La Place de Saint-Georges, 1899

Maurice Delcourt began as a painter and book illustrator. His first woodcut was published in the journal L’Ymagier in 1895, and in the late 1890s he issued large independent prints of his color woodcuts. These works were cut with a knife on endgrain boxwood and then overprinted with color blocks inked with gelatin colors. An impression of La Place Saint-Georges appeared in L’Estampe nouvelle in 1899 and was exhibited at the Salon of the Société nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1901. Delcourt broke from the tradition of three-dimensional modeling by juxtaposing flat areas of black and white and using expressive curved lines to depict a communicant and her mother in mourning (at left) passing by two elegant young women in the Place Saint Georges.