In a Victoria Carriage (En Victoria)

The French-Armenian artist Edgar Chahine was born in Vienna, raised in Istanbul, and active in France. After a stint of artistic training in Venice, he moved to Paris in 1895, where he studied at the Académie Julian. He became one of the most gifted, prolific, and innovative printmakers in Paris at the turn of the century, producing some 600 intaglio prints, and capturing life in the city in the Belle Époque. Here, in the twilight of the horse-and-carriage era in France, Chahine depicts a fashionable woman being driven through a park in an elegant Victoria carriage. This French carriage—graceful, low-slung, doorless, with a removeable coachman seat—was named after Queen Victoria and became popular in England as well.