L'Avocat parlant au prévenu (The lawyer speaks to the accused)

Jean-Louis Forain (1852-1931) was a leading French painter, printmaker and illustrator of the 19th and 20th centuries. He exhibited with the Impressionists at the invitation of his mentor and close friend, Edgar Degas, in the 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th exhibitions (1879-1886). His ballet scenes show his awareness of Degas, while his courtroom scenes, exposing the cruelties of the legal system, owe much in their concept to Honoré Daumier. In turn, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec looked up to Forain. His illustrations particularly to books by his friend the notorious symbolist/decadent J.K. Huysmans brought considerable acclaim, while his bitingly witty cartoons for <em>Le Figaro</em> and <em>Le Courrier Francais</em> made him a household name. Additionally, his portrait lithographs of Auguste Renoir and Ambroise Vollard are described in his<em> Grove Art Online</em> entry as ‘brilliant’. The same source notes how ‘he resumed etching in 1902 but changed his subject matter to concentrate on religious and courtroom subjects of great drama and deep feeling, expressed with bravura technique’

This is one of them, and it contrasts graphically with Forain's early etchings (e.g. <em>The two fops</em>, Te Papa 1971-0012-7), which were straightforward representations of drinkers, stage-door Johnnies, street walkers and the usual Montmartre cast. In the later prints, a rapid etched line produced tangles, crossings and zig-zags out of which the figures, the setting and the depth almost miraculously emerge. In subject, he turned to the courtroom and its victims, as here, and to religious subjects. Forain's legal scenes are never funny, in the way that Daumier's could be, but they are even more acerbic. The accused are largely humble men, caught in a system they do not understand, the lawyers are mostly predators, and the innocent, the women and children, are the true victims. Here the young mother, nursing a toddler, turns away from the crossfire between the lawyer and the agitated looking accused man above him, who is flanked by a policeman. These powerful prints strongly hint at a tragic storyline and but leave it you, the viewer, to interpret it.

See:

C & J Goodfriend, http://www.drawingsandprints.com/CurrentExhibition/detail.cfm?ExhibitionID=16&Exhibition=41

Wikipedia, 'Jean-Louis Forain', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Forain

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   April 2018