Roquebrune, French Riviera

 

Augusta Payne Rathbone

  1897 - 1990 (biography)

c. 1935  

etching & color aquatint 

10 5/8 x 8 1/4" platemark 

pencil, lower right 

trial proof outside of the edition of 

trial proof is faintly visibly in the lower left--the artist tried to erase the words 

 

cream wove Arches watermarked 

proof 

 

AR606 

SOLD

While in Paris in 1927, Augusta Rathbone was introduced to printmaking and thereafter worked primarily in color aquatint combined with line etching. 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. She 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.