Maxime Lalanne

Vocation

French draughtsman, designer and etcher. Lalanne, who studied in Paris in the studio of Jean Gigoux, made his Salon début in 1852. He was an important player in the etching revival in France and was a founding member in 1862 of the Société des Aquafortistes. His illustrated manual Traité de la gravure à l'eau-forte was published in 1866 and translated into English in 1880. He produced a second technical manual, Le Fusain, in 1869. Lalanne provided drawings for L'Illustration nouvelle, the Société des Aquafortistes's journal, from 1868 to 1881. Further, he made prints after artists such as Corot and Constant Troyon for French periodicals including L'Artiste and the Gazette des beaux-arts. He also produced illustrations for books, e.g. Chez Victor Hugo (1864). Lalanne's drawings were often very critical of the Second Empire, for example his collection of prints Souvenirs artistiques du siège de Paris (1871) and his plates for the Société des Aquafortistes, L'Eaux-fortes modernes series (1862-6). Pennell greatly admired Lalanne's quick, incisive pen and ink landscapes and townscapes, even comparing them favourably against those of Titian. He declared that Lalanne's etching of Richmond and the Thames, which appeared in the Portfolio, was 'the most exquisite example of his work I have seen in any English periodical'. Lalanne exhibited in Britain at the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts between 1882 and 1884. Lalanne's struggled 10 years with osteomalacia, a crippling bone disease that causes bone softness and disintegration. Lalanne continued working until he died, with charcoal in his hand, on 29 July 1886, shortly after completing a drawing for his cousin, the author Leopold Lalanne. Link to Wikipedia biography