Artists

Rodolphe Piguet

Swiss, 1840-1915

Rodolphe Piguet belongs to those Swiss artists who have been and are an honour to Swiss art beyond the frontier, who accomplish the greater part of their life-work in such centres as Paris or Munich, but who never forget, amidst the intoxication of success and fame, the beautiful home-land. He began his career as a painter on enamel in the studio of the Genevese master Charles Glardon, who carried on the tradition of Thouron and Petitot.

Mr. Piguet has always been a staunch defender of the claims of the art of painting on enamel, for which Geneva was so distinguished in the days of those masters in the practice. It is a matter for regret that the best traditions of this exquisite art have not been maintained. A Geneva school of painting on enamel in which the spirit and traditions of the early masters should be caught and carried on would be welcome. Why should this practice be regarded as one of the minor arts in painting, any more than the sonnet as minor work in poetry?

It was not, however, in the practice of painting on enamel that Mr. Piguet achieved fame, though after having left it aside for many years he has returned to it again and has made some happy efforts at landscape and portraiture in this most delicate yet durable art.

At the age of twenty Mr. Piguet left his native land for America, where he worked for some time as illustrator on the staff of the "Aldine Review," and later, on that of the American "Daily Graphic." It was not, however. till he arrived in the electrical artistic atmosphere of Paris that he came to the full consciousness of his possibilities. Here he accomplished his most important work, achieving fame by his masterly execution in dry-point, colored engraving, and pastel. The secrets of the language of these he made his own, and into it read his best self. “When I first turned to the use of the dry-point,” he says, "I found etching, properly speaking, too complicated. I was attracted to the dry-point by what one could accomplish with so simple an instrument and I sought to do on the metal with the point what one does with the pencil on paper." With what skill and delicacy he used this instrument is well known.

When he took to the pastel, he was equally happy, and his impressions in this medium of landscape on the banks of the Marne are suffused with a pensive beauty and luminous quality all their own. Mr. Piguet has been awarded the highest honors at the Paris Salon as well as the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and a glance at his fine pointe-sèches or his exquisite pastels of the Marne side or that album of etchings of Swiss subjects to which I re-ferred in the Special Number of The Studio on Etching and Engraving, is enough to convince us that we have here a work in which technical skill has yielded its utmost, in which the intimate moods of landscape and the elegant as well as familiar aspects of life are finely rendered in limpid language; in which classic and modern methods touch and blend and the charm and nicety of the "little masters " of the eighteenth century have found new expression.