Existing comment:
Precedents and Prototypes
The seventeenth-century painter and printmaker Rembrandt van Rijn was the most important source of inspiration for the illustrators of Paris à l'eau-forte. Guérard was no exception, though he was as influenced by Rembrandt's process and style, including the Dutch artist's "daring speed and the tones revealed in his drawings," as he was by the lowbrow subject matter that the master and his Dutch peers, including Joris van Vliet and Adriaen van Ostade, embraced. Beyond art, Guérard also sought inspiration in literature, referring to the sixteenth-century French writer François Rabelais and the fictional trickster Cyrano de Bergerac as "revolutionaries of times past." The artist seems to have connected with the avant-garde, nonconformist aspects of these
models, qualities that resonated with his own
disposition and artistic persona. |