Breaking Waves, September Tide (1901): Artwork and History

Breaking Waves, September Tide (1901) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Louis Auguste Lepère French, 1849-1918.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

Louis-Auguste Lepére began his career as a commercial wood engraver, but in 1885 he decided to begin making his own original woodcuts. Moved by Japanese prints exhibited at the 1888 Exposition Internationale de Blanc et Noir and the 1889 Exposition Universelle, Lepére experimented with the color woodcut process. Breaking Waves pays homage to the ocean imagery popular in the islands of Japan and integrates a diagonally recessed shoreline with a horizon line just above the center elements that find a counterpart in Utagawa Hiroshige's Hamamatsu.

Object facts

• Title: Breaking Waves, September Tide
• Date: 1901
• Artist attribution: Louis Auguste Lepère French, 1849-1918
• Place of origin: France
• Medium: Woodcut from three blocks in water-based colors on cream laid paper
• Dimensions: Image: 28.2 × 39.6 cm (11 1/8 × 15 5/8 in.); Sheet: 32.1 × 44.9 cm (12 11/16 × 17 11/16 in.)
• Type: Print
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1923.1841

Collection credit

Gift of M. Knoedler and Company

View the original

Explore the artwork in the Art Institute's collection, including its image and the museum's current catalogue details.

The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.