Maxime Lalanne

François Antoine Maxime Lalanne was a French artist known for his etchings and charcoal drawings (fusain).

The recognition of Lalanne's artistic vision has sometimes been crowded out by his self-evident technical skill. His Traité de la gravure à l'eau-forte instructed generations from its first printing in 1866 through at least 12 editions to 2010. John Taylor Arms, an etcher of peculiar technical attentiveness and intricacy, took his instruction and inspiration from Lalanne. James McBey and Ernest S. Lumsden also taught themselves to etch from Lalanne's treatise.

Lalanne taught and demonstrated almost every conceivable technique applicable to the etching plate, but in his own work he remained an almost steadfast adherent to pure line. It is as if anything but pure line was clutter to Lalanne and his worlds. Except for demonstrations, there are no extant examples of pure drypoint in Lalanne's oeuvre. Lalanne saw drypoint as a tool to correct "mistakes" as explained in his treatise (though he himself sometimes deviated). Although he clearly knew the atmospheric value of aquatint, only one confirmed example of his use of the medium exists - and only on one quadrant of a plate. Similarly, only one soft ground etching comes down from Lalanne (apart from demonstrations).

Lalanne knew how to command line alone to say precisely what he wanted to say. He accomplished that result through multi-stage biting: a continuing process that created, through line variance, every atmospheric element he desired. The rest was left to (occasional) burnishing, drypoint corrections/additions, and surface tone - a critical element to Lalanne.

Subjecting plates to numerous progressive bitings, Lalanne achieved a warmth, depth and dimensionality never before seen in etching, and rarely seen since, as a review of some of his work demonstrates. Through multi-stage biting, À Bordeaux drives the viewer from the dark and rich boat and boathouse in the foreground through the harbor to the distant town in a near infinite visual horizon. Through seven identifiable levels of biting, Rade de Bordeaux (Bordeaux, Effet de Neige) creates a blanket of vista that wraps the viewer in a surrounded sense of stillness and snow. In Une Rue de Rouen, the dominance of the cathedral in the background is established not through bold line but through scant biting. In Bords de la Tamise, Lalanne does the near impossible: he creates fog through multi-stage biting alone. Lalanne produced over 200 etchings, but even if had completed only these four, his place in history as a technical genius would have been secured.

Using realistic elements as a vehicle, Lalanne's etchings organize the visual field into a new order of unrelenting harmony, consistent with the subject, that fosters access to the image whose sense of place inspired the work. This would have been branded as a dance too close to the heretical edges of impressionism had it been perceived at the time, but it was not. Critics stumbled close to this reckoning, but never quite reached it.

Lalanne did not use etching to make social, political or even artistic statements, but rather let the world speak for itself. People play only a small role in Lalanne's world. Even in Lalanne's volume on Victor Hugo, the author Hugo is no more important than the plants in the garden, and seems crowded and overtaken by them.

Lalanne had his share of failures. Le Rocher de Sisteron, Vittel and Vue des Ruines du Château de Fère, for example, come across as two dimensional amateur exercises with little to commend them. The Crisenoy suite is technically astute but completely vacant, and the same can be said for the six plates that may have been destined for a book on architecture.

Those failures are nevertheless instructive. Against complaints that Lalanne was generally without depth and warmth, these works make it easy to tell when he was, and when he was not. Moreover, they permit us to isolate an additional element of continuity that stretches across all works. At a time when the etching plate was increasing in size, wall display was becoming more pervasive, and the intimacy of etching was at risk, even in his failures Lalanne attempts to draw the viewer closer to establish the connection that is historically fundamental to etching. This continuous predisposition is all the more evident in Lalanne's largely unpublished oeuvre of smaller works and miniatures. It is simply impossible to experience most of these works except in close quarters. One of these etchings, Jardin avec statue au bord d'une piêce d'eau, is among the best in Lalanne's entire oeuvre.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023