Le Rhone a Avignon (signed in pencil)

Armand Coussens was a landscape and portrait painter and an etcher of rural types and life in provincial towns. An old woman with goats, a street vendor of oranges, a hawker resting under a tree, an impression of a harbor, or of an open-air market yield exquisite plates of delicate coloring. Coussens' oeuvre numbers now over one hundred plates. A great colour etcher of the early twentieth century, Armand Coussens studied at the Ecole des Beaux-arts in Nimes. Upon graduation, he lived and worked in Paris for ten years. In Paris, both his paintings and etchings were frequently exhibited at major salons such as the Societe des Artistes Francais and at L'hotel Drouot. Coussens then moved back to his studio in Nimes where he continued to create his beautiful color etchings of landscapes and figure studies. Today examples of his art are included in prominent public collections in New York, London, Tokyo and Paris. As a leading colour etcher, Coussens's art was often appreciated for his use of combining the thick, velvety lines of drypoint engraving with the delicate lines of soft-ground etching. Such techniques gave his art unique tonal values.