Winter morning on the Quai de l'Hôtel-Dieu (The cab stand)

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 his famous <em>L'hiver de 1879...</em><em>, </em>also in Te Papa's collection (1969-0002-12). 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 (see again <em>L'hiver</em>). 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.

For many years, in the English-speaking world at least, Buhot's most famous image, reproduced in virtually every book on nineteenth-century etching, has been this one, familiarly known as <em>The cab stand.</em> It is a work that went through many states (some accounts suggest 15), and many different printings and the most desirable impressions are probably those after publication, when Buhot reworked the plate to various different effects. The work is one of Buhot's best 'weather' prints and the atmosphere is almost palpably cold and wet. The locale is the quayside of the Hôtel-Dieu (Charity Hospital), with a row of horses and cabs vainly waiting for passengers. 

Although an inscription on the support indicates that this is the fourth state of the print, this does not match the British Museum's impression, and this print requires further, far from straightforward, research.

See:

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/

C. & J. Goodfriend, 'Félix, Auguste and Friends', http://www.drawingsandprints.com/CurrentExhibition/detail.cfm?ExhibitionID=17&Exhibition=49

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   September 2017