23. Sir David Young Cameron
(1865-1945)
Cour des Bons Enfants, Rouen

(click on image to print)
Cameron: Cour des Bons Enfants, Rouen

Cour des Bons Enfants, Rouen

Etching, 1897, 230 x 318 mm., Rinder 277 ii/iii. Very fine impression in brown-black with varied plate tone on thin, laid japan paper with good margins, signed in pencil. The scene shows a cafe and a hotel in this tiny court in old Rouen. Such quests for the picturesque have been maligned by many 20th-century art critics but, quite apart from the clear artistic quality and the technical expertise of the print, it offers us an image of what we can no longer see for ourselves. Rouen, a hundred years later, is still a lovely and historic city, but it no longer looks like this.