European printmaking in the 19th century

Princess Louise of Belgium and Prince Philippe of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, reproduction of a photograph for printing: on the left, the original photograph; on the right, the wood-engraving, published in Le Monde Illustré in 1875. Design by Étienne Bocourt, cutting by Léon Chapon and photograph by Géruzet Frères (Brussels).

Between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the foundations of contemporary society were laid, marked in the political field by the end of absolutism and the establishment of democratic governments—an impulse that began with the French Revolution—and, in the economic field, by the Industrial Revolution and the consolidation of capitalism, which would have a response in Marxism and the class struggle. In the field of art, an evolutionary dynamic of styles began to follow one another chronologically with increasing speed, culminating in the 20th century with an atomization of styles and currents that coexist and oppose, influence and confront each other. The century began with the survival of Neoclassicism, a movement succeeded by Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Modernism and Symbolism.^[1]

In this century, the frequent use of etching continued, employed by painters such as Daubigny, Millet, Whistler, Manet, Degas, Pissarro, etc. However, the use of lithography, initiated in the previous century, predominated, with two trends: one that sought to compete with photography by emphasizing the accuracy and sensitivity of its compositions, led by Claude Ferdinand Gaillard; and another more artistic and relaxed tone, represented by Léopold Flameng. During this period, printmaking became highly industrialized and reached high production levels, with large print runs aimed at an increasingly larger public. At the end of the century, and especially linked to the post-impressionist generation, lithography had a privileged means of expression in the poster, to which great artists such as Jules Chéret, Alphonse Mucha, Pierre Bonnard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec devoted themselves.^[2]

During this period, new techniques emerged—or some of those introduced in the previous century were consolidated—such as woodcut, steel engraving or stereotype. On the other hand, the invention of photography revolutionized the graphic arts and influenced new techniques: in 1827, Nicéphore Niépce introduced heliography, made on a zinc plate sensitized to light and hollow engraved with acid; in 1852, Joseph Lemercier invented photolithography, a photonegative on glass projected on lithographic stone sensitized to light; in the same year, the cliché verre appeared, a glass cliché printed on photosensitive paper; and in the 1860s, photoengraving appeared, using a plate covered with a varnish or photosensitive resin attacked by acid, without the intervention of the artist. Another new technique, unrelated in this case to photography, was gillotage—also called zincography—invented by Firmin Gillot in 1850, which consisted of transferring a drawing to a zinc plate attacked with acid and stamped with a typographic press. The progressive industrialization of printmaking increasingly led to a differentiation between the artisan printmaker and the artist engraver—or painter-engraver—who demanded greater recognition for his creative work.^[3]

Romanticism was a style born at the beginning of the century, although it had already been forged at the end of the previous one in a so-called pre-romanticism. It was a movement of profound renewal in all artistic genres, which paid special attention to the field of spirituality, fantasy, feeling, love of nature, along with a darker element of irrationality, attraction to the occult, madness, dreams. Popular culture, the exotic, the return to underrated artistic forms of the past—especially medieval ones—were especially valued, and the landscape gained notoriety, which became a protagonist in its own right. The Romantics had the idea of an art that arose spontaneously from the individual, which is why they emphasized the figure of "genius": art is the expression of the artist's emotions.^[4]

Romanticism was succeeded by realism, a trend that emphasized reality, the description of the surrounding world, especially of workers and peasants in the new framework of the industrial era, with a certain component of social denunciation, linked to political movements such as utopian socialism. These artists moved away from the usual historical, religious or mythological themes to deal with more mundane themes of modern life.^[4]

In France, the turn of the century saw the transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. Two of the best French Romantic painters, Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, practiced lithography.^[5] Géricault produced between 1817 and 1820 seven lithographic stones dedicated to the Napoleonic army, as well as other single works including Horses Fighting in a Stable and Boxing Match; during a stay in Great Britain between 1820 and 1821, he produced a number of prints of scenes from everyday life.^[6] Delacroix made prints generally of literary inspiration, such as his series of seventeen lithographs of Goethe's Faust (1826), which was praised by the writer himself; or his series of Shakespeare's Hamlet (1843).^[7]

Among the French printmakers of this period are: Louis Pierre Henriquel-Dupont was noted for his prints reproducing artists of the past and of his time;^[8] Claude Ferdinand Gaillard was a skilled draughtsman and virtuoso engraver, author of reproductions such as Rembrandt's Supper at Emmaus, Botticelli's Madonna and Child, and Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa;^[9] Léopold Flameng reproduced Van Eyck, Van der Goes, Rembrandt and Ingres, and published numerous plates in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts;^[10] Jean Gigoux was an exponent of the troubadour style, illustrator of books such as Gil Blas and Abelard and Heloise;^[11] Ernest Meissonier illustrated various books, including the works of Balzac; Charles Meryon was a talented engraver, author of etchings of views of Paris that are notable for their chromatic distribution and luminous intensity.^[12] Also noteworthy was the rise of caricature, practiced by artists such as Henry Monnier, J. J. Grandville, Paul Gavarni and Charles Philipon, and published in magazines and newspapers such as Le Miroir, La Pandore, La Caricature and Le Charivari.^[13]

In the times of realism, Honoré Daumier should be mentioned first. He worked for a while in a lithography workshop, until he was hired by Philipon for La Caricature thanks to his skills as a draughtsman. In 1831, his caricature of Louis Philippe I as Gargantua earned him six months in prison, but also brought him enormous fame. From then on he carried out an intense lithographic work (about four thousand works), especially in Le Charivari, either in series (Robert Macaire, 1836-1838; Babists, 1839; Gods of Olympus, 1841; People of Justice, 1845-1848; Tenants and Landlords, 1848) or single pieces, which he later grouped in albums such as Actualities or All That is Wanted. In general, his work was satirical, in which he mocked the bourgeoisie and the circles of power, with a style of curved lines and modulated figures with a sculptural appearance.^[14]

Linked to realism was the Barbizon landscape school (Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Narcisse Virgilio Díaz de la Peña), marked by a pantheistic feeling for nature, with a concern for the effects of light in the landscape, such as the light that filters through the branches of the trees.^[15] Almost all of its members practiced printmaking—especially etching—with the work of Corot, who began late in graphic art but mastered it with mastery. He produced about fifteen etchings and another fifteen lithographs, as well as about seventy cliché verres, generally landscapes.^[16] Jean-François Millet, a notable painter especially dedicated to peasant themes, as in his famous The Angelus, was related to this school. In his graphic work he showed the influence of Rembrandt, especially in his luminous effects, with a concise and decisive stroke, as in The Wool Carder (1855).^[17]

A special place should be given to Gustave Doré, one of the best engravers of his time. Gifted in drawing, at the age of twenty-two he illustrated Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais (1854) and, the following year, Balzac's Amusing Tales (1855). Since then his production was intense, generally in woodcut, with an anachronistic style far from stylistic novelties, although his work shows the influence of Dürer, Rembrandt and the English romantics, especially Blake and Turner: Dante's Divine Comedy (1857-1867), Shakespeare's The Tempest (1860), Perrault's Tales (1862), Cervantes' Don Quixote (1863), Shakespeare's Macbeth (1863), Chateaubriand's Atala (1865), the Bible (1866), Milton's Paradise Lost (1866), La Fontaine's Fables (1867), Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1870), Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1875), Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1877), Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven (1884).^[18]

During this century, a type of woodcut ("à la langue de chat") was practiced in France, especially for book illustration. It was promoted mainly by the Englishman Charles Thompson, who founded a woodcut school in Paris in 1817. Practiced by artists such as Daumier, Doré and Meissonier, some of its best exponents were Célestin Nanteuil and Tony Johannot.^[19] Lithography was also very popular: in 1816 Charles Philibert de Lasteyrie and Godefroy Engelmann opened their workshops in Paris, and in 1820 it was the technique chosen by Isidore Taylor to illustrate his Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l'ancienne France, in collaboration with a wide range of artists. It was used by artists such as Delacroix and Daumier, and caricaturists such as Grandville and Gavarni.^[20]

In the years 1830-1840 the use of etching began to resurface among artists: in 1835 Rodolphe Bresdin made several etchings, in 1844 Théodore Chassériau produced fifteen etchings for an edition of Othello, and Camille Corot practiced this technique in the mid-1840s. Félix Bracquemond exhibited four etchings at the Exposition Universelle of 1855. In 1861 the Société des aquafortistes was founded in Paris, with the aim of bringing art for art's sake to printmaking. Its promoter was the entrepreneur Alfred Cadart, who had the collaboration of artists such as Charles-François Daubigny and Charles Jacque. Its members included Bracquemond, Corot, Daubigny, Millet, Meryon, Daumier and Delacroix, as well as Gustave Courbet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Carlos de Haes, Johan Barthold Jongkind, Maxime Lalanne, Alphonse Legros, Édouard Manet, Théodule Ribot, etc. His main organ was the publication Eaux-Fortes modernes. Publication artistique d'œuvres originales par la Société des aquafortistes, with a monthly circulation; between 1863 and 1867 five albums were published with compilations of the magazine, in the first of which, prefaced by Théophile Gautier, the term "aquafortist" emerged as a synonym for original engraver. One of its members, Lalanne, published in 1866 the Treatise on Etching, in which he described new ways of practicing this technique, such as "a la pluma", done with pen on copper; or retroussage, the cleaning with a muslin on the inked sheet, with which glazes, tones and half tints are obtained.^[21]

In Germany and Austria, printmaking was practiced by painters such as: Adrian Ludwig Richter, who engraved views of Dresden and illustrated books such as Volksmärchen der Dentschen by Johann Karl August Musäus (1841);^[22] Moritz von Schwind illustrated popular legends;^[23] Adolph von Menzel inherited a lithographic company from his father, with which he achieved his first successes as an artist (Life of Frederick the Great, 1840-1842);^[24] Wilhelm Leibl devoted himself mainly to genre genre.^[23] Lithography was practiced by Karl von Piloty and Johann Nepomuk Strixner, authors of facsimiles of drawings and paintings from the Berlin and Munich galleries.^[25] An offshoot of Romanticism was the German movement of the Nazarenes, inspired by the Italian Quattrocento and the German Renaissance, mainly Dürer. Prominent among their ranks was Johann Friedrich Overbeck, who was a notable engraver, author of thirty-six carvings of the Gospels.^[23]

During the first decades of the century, Romanticism, which had already had some notable antecedents in Füssli and Blake, predominated in Great Britain. One of its most outstanding exponents was Joseph Mallord William Turner, a landscape painter who stood out for the atmospheric and luminous effects of his works. In the graphic field he was the author of a series entitled Liber Studiorum (1807-1819), inspired by the Liber Veritatis by Claude Lorrain, a set of seventy-one mezzotints in which he recreated various types of landscape: marine, mountainous, historical, architectural and epic.^[26] Also worth mentioning are: Abraham Raimbach, illustrator of Gil Blas (1809) and Don Quixote (1818);^[27] George Cruikshank, caricaturist and illustrator, author of works of satirical content (Life in London, 1821; Sketches by Boz, 1836; Oliver Twist by Dickens, 1838; Bottle, 1847);^[28] and Francis Seymour Haden, a self-taught artist who did mostly landscapes, first president of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, founded in London in 1880.^[29]

The school of the Pre-Raphaelites emerged in this country, who were inspired—as their name suggests—by Italian painters before Raphael, as well as by the newly emerging photography, with exponents such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Ford Madox Brown.^[30] The members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood mainly practiced testa woodcut. Of particular note was the work of Rossetti, who illustrated Tennyson's poems (1857) and the Old Italian Poets (1861).^[31]

In Italy, the work of Luigi Calamatta, a Paris-trained burinist, who basically devoted himself to reproducing works by Ingres, was noteworthy. Paolo Mercuri, director of the Vatican Chalcography, was a notable engraver, dedicated to reproducing the images of the Raphael's Rooms, in collaboration with other artists.^[32]

In Spain, the first lithography workshop was opened in Madrid in 1819, directed by Felipe Cardano; two years later, another one was opened in Barcelona, directed by Antonio Brusi. In 1825 King Ferdinand VII promoted the creation of the Royal Lithographic Establishment, whose direction was entrusted to José de Madrazo, who was in charge of the edition of two hundred prints with reproductions of paintings of the Royal Sites and public buildings, made by artists such as Fernando Brambila, Florentino Decraene, José Camarón Boronat, Gaetano Palmaroli and Gaspar Sensi.

In 1835, the romantic magazine El Artista began to be published, which included illustrations of stories and poetry, as well as portraits and other images by artists such as Federico de Madrazo, Hélène Feillet and Carlos Luis de Ribera. In 1839, Francisco Javier Parcerisa began the series Recuerdos y bellezas de España (1839 -1865), a total of ten volumes with images of monuments and landscapes of Spain. Similarly, between 1842 and 1850, Jenaro Pérez Villaamil published his series España artística y monumental, with 144 prints of the most outstanding monuments of Spain. Another notable series was Pedro de Madrazo's El Real Museo de Madrid y las joyas de la Pintura de España (The Royal Museum of Madrid and the Jewels of Spanish Painting) (1857).^[33]

There were also Domingo Martínez Aparici, professor of engraving at the San Fernando Academy, reproducer of works by the great Renaissance and Baroque masters; Bernardo Rico, illustrator of books and newspapers; Arturo Carretero, notable woodcutter, contributor to several newspapers; Joaquín Pi y Margall, dedicated to sweet carving with reproductions of John Flaxman and Joseph von Führich and contributor to the series Monumentos Arquitectónicos de España (1859 -1881); Bartolomé Maura, author of etchings of portraits and reproductions of Spanish paintings; Leonardo Alenza followed in the line initiated by Goya, with romantic and temperamental images, mainly portraits and genre scenes; Eugenio Lucas was equally influenced by Goya, author of etchings on trivial subjects and divertimentos; Mariano Fortuny was an outstanding painter and draughtsman, author of some forty etchings with subjects inspired by his stay in Morocco, such as El árabe muerto and La familia marroquí (The Dead Arab and The Moroccan Family); Carlos de Haes was a notable landscape painter, author of fifty-four prints grouped in Ensayos de grabado al aguafuerte; José María Galván was dedicated to reproduction etching—especially Goya—and collaborated with the publication El Artista al aguafuerte.^[34]

• 
  Boxing Match (1818), by Théodore Géricault, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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  Royal Pond of the Courtyard of the Alhambra in Granada (1824), by Felipe Cardano, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.
• 
  Cascada de la Granja, from the Vistas de los Sitios Reales y Madrid (1830), by Fernando Brambila.
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  Sepulcro en el monasterio del Parral de Segovia, from the series España artística y monumental (1842), by Jenaro Pérez Villaamil.
• 
  La estirge (1853), by Charles Meryon, Phillips Collection, Washington D. C.
• 
  The Wool Carder (1855), by Jean-François Millet, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
• 
  A Young Mother at the Entrance to a Wood (1856), cliché-verre by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
• 
  Mona Lisa (1858), by Luigi Calamatta.

Impressionism was a profoundly innovative movement, which meant a break with academic art and a transformation of the artistic language, thus initiating the path towards the avant-garde movements. The Impressionists were inspired by nature, from which they sought to capture a visual "impression", the capture of an instant on canvas—influenced by photography—with a technique of loose brushstrokes and clear and luminous tones that especially valued light. A new subject matter emerged, derived from the new way of observing the world: together with landscapes and seascapes, urban and nocturne views, interiors with artificial light, scenes of cabaret, circus and music hall, characters of the bohemia, beggars, outcasts, etc.^[35]

Of great importance during this period was the influence on the graphic arts of Japanese printmaking, which spread profusely through the West. The Japanese woodcut influenced above all the use of flat colors, new concepts in the use of perspective, elegance of line and boldness in the assembly of form and color. The taste for Japanese prints was introduced mainly by Félix Bracquemond and was especially prevalent in the 1880s and 1890s. Its influence is most evident in the work of Mary Cassatt and Henri Rivière, as well as in the group of the Nabis—especially Pierre Bonnard—and other artists such as Whistler, Manet and Fantin-Latour. Also noteworthy is the popularizing work of the magazine Le Japon Artistique, published by Samuel Bing between 1888 and 1891.^[36]

It is also worth mentioning the importance of newspaper and magazine illustration during this period, in which both painters and graphic artists took part. Some painters marginalized by academic circles and official salons found a way to publish their works, such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri-Gabriel Ibels, Adolphe Willette, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, Louis Anquetin, Hermann-Paul and Jean-Louis Forain. Among these illustrated newspapers it is worth remembering: Les Temps nouveaux, Le Courrier français, La Revue Blanche, L'Escarmouche and Le Chambard.^[37]

In the 1880s, after the experience of the Société des aquafortistes, there was an initiative to revalue the original print not only in etching, but in all printmaking techniques. To this end, the Société de l'estampe originale was created, as well as the publication L'Estampe originale, directed by Auguste-Louis Lepère, which published two albums in 1888 and 1889 that despite their limited success laid the foundations for a greater awareness of the artistic work of the engraver. Members of this society were Félix Bracquemond, Whistler, James Tissot, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Tony Beltrand and Daniel Vierge. The commercial failure of this initiative came from the higher price derived from the original work, so the idea began to take shape that the public should be made aware of the exclusivity of this type of creations, the product of the artist's genius, through a handcrafted and not merely industrial process. Despite the contradiction that one of the hallmarks of printmaking is its repetition, the aim was to single out the original print. Thus arose the technique of eau-forte mobile ("variable etching"), initiated by Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic, consisting of inking the plate differently in each printing, so that an infinite number of variables can arise from the same composition and each print becomes unique. These unique prints were called belle épreuve ("rare proof") and became part of the catalogs of art galleries, usually in limited and numbered editions, intended for collectors. Although they started with etching, they later moved on to lithography as well. This new concept was taken up by the Société des Peintres-Graveurs, founded in 1889 and directed by Félix Bracquemond, which brought together painters who were also interested in printmaking as an aspect of their artistic activity, among them Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, Odilon Redon, James Tissot, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, Eugène Carrière, Marc Chagall, Édouard Vuillard, Henri Fantin-Latour and Albert Besnard.^[38]

One of the artists who most practiced printmaking was Édouard Manet—generally considered a pre-impressionist—author of about one hundred works, most of which were not published. An admirer of Goya and Rembrandt, in his prints he did not faithfully reproduce paintings or drawings, but interpreted them in black and white, seeking his own form of expression. He practiced etching and lithography, always in a personal and novel way. His most creative periods in printmaking were 1860-1863 and 1865-1874; in the former he made about forty etchings, while in the latter he focused more on illustrations for books, generally in lithography and gillotage. One of his most famous works is El globo, a lithograph of 1862, resolved in a free and heterodox way, so it was not published at the time. His Execution of Maximiliano (1868) was censored by the authorities. In 1874 he made Polichinela, a caricature of president Mac-Mahon, which was also banned. In 1875 he illustrated The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe and, the following year, The Afternoon of a Faun by Stéphane Mallarmé.^[39]

Among the impressionists, the graphic work of Edgar Degas, who was aware of the power of printmaking as a means of disseminating his works, is worth mentioning. He began etching at the age of twenty-two, although later he would also practice aquatint, lithography and monotype. His early works show the influence of Rembrandt, although his style evolved thanks to the influence of artists of his time such as Manet, Whistler, Tissot and Bracquemond. In his work we can perceive the desire for experimentation and innovation, as well as the insistence on working alone. In an early period (1856-1864) he devoted himself mainly to portraiture, influenced by Rembrandt, Delacroix and Ingres. After a few years of inactivity, in 1875 he resumed his graphic work and began to depict his favorite subjects: dancers, theater and music hall scenes, cafés, brothels and toilette scenes. Under the influence of his friend Marcellin Desboutin, he then practiced the drypoint style esquisses sur métal, which combined printmaking and drawing. Soon after, he became interested in original printmaking and monotype, a technique in which he experimented with various methods, in combination with oil or pastel. In these works he especially expressed his interest in the effects of artificial light, which sometimes took on an almost abstract appearance. Between 1879 and 1880, he experimented with new printmaking tools, such as the emery pencil and the carbonic arc or electric pencil, with which he created new tonal effects. He also worked in lithography, generally with autographic paper, sometimes transferring monotypes. He also used photography to obtain motifs, using the positives as the basis for his graphic compositions. From 1884, he practically abandoned his graphic work, which he partially resumed at the end of the 1880s with a lithographic series dedicated to the female nude. Already in the 1890s he definitively abandoned printmaking in favor of photography.^[40]

Other Impressionist artists who practiced printmaking were: Camille Pissarro, who practiced etching in an original way, seeking different variations of the same image, for which he started from a simple drypoint or etching sketch and applied successive aquatints in different states and colors;^[41] Pierre-Auguste Renoir devoted himself above all to lithography, generally with the reproduction of his pictorial work, with images that have the appearance of pastel, with rounded volumes and voluptuous atmospheres;^[42] Mary Cassatt was one of the artists who most assumed the Japanese influence—especially of Utamaro—from which she adopted both the forms, compositions and perspectives and the color schemes, all of which she applied to some images of Western context, generally domestic and family images, with a preference for the relationship between mothers and children.^[43]

Also noteworthy is the work of the American artist based in the United Kingdom James McNeill Whistler, a painter of intense lyricism who seeks in his images to capture the atmosphere and atmospheric effects, daytime and nighttime luminosity. He practiced etching, lithography, and drypoint. He was one of the first artists to engrave directly on copper, painting rather than inking the metal, to capture the instant in a more suitable way, so that all his prints were unique.^[41] In 1858 he published a series of twelve sketched prints of the Parisian districts of Montrouge and Montmartre, and the following year a similar one of views of the Thames; he had to wait twenty years for his third series, this time on Venice.^[44]

In Germany, the main Impressionist artists were Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt. The first evolved from realism to impressionism, author of landscapes, portraits and peasant scenes;^[45] Corinth also straddled realism, impressionism and, at the end of his career, expressionism, with a profuse graphic oeuvre of nine hundred works between lithographs and drypoints, with quick and sharp strokes, some of them in series (Luther, Anne Boleyn, Götz von Berlichingen);^[46] Slevogt produced series of lithographed and etched illustrations on copper, with confident drawing and creative fantasy (Lederstrumpf by James Fenimore Cooper, 1906-1909).^[47]

The Swedish Anders Zorn practiced etching, with a sober and spontaneous style, more concerned with expression than with technical quality, author of portraits, nudes and genre scenes.^[48]

In Spain, the work of Tomás Campuzano, painter of landscapes and seascapes in the pleinairistic style; Ricardo de los Ríos, a reproductive watercolorist and author of landscapes and portraits, such as Garibaldi and Carlos de Haes; and Juan Espina, a landscape painter with a plenairistic tone.^[49]

After the first impressionist generation, several artists emerged in France who, while starting from its premises, evolved towards new forms of expression, which are usually grouped into two currents: Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. The first was characterized by the technique of pointillism (or divisionism), consisting of composing the work through a series of dots of pure colors, which are placed next to others of complementary colors, merging in the retina of the viewer in a new tone.^[50] Its main exponent in the graphic field was Paul Signac, author of lithographs in which he reflected his pictorial compositions, centered on landscapes, portraits and social scenes.^[51]

For their part, the Post-Impressionists reinterpreted in a personal way the new technical discoveries made by Impressionism, thus opening different paths of development of great importance for the evolution of art in the twentieth century. Thus, rather than a particular style, post-impressionism was a way of grouping diverse artists of different sign, among whom Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Cézanne stand out.^[52] Van Gogh was the author of works of strong dramatism and interior prospection, with sinuous and dense brushstrokes, of intense color, in which he deforms reality, to which he gave a dreamlike air.^[53] He did not work much in the graphic field, of which only nine lithographs are known from his Dutch period (1882-1885), usually reproductions of his works, such as The Potato Eaters (1883-1885); and an etching made in Auvers-sur-Oise, the Portrait of Doctor Gachet (1890).^[54][55]

Toulouse-Lautrec's work was strongly marked by graphic art. In 1886 he began to collaborate with the publication Le Courrier français, for which he made drawings that were transferred to photorealism. He worked mainly in color lithography, in which he created prints and posters inspired by the night life of Paris (cafés, theaters, cabarets), with a realistic style but with a decorative tone that combined naivety and social satire. In his images appear scenes of chandeliers with singers and dancers in dramatic and disproportionate gestures, seen from the perspective of a person suffering from dwarfism. In 1893 he made with Henri-Gabriel Ibels the series of twenty-two lithographs Le Café-Concert, in which they portrayed the most famous variety actors of the time. He also dealt with the subject of prostitution, in his series of eleven lithographs Elles (1896), in which he portrays moments of intimacy of these women, which might seem like domestic interiors if it were not for a subtle eroticism that he confers to the scenes.^[56]

Cézanne is often considered a pioneer of the artistic avant-garde of the 20th century. In his works he structured the composition in geometric forms (cylinder, cone and sphere), in an analytical synthesis of reality precursor of cubism. He practiced lithography, in reproductions of his works, generally landscapes, portraits and nudes—especially of bathers.^[57]

• 
  Terrace of Villa Brancas (1876), by Félix Bracquemond, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown
• 
  L'Attente (1877), by Ricardo de los Ríos
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  Flammarion engraving (1888), anonymous
• 
  The Bath (1890-1891), by Mary Cassatt, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
• 
  En la costa gallega, esperando la sardina (1894), by Tomás Campuzano
• 
  Diogenes and Alexander (1894), by Lovis Corinth, Grafische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna
• 
  Souvenir (the guitar) (1895), by Anders Zorn
• 
  The Bathers (1896-1897), by Paul Cézanne, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin