The Entomologist By Je Laboureur Original Signed Etching

"The entomologist" (1932), engraving on vellum signed in the plate, with the dry seal of the Edition of the Chalcography of the Louvre authenticating the work. Dimensions 50x65.5 cm. Engraving in very good condition. Dimensions at sight 42x43 cm, under protective glass, under master key, in a Montparnasse frame. Total dimensions, with frame, 68x78 cm. Jean-Emile Laboureur, born in Nantes on August 16, 1877, died in Penestin in the Morbihan on June 16, 1943, is a painter, draftsman, engraver, etcher, lithographer and French illustrator. Coming from a bourgeois family in Nantes, Jean-Émile Laboureur arrived in Paris at the age of eighteen. He abandoned his law studies to attend the Jullian Academy and was introduced to printmaking by Auguste Lepère. Laboureur made his first wood engravings, in which the influence of Félix Vallotton was evident, then turned to etching. He experimented with the burin technique for the illustration of L'Appartement des jeunes filles by Roger Allard in 1919, the first in a long series of seventy-four illustrated books. Founder and president of the Société des Peintres Graveurs Indépendants in 1923 and author of several studies on engraving, Laboureur was the architect of the renewal of French engraving in the interwar years. Grave plowman L'Entomologiste in 1932, at a time when, in full possession of his art, he nevertheless had to face major denunciations of contracts due to the effects of the crisis of 1929. His plates are the ripened fruit of many works preparatory work, documentation gathered in books or newspapers, overall sketches of which he recomposes the elements. Obviously, this engraving is nourished by the meticulous observation of nature. The Entomologist combines elliptical writing with a meticulous luxury of detail that is reminiscent of 17th century northern painting. It is an astonishing and abundant work where the attentive eye discovers a whole small group of insects born under the master's chisel: bees, weevils, butterflies, snails, dragonflies and spiders ... The silhouette of the entomologist, everything to his discoveries, is little more than a pretext for a staging of nature in a theater whose curtain consists of screens of oak leaves and branches of bramble. On the occasion of the tribute exhibition paid to Laboureur by the National Library of France in 1954, Marcel Gromaire sees this engraving as one of the most beautiful of the first half of the 20th century.