Bateaux au mouillage à Tréboul, plate 5 from Le Beau Pays de Bretagne

The French printmaker, illustrator, and shadow-theater designer Henri Rivière was born in Montmartre in 1864. He lived and worked in this area of Paris throughout his long career, and along with Brittany, it became his primary subject matter. Bateaux au mouillage à Tréboul (Anchored Boats at Tréboul) is from “Le Beau Pays de Bretagne” (The Beautiful Country of Brittany)—a series of 20 lithographs issued yearly between 1898 and 1917. Rivière was one of the first artists to use larger numbers of colors in a single image, in this case 12 to 14 different tones. He mastered the method of overlaying the colors in the printing process and mixed the colors with varnish to give them different textures and hues. It was also Rivière who produced these complicated images in large editions before any of his colleagues, and for Bateaux au mouillage à Tréboul he published an edition of 600 single sheet impressions and 1000 impressions on calendars.