Self-Portrait

One of the unsung heroes of the etching revival and of the realist movement overall, Jacque was among the earliest artists to return to etching in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. His first etching in 1830 was a copy of a head after Rembrandt, and one can read in his own brooding self-portrait a debt to the seventeenth-century master. He initially worked in a small scale most closely associated with book illustration, and he concentrated his attention on barnyard scenes and farm animals. Before Maxime Lalanne wrote his treatise on etching in 1866 that was to prove so influential, Jacque had published a series of short articles on the subject in Magasin pittoresque in 1852.