Woodcutters' Meal
1887, published 1908
Medium
Wood engraving in black on cream laid Japanese paper
Dimensions
Image: 29.2 × 21.7 cm (11 1/2 × 8 9/16 in.); Sheet: 37 × 30 cm (14 5/8 × 11 13/16 in.)
Classification
wood engraving
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
124973
Art Historical Context
**Woodcutters' Meal by Louis Auguste Lepère invites visitors into a serene snapshot of rural French life from 1887, later published in 1908. This wood engraving housed in the Art Institute of Chicago's Prints and Drawings department measures 29.2 × 21.7 cm in its image area on a larger sheet of cream laid Japanese paper. Lep, a prominent French printmaker of the late 19th, specialized in capturing everyday scenes with remarkable precision, often drawing from the working-class world around him. The medium—wood engraving—holds special significance as a technique revived in France during this er...
About the Artist
Louis Auguste Lepère · 1849–1918
Louis-Auguste Lepère (1849–1918) was born in Paris on November 30 to the sculptor François Lepère, immersing him early in the artistic world. At age thirteen, he apprenticed in the studio of the English wood engraver Joseph Burn-Smeeton, training there from 1862 to 1867, and later attended drawing courses under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran at the Petite École (now École nationale supérieure des art...