Meryon also suffered from mental illness throughout his life. His familiarity with poverty and melancholy shaped his artistic vision, and over the course of four years (1850-1854) he produced a series of twenty-two haunting and imaginative views of the streets, buildings, and bridges of Paris called "Eaux-fortes sur Paris."
In the majority of his etchings, Meryon treats human figures as subsidiary elements in the urban landscape. The figures in "La Morgue," however, relate a narrative: a body recently dredged from the river is taken to the city mortuary, as spectators watch from the wall. The scene takes place in an architectural setting depicted with characteristic clarity and imagination. This print hung in the Blue Room of the Deanery along with other prints from the same series and etchings of the American artist, James McNeill Whistler.
Keywords
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drypoint
- Intaglio process in which a sharp needle scratches the plate creating a burr that yields a characteristically soft and velvety line in the final print.
etchings
- Prints made from an etched printing plate, which is a metal plate on which a design is made by coating the plate with an acid-resistant substance, creating a design in the coating, and then exposing the plate to acid, which etches the plate where the metal is exposed. For designs incised directly into a copper plate using a burin or graver, use "engravings (prints)."
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<ref name=BMC>cite web |url=http://triarte.brynmawr.edu/objects-1/info/179475 |title=La Morgue |author=Bryn Mawr College Library Special Collections |accessdate=1/26/2021 |publisher=Bryn Mawr College</ref>
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