The Large Apple Market Possibly 1891 - 1917

Auguste-Louis Lepère made this etching, *The Large Apple Market*, with black ink on paper. Look closely and you'll see everything is built up from many small, precise marks. It reminds me of a pointillist painting, but instead of color, it’s all about texture and light. There’s so much going on in this print! The texture is so rich you can almost smell the earthy scents of the market, but the image has a ghostly quality. I'm drawn to the way he etches the light—it seems to radiate from behind the buildings and through the smoke, creating a hazy, dreamlike atmosphere. Lepère's work shares something with Whistler's etchings of London, that preoccupation with capturing the atmosphere of a place, rather than just the details. I find that this work invites us to wander through a space that is both familiar and somehow wonderfully distant.