My father would spend hours examining from below the leaves, the branches, the twigs, the very texture, the tassels and laces of a bush. He would fly into a sudden rage and exclaim “Even the greatest artist is incapable of rendering this! It is beyond us.” (...) He would spend hours in our garden, studying the work of spiders weaving their web". (Rodolphine, the artist's daughter, quoted in: L. Godefroy & M-A. Leblond, La vie nomade de Rodolphe Bresdin, pp. 78-79).

According to Van Gelder all known impressions of Branchages are posthumous. The first edition of fifty, to which this impression belongs, was reserved for a luxury edition of La vie nomade de Rodolphe Bresdin, anunpublished biography by Louis Godefroy (1885-1934) and Marius-Ary Leblond. The book was never issued and the manuscript remains in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. At some point the plate was steel-faced and reduced in size before a second edition of 125 impressions was published in 1976 in the deluxe edition of Dirk van Gelder's Rudolphe Bresdin/Catalogue Raisonné de L'Oeuvre Gravé.



Post Lot Text
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