Winter Morning on the Quays

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

In this print, Félix Buhot depicted a Parisian street scene transformed by the ephemeral effects of weather and natural light. The artist presented a cab station on a wet and rainy day alongside the regular apartment buildings that resulted from Haussmannization. Pedestrians and a police officer populate the scene, evoking the spontaneous moments recorded by the Impressionists around the time of the print’s creation. Buhot was known in particular for his technical aptitude in etching and used a complex combination of techniques to produce the dense blacks and textured marks of the print. He often printed few impressions in a large number of states to create a sense of rarity, and the example here is exemplary of this practice, with the composition tipped down by the artist to a larger sheet with an embossed border, effectively creating a unique work from a reproductive process. Félix Buhot referred to the decorative borders of his prints as “symphonic margins.”