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Adolphe Appian (born Jacques Barthelemy Adolphe Appian) was a French landscape painter and etcher. He was born in Lyon and changed his name to Adolphe Appian at the age of fifteen. This coincided with his enrolment at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at Lyon which was an art school which specialised in training to decorate fabrics by a local silk industry. Later he opened a studio in Lyon and worked as a graphic designer. He travelled to Paris to finish his studies and after he had exhibited a painting and a charcoal drawing in the Paris Salon in 1853, he became friends with the leading Barbizon School artists, Camille Corot and Charles-Francois Daubigny, who greatly influenced his style. He painted at the beginning of his career atmospheric pictures in a monochromatic palette of the riverside of the Rhone and the south of France. In 1870 he changed his style to use brilliant and striking colour in his paintings but he still continued to make charcoal drawings as well as small etchings of landscapes in the Barbizon style.
The etching was presented to the National Art Gallery by the generous benefactor Sir John Ilott in 1973, shortly before his death. Lyrical and realist, it depicts the rock face - or small cliff - in the common lands of Rix, in Ain province, France, with hills beyond. The silhouetted foreground figure, probably female, is likely to be a local worker. It is plate 205 in the fourth volume of prints, Eaux-Fortes Modernes, produced by the Société des Aquafortistes (Society of Etchers) in 1863-67. Five volumes and 300 plates all up were published; the collection marks the advent of the etching revival in France. Other contributors to the series include notable artists also acquired by Ilott and represented in Te Papa's collection, including Corot, Daubigny, Henri Fantin-Latour, Edouard Manet, Charles Meryon and Alphonse Legros.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolphe_Appian
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art September 2017