Item #4064 John Brown. Paul Chenay, artist, after Victor Hugo, engraver.
John Brown.
John Brown.
John Brown.
John Brown.

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Chenay, Paul, engraver, after Victor Hugo, artist.

John Brown.

Paris: Gilquin et Dupain, [ca 1860]. Engraving and aquatint, 20.625” x 13.125” plus margins; printed on chine collé mounted on larger sheet of heavy wove paper.

A powerful aquatint after a drawing by Victor Hugo, engraved by his brother-in-law Paul Chenay.

The image has an interesting history. Hugo’s drawing, known as Ecce Lex or Le Pendu, did not, in fact, initially represent John Brown, but was, rather, a response to the hanging of John Charles Tapner against which Hugo fought, and which he witnessed on the island of Guernsey in 1854, during his self-imposed exile from France. The day, several years later, that Hugo learned of John Brown’s sentencing, he had already been planning to give Chenay certain of his drawings to engrave, and turned again towards the piece that best represented his distress and indignation. In a letter to Chenay, Hugo wrote: “Anything that furthers the great aim, Liberty, is a duty as far as I am concerned, and I shall be happy if this drawing, reproduced many times over by your art, helps keep ever-present in people's souls the memory of this liberator of our black brethren...” (artseensoho). A contemporary newspaper article compared the piece’s somber eloquence to that of Goya. “Undoubtedly [it is] the most emblematic drawing of Victor Hugo's tireless fight against the death penalty” (Audinet).

Initial permission to publish the engraving was rescinded after the editor, operating without the consent of either Hugo or Chenay, added the date of Brown’s execution—December 2nd, the same as Napoleon III’s 1851 coup d’état—to the bottom of the engraving, thereby presumably suggesting a highly offensive connection between Hugo’s dolorous protest and Napoleon’s power. In a fiasco that infuriated Hugo and his inner circle, the proofs were seized from their display cases and shredded at the printing office. To enable the safe dissemination of the work’s true message, the date was effaced from the plate for subsequent issues.

REFERENCES: Audinet, Gérard. “Ecce Lex” at Maisons Victor Hugo; Chenay, Paul. Victor Hugo à Guernsey : Souvenirs de son beau-frère, 76–78; “ECCE,” in Shadows of a Hand: The Drawings of Victor Hugo, qtd on artseensoho.com.

CONDITION: Good, minor rubbing and soiling, a few white spots apparently touched in with graphite, some faint damp-stains and a few white specks in image, trimmed to plate-mark at top, no tears.

Item #4064

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