Le Broc

 

Augusta Payne Rathbone

  1897 - 1990 (biography)

c. 1935  

etching & color aquatint 

10 5/8 x 14 1/2" platemark 

pencil, lower right 

artist's proof 

 

a color pochoir reproduces this etching in French Riviera Villages published by Mitchell Kennerley, 1938 

ivory wove 

published 

artist 

21393 

$900.00 

The medieval village of Le Broc is located in the Alpes-Maritimes department in southeastern France, about four miles from Nice. The municipality is perched on a rocky outcrop that overlooks the rivers Var and Esteron, as well as Broc lake (Lac du Broc). Seen in the right half of the composition is the steeple of Ste-Marie-Madeleine, an early 16th-century church. The quaint fishing village is home to around 1,500 residents now; however, when Augusta Rathbone created vibrant etching and color aquatint, the population was only around 300.

Here, Rathbone captures the high contast of pale stone structures drenched in the bright sun of southeastern France, the jumble of their angular roofs suggesting an architectural closeness no longer found in contemporary civil design.

While in Paris in 1927, Augusta Rathbone was introduced to printmaking and thereafter worked primarily in color aquatint combined with line etching. Rathbone, who had studied briefly with Bonnard, uses a freely drawn black etched line to capture rough shapes which are then filled with color, using aquatint. She worked with Monsieur Porcabeuf, a professional printer in Paris, who would prove her prepared plates. In the 1930s she traveled the French Riviera and her color palette adapted to the colorful villages throughout the region.

Rathbone produced twenty color aquatints of the French Riviera and around 1938 she joined forces with Juliet and Virginia Thompson to create the illustrated book, French Riviera Villages, which was published that year by Mitchell Kennerly. Twelve of Rathbone's original color aquatints were reproduced mechanically by photography and then hand colored with pochoir. Juliet Thompson photographed the villages and Virginia Thompson wrote a history on each village. Rathbone's aquatints are a modernist homage to these ancient villages.