La vague (The Wave)

Henri Rivière was so obsessive about emulating Japanese woodcuts that he made his own carving tools, secured some Japanese paper, and acquired hundreds of Japanese prints. One result was a series of wave woodcuts in the early 1890s based on imagery he found at his summer home on the Brittany coast. This lithograph captures the flat colors and stylized water spray found in those woodcuts. Rivière also used a whopping eight colors, rare for the early days of fine art lithography.