Adolphe Lalauze
Adolphe Lalauze (8 October 1838 – 18 October 1906)[1] was a prolific French etcher who made the illustrations for many books. He won various awards and was made a knight of the Legion of Honour. LifeAdolphe Lalauze was born in Rive-de-Gier, Loire, on 8 October 1838.[2] His first job was a Contrôleur de l'Enregistrement.[3] Lalauze worked in this civil service job in Toulouse for some time, then enrolled at the Toulouse École des Beaux-arts. He moved to Paris, where he became a student of Léon Gaucherel. Encouraged by Gaucherel, he took up etching, and first exhibited at the Salon in 1872.[4] At the Salon in 1876 he exhibited twenty-one etchings. These included a series of nine called Le Petit Monde (The Small World) that depicted childhood scenes using his children as models, which won a 3rd class medal. He won a 2nd class medal at the Salon of 1878 for twelve plates illustrating the Histoires ou contes du temps passé by Charles Perrault.[2] Lalauze illustrated many books. He drew the Frontispiece for Le Bric-à-brac de l'amour (1879) published by Octave Uzanne.[5] This book used revolutionary new photo-mechanical reproduction techniques.[6] He illustrated the Peter Anthony Motteux translation of Don Quixote, first published in 1879.[7] Lalauze made 21 etchings for the 1881 edition of Galland's translation of the Arabian Nights, and these were reproduced in several other editions.[8] He was one of the illustrators of Damase Jouaust's 1882 Petite Bibliothėque artistique (Small Art Library), along with Pierre Edmond Alexandre Hédouin and Émile Boilvin.[3] He created illustrations for Walter Scott's Waverley Novels published in Boston in 1893–94.[9] In 1898 his illustrations in the pure fin de siècle style appeared in Sophie Arnould, actress and wit by Robert B. Douglas.[10] Adolphe Lalauze was a member of the Société des Artistes Français.[11] He died in Milly-la-Forêt, Essonne in 1906. His son, Alphonse Lalauze, was also an artist.[4] WorkLalauze was known for etchings that depicted children, using his own children as models. He also made etchings that interpreted work by such artists as Charles Bargue, Pieter Codde, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, Juan Antonio Gonzalez, Charles Green, Antoine-Jean Gros, Jean-Baptiste Huet, Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, David Teniers, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Diego Velázquez.[4] Lalauze made color prints by superimposing etched boards.[3] Some of his larger plates included "Love Story" after Frank Dicksee, "A Kiss from the Sea" after Hamilton Macallum and "The Entry of Charles V into Antwerp" after Hans Makart. His best work included "The Halt" after Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, etched for the magazine L'Art, and "Portrait of Madame Pompadour" after Maurice Quentin de La Tour, published by the Société des Artistes Français.[2] During his lifetime he was called "one of the most skillful original etchers of the modern French school."[11] An 1889 book described him as an etcher with extreme facility who composed elegant vignettes and frontispieces.[3] Later, Claude Roger-Marx criticized him for having fallen from interpretive drawing into a "laborious work of illustration" and of multiplying small compositions and vignettes.[12] Awards and distinctions
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