Felix Bracquemond

Felix Henri Bracquemond (22 May 1833-29 October 1914) was a French painter, etcher, and printmaker. He was the husband of the Impressionist painter Marie Bracquemond; they married in 1869. He played a key role in the revival of printmaking, encouraging artists such as Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro to make prints. Painting interested Bracquemond less than engraving. Around 1853, he applied himself to engraving and etching, and played a leading role in the revival of the etcher's art in France. He was a lover of Japanese art and the first to discover an album by Hokusai in 1856. He also designed pottery for a number of French factories, in an innovative style that marks the beginning of Japonisme in France. In his career he produced over eight hundred plates--portraits, landscapes, scenes of contemporary life, and bird-studies, in addition to numerous interpretations of other artists' paintings, particularly those of Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Gustave Moreau, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. In 1874, Bracquemond participated in the first exhibition of painters who would become known as the Impressionists. He was close friends with Edouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, and Henri Fantin-Latour. He is the author of a book entitled "Du dessin et la couleur," published in 1886 and a study of woodcutting and lithography. He was honored as an Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1889. He has been called the "molder of artistic taste in his time." It was Bracquemond who recognized the beauty of the Hokusai woodcuts used as packing material around a shipment of Japanese china, a discovery which helped change the look of late nineteenth-century art. He died in Sevres.