Le Gandin Ivre – Albert Bertrand after Félicien Rops, 1910

“Le Gandin Ivre” [The Drunken Dandy], colour etching au repérage made in 1910 by Albert Bertrand after a design by Félicien Rops. Numbered in pencil “36/150” and bearing a blind stamp in the lower right margin. Image size: 31.4 × 43.8 cm (plate mark: 38.5 × 48.4 cm).

The etching depicts a scene in a Parisian nightlife setting, where a drunken man has collapsed into the arms of a woman. The atmosphere is one of decadence and dissolution; the bourgeoisie is shown in a state of moral decline.

Félicien Rops (1833–1898) captured this with his signature sharp, satirical visual language. In Le Gandin Ivre, the dandy appears as a caricature of the vain, superficial man lost in drink and distraction — an ironic commentary on the social norms of his time.

Rops aimed to be modern and of his time: a chronicler who penetrated the ideas and emotions of his era and gave them form. In Paris he found that modernity – in its cabarets, brothels, and nocturnal life filled with ambiguous pleasures and hidden dramas. Le Gandin Ivre belongs to this world: a scene that not only mocks moral hypocrisy, but also evokes the tragicomic figure of the “whore with the heart,” a theme closely related to the works of Toulouse-Lautrec and the naturalist literature of Émile Zola, the Goncourt brothers, and Guy de Maupassant.

In the au repérage technique employed by the printmaker, multiple printing plates were inked in different colours and printed successively onto the same sheet of paper, resulting in a single richly coloured image.

Literature:

• Maurice Exsteens (1928) “L’oeuvre gravé et lithographie de Félicien Rops“, no. 855.

Price: Euro 2.950,-