Frejus, French Riviera

Augusta Payne Rathbone

Augusta Payne Briggs Rathbone was born in Berkeley, California on 30 November 1897. In 1900, her parents, Henry and Julia Briggs Rathbone, were living in the San Francisco home of her grandparents, Obil and Mary Briggs, and that same year her mother passed away. After the 1906 earthquake and conflagration, Rathbone was sent to live in Berkeley with her aunt, Edith Moses. Rathbone eventually returned to San Francisco where she attended Miss Hamlin’s School for Girls and Young Ladies. She received her BA degree in art from the University of California Berkeley in 1920 and the following year she sailed to Paris for further study.

In 1921, upon graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, Augusta Rathbone continued her studies at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. She also studied with Lucien Simon and, for seven years, with the Spanish artist Claudio Castelucho y Diana. In 1927, at the suggestion of Nora Hamilton of Chicago, Rathbone began to concentrate on printmaking and took her plates to Monsieur Alfred Porcabeuf in Paris for proving and printing. Her earliest intaglios featured the Sierra Nevada and urban scenes of New York and San Francisco. After World War II, Rathbone returned to Paris but in the face of prohibitive printing costs she taught herself how to print her plates.

While in Paris in 1927, Augusta Rathbone was introduced to printmaking and thereafter worked primarily in color aquatint combined with line etching. Rathbone, who had studied briefly with Bonnard, uses a freely drawn black etched line to capture rough shapes which are then filled with color, using aquatint and printing the color 'a la poupée'. She worked with Monsieur Porcabeuf, a professional printer in Paris, who would prove her prepared plates. In the 1930s she traveled the French Riviera and her color palette adapted to the colorful villages throughout the region.

Rathbone produced twenty color aquatints of the French Riviera and about 1938 she joined forces with Juliet and Virginia Thompson to create the illustrated book French Riviera Villages, which was published that year by Mitchell Kennerly. Twelve of Rathbone's original color aquatints were reproduced mechanically by photography and then hand colored with pochoir. Juliet Thompson photographed the villages and Virginia Thompson wrote a history on each village. Rathbone's aquatints are a modernist homage to these ancient villages, in this case the village of Fréjus.

Julius Caesar developed Fréjus into a bigger seaport than Marseille and it became a chief post along the Aurelian Way. The town was sacked in the 10th century and over time sand deposits separated the town from the sea. Historic sites include the Gothic Saint-Léonce Cathedral which has painted cloisters and a baptistry with Roman columns. Like Whistler, Rathbone opted to depict the ordinary architecture of the town rather than another view of the magnificent cathedrals and churches. The simplicity of her compositions open a new appreciation of the ancient architecture.