Existing comment:
Fine-Art Ephemera
From posters to newspapers, magazines to business cards, the nineteenth century saw an efflorescence in commercial printing. Guérard, whose reproductive prints were already an important source of income, participated in this boom by creating menus, notecards, business cards, and other public announcements. Eschewing lithography, however, the medium most often associated with such ventures (and looked down on for that reason), Guérard favored intaglio, a form of incising, which aligned his prints more closely with fine art than with the trade. Like his prints of animals, these works count among the artist's most original, and manifest his steadfast enthrallment with the art of Japan. |