Marché à la terraille

Art Historical Context

**Marché à la terraille (1890) by Auguste Lepère invites visitors into the gritty vibrancy of late 19th-century Paris This wood engraving captures a bustling scrap metal market*marché à la terraille*—where vendors and workers haggle over salvaged goods amid the city's industrial hum. Lepère a masterful French engraver illustrator (1849–8), specialized in documenting everyday urban life with a keen eye for detail, evoking the energy of the Belle Époque era. Wood engraving, Lepère's chosen medium, was a pinnacle of 19th-century printmaking By incising fine lines into the dense end-grain of wood blocks, artists like him achieved remarkable precision and tonal depth, rivaling drawings. This technique made high-quality reproductions affordable, bringing scenes of working-class Paris to wider audiences through books, journals, and posters. Now part of the Corcoran Collection (Gift of Jack and Margrit Vanderryn) in the National Gallery of Art's Prints department, this work exemplifies Lepère's contribution to Realism in print form. It offers a window into the social fabric of fin-de-siècle France, blending artistic innovation with cultural snapshot. (198 words)

About the Artist

Auguste Lepère · 1849–1918

Auguste-Louis Lepère (1849–1918), son of the sculptor François Lepère, was born in Paris on November 30, 1849, into an artistic family that shaped his early path. At age thirteen, he apprenticed in the Paris studio of the English wood engraver Joseph Burn Smeeton, honing his skills in wood engraving until 1867. He furthered his training with drawing classes under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran at the...