Homage to Boudin: A Suite of Four Original Etchings by Elizabeth Quandt

Elizabeth Quandt

A suite of four etchings by British-born California printmaker Elizabeth Quandt. Titled Homage to Boudin, they were inspired by French painter Eugene Boudin's scenes of the beaches of Trouville, France, a popular destination for tourists in the Georgian and Victorian eras.

The suite includes four etchings, with the first three - "Trouville Revisited", "Alone on the Beach", and "On Deauville Beach" - printed in an edition of 50, 25 of which were included in the suite itself. The fourth, "Sunset", was created specifically for the suite and only 25 impressions were pulled. Thus, the first three are editioned IV/L, while "Sunset" is editioned IV/XXV.

In three of the four etchings the artist used two plates to create a kind of "before and after" in which a seascape is shown in two incidences: in the top plate, a crowd of vacationers is gathered with their horses, parasols, and "bathing machines" (contraptions invented in the late 18th century to hide the female body from onlookers when swimming). In the bottom plate, a solo visitor - or none at all - transforms the same seascape into a quite different scene, now one of quietude. The final plate in the suite is a lone "bathing machine" beside the shore. In these images Quandt examines the sense of loneliness or solitude that comes both within and without the social sphere.

Elizabeth Quandt was born Elizabeth Gunn in Oxfordshire, England on July 13, 1922. Her father, Sir Herbert James Gunn, was a portrait painter to the Queen of England. Elizabeth studied at Queen Anne's School in Reading, England. During the Second World War she met and married American William Mailliard and they moved to San Francisco, California where he pursued a career in politics.

After a divorce, Elizabeth met the photographer William (Bill) Quandt, who was an assistant for photographer Ansel Adams, and they soon married. Bill Quandt ran a successful stereo business in Santa Rosa, California and Elizabeth attended the Santa Rosa Junior College, where she eventually taught printmaking. After Bill Quandt's death she married sculptor Roger Barr (1921-2000).