2-727-670 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Effect of Moon at Dieppe, c. 1885. The 1890s in France was not only a decade that produced marvelous colour lithographs but also beautiful colour etchings. This renaissance of colour intaglio prints was the result of many factors, including an interest in French 18th-century etchings-an earlier period of glorious colour printmaking-and the popularilty of Japanese colour woodcuts, introduced in France in the 1860s. Around 1885 Guérard, an inventive artist, began to experiment with colour etching. In Effect of Moon at Dieppe, he realized the glow of the lights around the harbor and their reflections in the water by burnishing away etched lines on the plate so that nothing printed in these areas. The highlights, therefore, are the unprinted white paper.