Portrait of Huysmans

The son of renowned printer and Société des Aquafortistes co-founder Auguste Delâtre, Eugène Delâtre was among the earliest and most enthusiastic artists to experiment with color etching in fin-de-siècle Paris. Breaking from the tenets of the etching revival—which privileged the monochromatic contrast of printmaking—Delâtre's prints instead played upon the current fashion for color lithography. The medium was used widely at the time, from the mass-produced posters that decorated the urban landscape to artistic prints available at dealers' shops. This portrait shows the decadent novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) within the cultivated interior of his Parisian apartment. By the time the print was produced, the author had developed a sensational reputation for his novel Against Nature (1884), which broke from narrative tradition and included allusions to homosexuality. Delâtre's Portrait of Huysmans was included in the 1894 edition of L'Estampe originale, a collaborative print album that highlighted current trends and innovations in contemporary printmaking.