Charles Louis D'Henriet’s soft-ground etching, “The Barque of Dante”, 1865, after Eugène Delacroix

Charles Louis D'Henriet (1828–?)

“The Barque of Dante”, 1865, after Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), printed by Auguste Delâtre (1822–1907) and published in “L’Artiste”.

Soft-ground etching printed in brown ink, trimmed at the platemark with thread margins and re-margined with a support sheet.

Size: (support-sheet) 40.4 x 43.4 cm; (sheet) 22.3 x 28.5 cm; (image borderline) 21.5 x 28.1 cm

Scratch-inscribed on plate below the image borderline: (left) “Publié par L’Artiste.”; (centre) “T [?] D’Henriet d’après E. Delacroix.”; (right) "Paris. Imp. e par Aug. Delâtre, Rue St. Jacque 171.”

The Library of Congress offers the following description of this print:

“Print shows Dante and Virgil being ferried across the River Styx by Phlegyas as tormented souls assail the boat from the wind tossed sea.” (https://www.loc.gov/item/2015647082/)

Condition: a richly inked impression trimmed to the platemark and re-margined. The sheet is in near perfect condition (i.e. there are no tears, holes, folds, abrasions, stains or foxing), but I can see an interesting hair mark left during the inking of the plate above the figures of Dante and Virgil.

I am selling this richly etched translation of Delacroix’s famous painting for AU$115 (currently US$93.39/EUR75.13/GBP65.97 at the time of posting this listing). Postage for this print is extra and will be the actual/true cost of shipping.

If you are interested in acquiring this darkly glowing soft-ground etching, please contact me (oz_jim@printsandprinciples.com) and I will send you a PayPal invoice to make the payment easy.

This print has been sold

I’m guessing that most folk would already be familiar with the famous painting by Delacroix on which D’Henriet’s dark and moody etching is a translation. In some ways the portrayed turmoil mirrors the conflict with the boundaries pushed by Delacroix in his step away from the prevailing Neo-Classical interests at the time to Romanticism. There is, however, an even more interesting aspect to the painting that D’Henriet has taken a good deal of trouble to capture in this print: the water droplets running down the stomach of the chap with a tormented soul shown in a patch bright light in the foreground. These water droplets are perhaps the most significant water droplets in the nineteenth century as they marked the change from soft modelling to create the illusion of reality to the use of dabs of pure colour of the Impressionists so that a single stroke of white denotes the highlight on a droplet while the colours in shadows are signified respectively with green for the mid-tone, yellow for the reflected light on the internal back of the droplet and a dash of red for the cast shadow.