Amiens Cathedral: Jour de l'Inventaire (Inventory day)

Auguste Lepère (1849-1918), the French printmaker, painter, illustrator, ceramist and teacher, was the son of a sculptor. He was apprenticed at the age of thirteen to the English wood engraver Joseph Burn Smeeton who had established his studio in Paris. Lepère desired foremost to be a painter and submitted his paintings to the annual Salons but he worked for 30 years as an illustrator, earning his livelihood producing wood-engraving illustrations for L'Art, Le Monde illustré, La Revue illustrée and L'Illustration. Technology ended his first career in about 1890 as books and magazines adopted the use of the photographic image.

Lepère continued working in wood engraving, however, and between 1889 and 1901, his favorite subjects were the urban scenes around contemporary Paris - the bridges, churches and boulevards. He produced his first color woodcut, Marchands au panier sous une porte rue Mauconseil, in 1889.

It was a natural progression from magazine illustration to book illustration and in this new career Lepère found success as a master of the medium. Besides wood, he also worked with metal for his etching and limestone for his lithographs. His output was prodigious, producing around 1000 wood engravings and over 100 etchings

Amiens Cathedral is one of the latter. Here Lepère provides a wonderful panorama of the west front of Amiens Cathedral with, a real rarity in the etching revival of the period, a dramatic historical scene enacted in the foreground, with a rioting mob. What is happening? The sub-title of the print, which translates as 'Inventory Tax Day', provides a hint. In the 16th century, particularly in the period preceding and during the French Wars of Religion (1562-98), it was customary practice to demand a forced levy, calculated through a combination of inventories and political expediency, on the economies of cities and towns to supply the royal army with grain. Especially during poor harvest years, this caused social unrest among the understandably angry and probably in some cases starving citizenry. Here, though Lepère presents a more modern, satirical take on the theme.

Te Papa owns two impressions of this etching, both donated to the National Art Gallery by Sir John Ilott (see 1955-0012-10).

See: Annex Galleries, 'Auguste Louis Lepère', https://www.annexgalleries.com/artists/biography/1381/Lepere/Auguste

Dr Mark Stocker    Curator, Historical International Art   May 2018