L'Hiver à Paris; La Neige à Paris (The winter of 1879 in Paris)

Born in Valognes, Normandy in 1847, Buhot was orphaned at the age of seven. The library in his small town introduced him to art, and he spent hours poring over rare illustrated books and manuscripts. At the age of 18, Buhot moved to Paris to study painting and drawing at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. By his mid-twenties, he had learned the art of etching and quickly became a successful printmaker. His depictions of Parisian life are atmospheric and enchanting, though precisely executed. Impressionistic details such as the blurring of carriage reflections on the wet road (certainly evident in this print), give the viewer the sense of peering into a memory. Buhot struggled with depression, and ultimately gave up printmaking shortly before his death at the age 50. However, his work is a testament to the power and popularity of his singular perspective.

Buhot was not often a 'one-state' etcher with a final ideal in mind for his prints, and instead enjoyed the challenge of achieving the maximum number of variations that could be drawn from a single plate. Changes from one state to another could be as simple as adding highlights in aquatint, to techniques that change the entire aesthetic of the image, say from day to night, or from calm to stormy weather. He would sometimes rub out sections and rework them; for example, the number of dogs varies in numerous versions of this famous print, <em>L'hiver de 1879 </em><em>à </em><em>Paris. </em>Furthermore, he experimented with every part of the print: the tools, the mediums, the color and type of ink, the paper, even his signature and monograms, and perhaps most famously his 'symphonic margins', scenes along the sides that serve as comments on the main image (again evident here). Buhot uses these margins to call attention to aspects of the story we might not know. These were sometimes sketched in the original plate, and sometimes added with a separate plate.

The result of this experimentation is that scholars are not always certain how many states there are of some prints, since besides published images there can be numerous versions that the artist produced in very small quantities, perhaps just for himself. The order of the prints can be almost impossible to determine, and later states are not necessarily better than earlier states; certainly Buhot himself did not think of them as necessarily improving, but simply changing.

This impression is almost certainly from the fourth state of nine altogether, the first commercially published state. This is indicated by the title 'L'Art' which appears in the snowbank under the lamp-post at the lower left, and the address of the printer, A. Salmon, below the image, but before the extensive reworking on the dogs, and before highlights were streaked into the aquatint.

While the central image is of dogs and shoppers only slightly inconvenienced by the weather, by contrast, the 'symphonic margins' vividly detail the hardships and suffering brought on by heavy snows. The top left scene is that of a dead horse near a carriage in the street. Below this, we see another scene of a dead horse in the street. Below this, a group of figures are warming themselves about a brazier. To the right of this, there is a wittily cropped scene of various legs and feet. Finally, at the lower right, we see figures skating in the solid ice.

See:

Art Gallery of New South Wales, https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/118.2017/

Art Museum of Arizona, 'Master Impressions from the UAMA Collections: Félix Hilaire Buhot', http://artmuseum.arizona.edu/events/event/master-impressions-from-the-uama-collections-felix-hilaire-buhot\

'Art of the Day', University of Iowa, https://uima.uiowa.edu/exhibitions/art-of-the-day/new-art-of-the-day-post-14/

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   September 2017