16 Oct A Triumph of Fin de Siècle Printmaking: Our L’Estampe Originale on Tour

We are delighted to announce that our complete set of L’Estampe originale has premiered at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens, marking the beginning of an extensive museum tour through 2027. This extraordinary portfolio—one of only six intact sets remaining from the original edition of one hundred—represents a pivotal moment in the history of printmaking when the medium transcended its reproductive role to become a vehicle for artistic innovation.

Published quarterly between 1893 and 1895 under the visionary direction of Parisian publisher André Marty, L’Estampe originale assembled ninety-five works by seventy-four masters of late nineteenth-century art. The roster reads as a who’s who of the period: Bonnard, Gauguin, Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Whistler, among others, each contributing prints that pushed the boundaries of color lithography and explored new possibilities in texture, luminosity, and artistic expression.

What makes this portfolio particularly remarkable is its completeness. Commercial pressures over the past century have led dealers to break up most sets, extracting individual prints by artists whose market values soared. Today, beyond our own, complete sets reside only in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Van Gogh Museum, the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, and the Georgia Museum of Art.

The exhibition, curated by distinguished art historian Donna Stein, is accompanied by her newly revised catalogue raisonné—a full-color update to her seminal 1970 publication. Dr. Stein’s scholarship illuminates how these artists, working at the height of movements from Impressionism to Symbolism to Art Nouveau, embraced printmaking not as a secondary medium but as an arena for primary artistic statement.

Each artist in L’Estampe originale maintained complete creative control—selecting paper, determining technique, even positioning Alexandre Charpentier’s distinctive blind stamp. This autonomy, combined with collaborations with master printers, redefined the very concept of the “original” print, establishing precedents that continue to influence contemporary printmaking.

Museums interested in hosting this traveling exhibition should contact Landau Traveling Exhibitions through 2027. As guardians of this rare complete set, we are gratified to share these masterworks with audiences nationwide, offering an unprecedented opportunity to experience the full scope of this landmark achievement in graphic arts.

For further information about the exhibition tour, please visit www.a-r-t.com/lestampe or contact us directly for details about this exceptional collection.