "La rénovation de l'estampe : L'estampe en 1896," L'estampe et l'affiche, vol. I (March 1897), p. 5. Cf. also by same author, La lithographie originale en couleurs (Paris: Publication de l'estampe et l'affiche, 1898), p. 27.

6 Timothy Riggs, "L'estampe originale: A Late Nineteenth Century Publication of Original Prints" (Unpublished Masters Thesis, Yale University, June 1966), p. 68.

7 Ibid., p. 39.

8 Mellerio, "La rénovation de l'estampe: L'estampe en  1896," p.5.

9 Riggs, op. cit., p. 39. Cf. also Donna Stein, L'estampe originale: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: The Museum of Graphic Art, 1970), p. 13.

10 Riggs, op.cit., p. 38.

11 For 150 francs, yearly subscribers to L'estampe originale received forty prints, for which the non-subscriber had to pay 200 francs (cf. Stein, op.cit., p. 7). Every print was limited to an edition of 100, each numbered and signed by the artist. L'épreuve issued ten prints monthly in an edition of 205 impressions. The yearly subscription rate was 100 francs for the regular (unsigned) and 250 francs for the deluxe editions. Therefore even in the deluxe edition the average price per print was just slightly more than half chat of a print from L'estampe originale.

12 They were smaller in format and printed on poorer-quality papers. Also, photo-mechanical processes were sometimes used.

13 All the Vollard publications arc catalogued in Una E.Johnson, Anlbroise Vollard éditeur: 1867-1939 (New York: Wittenbom and Co., 1944). Subsequent references in text to a work listed in the Johnson catalogue will be indicated by the abbreviation J. followed by the catalogue number. Johnson gives the title L'album des peintres-graveurs to each of the two published albums of miscellaneous prints as well as to the projected third album. In fact, however, the 1896 publication was entitled Les peintres-graveurs, and that of the following year, L'album d'estampes originales de la galerie Vollard. Vollard executed the cover for the proposed third album (1.198, p. 159). The text reads Album / d'estampes / originales which, presumably, would have been the title of the publication. Prior to Vollard's first publication, the name Les peintres-graveurs had been used by the artists who had shown original prints in the five successive annual exhibitions at Durand-Ruel's gallery beginning in 1889.

According to Johnson, Vollard's first undertaking as a publisher of prints was Bonnard's Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris, a portfolio of twelve colour lithographs (1.14) executed in 1895 (cf. Johnson, op. cit., p. 13). Claude Roger-Marx states that "cette suite...fut exposée pour la première fois...chez Vollard, en 1899" (cf. Claude Roger-Marx, Bonnard Lithographe [Monte Carlo: André Sauret, 1952], p. 105). It seems, then, that Les peintres-graveurs of 1896 was the first publication Vollard exhibited (n. 16).

14 These included: Georges Auriol, Albert Besnard, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Fantin-Latour, Alexandre Lunois, Charles Maurin, Maurice Denis, Odilon Redon, Auguste Renoir, Theo van Rysselberghe, Félix-Édouard Vallotton, and Édouard vuillard.

15 By Vollard's account, the twenty-two prints sold for 100 francs (cf. Recollections of a Picture Dealer, p. 248), or half the annual non-subscription price for the forty prints in L'estampe originale. The January 1898 issue of L'estampe et 1'affiche advertised this album at a price of 150 francs (p. 20). This could represent an increase in price, in spite of no increased market demand, or merely Vollard's faulty memory. Certainly his Recollections are incorrect in regard to the price of the 1897 publication (n. 47).

16 The show, 15-20 July, was advertised in a poster (J .59) which Vollard had commissioned from Bonnard.

17 Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, p. 248. Vollard notes that even twenty years later the edition was not sold out.

18. The 28 June issue of the Belgian publication L'art moderne had briefly reviewed the Parisian art scene, devoting a paragraph to Vollard's recently-opened gallery. It was noted that at Vollard's "les aquafortistes, lithographes, dessinateurs, aquarellistes, qui attirent les critiques nouveaux, exposent abondamment." The reviewer found the prints to be of considerable interest and stated that some of them "font partie de l'album des peintres graveurs que M. Vollard édite." Those artists cited in the review who were represented in Les peintres-graveurs included Redon (J.134), Theo van Rysselberghe (J. 184), Denis (J. 44), Maurin (J. 102), Vallotton (J. 194), and Vuillard (J. 196). Cf. "Notes d'art Parisiennes" L'art Moderne, no. 26 (28 June 1896), p. 203. Three days earlier Arsène Alexandre's review of the same exhibition had appeared in the newspaper Le Figaro. Alexandre noted that "Cette nouvelle série est loin de manquer d'intérêt. On y trouve à côté de choses insuffisantes et bicornues, des oeuvres remarquables, et d'autres qui ont beaucoup d'originalité et de saveur." While he faulted the exhibition for not being "une manifestation complète de la gravure originale moderne," he nevertheless found it to be generally both "curieuse et variée". Among the artists whose work the critic praised, those who contributed to Les peintres-graveurs, included Besnard (J. II), Jacques E. Blanche (J. 12), Carabin (J. 27), Denis (J. 44), Fantin-Latour (J. 57), Lunois (J. 82), Maurin (J. 102), valadon (J. 193), Vallotton (J. 194), and Vuillard (J. 196). Alexandre did not, however, mention either Redon or van Rysselberghe. Cf. "La vie artistique, peintres-graveurs," Le Figaro (25 June 1896), p. 5, cols 3, 4.

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