Le Vent (The Wind),

1901

French printmaker, illustrator, and collector Henri Rivière lived his entire life in the Montmartre district of Paris, making yearly pilgrimages to picturesque villages on the coast of Brittany. Rivière’s erudite passion for collecting Japanese woodblock prints profoundly influenced his innovative graphic output, as evidenced in the elongated format, flat decorative colors, and outlined forms of this lithograph of Breton women hanging laundry on a windy day. This print is from the portfolio The Enchanted Hours, a charming series of sixteen color lithographs representing the changing effects of nature at different times of the day. Upon his death, Rivière bequeathed his entire print collection—including over seven hundred Japanese prints—to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.