Armour and swords.

Jules-Ferdinand Jacquemart (1837-1880) was a major French etcher, illustrator and watercolourist. His father Albert Jacquemart was also an artist, although an amateur one. He illustrated botanical books, and was also a collector and an author.

Jacquemart made his name reproducing in etchings contemporary and old master paintings, and from 1859 until the end of his career he regularly contributed plates to the Gazette des beaux-arts. James McNeill Whistler wrote to Henri Fantin-Latour in 1862 that his brother-in-law, Francis Seymour Haden was very impressed with Jacquemart's etchings, which he saw when visiting Charles Meryon in Paris. Jacquemart was also an accomplished landscape watercolourist and in 1879 was a founder member of the Société des aquarellistes français.

Jacquemart shared Whistler's interest in oriental art. His earliest recorded work was an etching dating from 1859 depicting a selection of Chinese and Japanese objects. Along with Philippe Burty, Fantin-Latour and Félix Bracquemond, he formed a society that aimed to study Japanese art and culture.

The Chalcographie de Louvre commissioned Jacquemart to execute illustrations for Henri Barbet de Jouys's Gemmes et joyaux de la couronne du Musée du Louvre in two folio volumes, first published in 1865 (see F.L. Leipnik, A History of French Etching, 1924, p. 118). Armour and swords relates to this production but is an etching in its own right, and there are no inscriptions that relate it to these monumental tomes. In the print, an ornamental display of nine swords and daggers about a decorated metal cuirass (chest-armour), Jacquemart applies his qualities of ingenuity in arrangement and truth to the objects depicted.

The choice of Jacquemart as the reproductive illustrator is easy to understand, as through his career he had produced 400 plates recording collections of precious stones, medals, daggers, swords, bronze busts statuettes, ceramics and paintings. In short, Jacquemart had established his reputation based on his high level of technical skills even if his reproductive prints of other artists' artworks were (to quote Leipnik) 'scarcely above mediocrity'.

Regarding Jacquemart's technical skills, Leipnik offers the following insightful assessment: 'Jacquemart's marvellous achievement is the still unrivalled reproduction of the surface texture of the perfect suggestion of the dull glimmer of gold, of the pale sheen of silver, of the vibrating lustre of china, of the liquid fire and the prismatic rays of faceted stone and the grain of leather; and the inimitable rendering of the translucent, opalescent or opaque qualities of these various materials' (ibid.). However, other than this print, he is not currently represented in Te Papa's collection.

See:

F.L. Leipnik, A History of French Etching from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day (London, 1924)

Prints and Principles, 'Jules Jacquemart's etching of a crystal ewer', http://www.printsandprinciples.com/2016/10/jules-jacquemarts-etching-of-crystal.html

University of Glasgow, James McNeill Whister, 'The Etchings: A Catalogue Raisonné', http://etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk/catalogue/biog/?nid=JacqJ

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   May 2018