Jeune Fille Vue de Dos. A Study of Suzanne Duchamp. by Jacques Villon, 1875-1964

Jacques Villon, 1875-1964
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Jeune Fille Vue de Dos. A Study of Suzanne Duchamp.

Original drypoint with aquatint in black ink. 1906. Signed in pencil. Numbered (27) in pencil from the edition of 50. Also signed and dated in drypoint in the plate. Hand-printed on Villon's press 1906. Edition issued by Sagot Le Garrec Paris 1906.
Ref: Ginestet-Pouillon - Villon Les Estampes no 155 (vi as completed)

Beautiful sparkling impression with delicate wiped tone and strong line. On pale cream stiff laid paper. Excellent original condition, not restored; just the slightest suggestion of time toning at the outer sheet edges. Full margins. Sheet: 14 1/4 x 11ins. Plate: 6 5/8 x 4 1/4ins.
(168x110mm)

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Jacques Villon was in many ways the most significant of all the artists who worked in Paris in a Belle Époque style in the first years of the century. He had a superb eye for the style of the period, for capturing pose and atmosphere, but his work also stands out for one other essential element in these first years. That is his sense of pictorial structure and space. It was this feeling for the structure of composition which was to lead him into cubism in the later years of the first decade of the century. The pose in Jeune Fille Vue de Dos, half-angled and seen from behind, with almost no space in the foreground as opposed to the open distance beyond, shows this understanding of structure to the full.

This beautiful study, worked in drypoint with aquatint, burnishing and textural biting, typifies the extreme subtlety and sensitivity of light and tone which marks out Villon's early prints. It is a study of his sister Suzanne Duchamp in a chair on the beach on holiday. The contrasts between the defined deep-bitten outline strokes of the drypoint and the varied tones - in the dark tresses of her hair, in the modelling of her face and the suggested textures of her clothes - display his extreme delicacy of touch and his awareness of how to use tone to full visual effect.

Villon was particularly fond of aquatint as a medium at this date and in writing about this print in particular he acknowledged that for it he owed a great debt to Louis Legrand whose work he much admired (see no 20 in this catalogue).