Le Poulailler, Vendée: "Attrape le plus Gras!" (The poulterer, Vendée: "Catch the fattest one.")

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 wanted above all 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.

This etching shows not so much a rural idyll as the opposite - a humorous, brutal scene, where the poulterer, only visible from the reverse, enters a hen house and is exhorted, in the pencilled inscription, by his scowling wife in a bonnet and very full dress (she obviously wears the trousers) to grab the fattest one, either for a customer or for the family table. A little girl, their daughter, stands beside her, looking distressed as the chickens stage a rapid exodus.

Te Papa has two impressions of this etching in its collection. Both were presented to its predecessor, the National Art Gallery, by Wellington advertising magnate, collector and benefactor Sir John Ilott.

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

Dr Mark Stocker    Curator, Historical International Art   May 2018