Nineteenth-Century French Studies

Starving artist, poète maudit and engraver Antoine Monnier was born in Lyon in 1846. His “livre d’artiste” entitled Eaux-fortes et rêves creux: sonnets excentriques et poëmes étranges, illustrated with his etchings, appeared in 1873, a year before the publication of the first “livre de peintre”: Le Fleuve by Manet and Cros. A brief presentation of Eaux-fortes, Le Haschisch: contes en prose, sonnets et poëmes fantaisistes (1877) and Ève et ses incarnations: sonnets et eaux-fortes (1878) will show that the richness of Monnier’s work extends well beyond his debt to Baudelaire and Méryon and, as such, is worthy of further study. (In French)