Henry de Waroquier - Portrait - Original Etching 1946

Henry de Waroquier - Portrait - Original Etching Paris, Le Gerbier, 1946 Edition of 340 Henry de Waroquier (1881-1970) Henry de Waroquier, painter, sculptor, and printmaker, was born in Paris on the rue Lafitte, very near the important art galleries of Ambrose Vollard and Durand-Ruel. It was in the windows of these galleries that as a youth he discovered the works of the French Impressionists. Also in the neighborhood was a store which featured the art of the Far East. Both the Impressionists and the art of Japan were important early influences on his work. As a young man, de Waroquier was drawn both to the study of art and of biology, finally choosing the former. He studied in Paris at the School of Decorative Arts, and privately with the architect Charles Genuys and the painter and scholar Louis Ménard. In 1901, de Waroquier was given a Grand Prize for ornament design, and that same year he began to travel in Brittany doing paintings and drawings in which the Impressionist and Japanese influences mingled. In 1903, he was named professor of composition at the Estienne School of Art and Industry in Paris. He often traveled to Venice and did a number of paintings, drawings, and etchings of that city. From the beginning of the 20th century, de Waroquier exhibited prominently in the annual Salon exhibitions in Paris, most notably in the Salon d’Automne, of which he eventually became president, and in the Salon des Tuilleries and the Salon des Artistes Indépendants. He had many one-man shows in Paris and elsewhere. In 1946, the museum in Zurich mounted an extensive retrospective of his work, and in 1952 the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris held an exhibition of fifty of his sculptures. In 1955, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris put on an exhibition of his engravings. One of his most important works is the mural, Tragedy, which he painted for the Universal Exhibition of 1937 in the Palais de Chaillot. De Waroquier’s work figures prominently in many important collections of early 20th century art, most especially in those of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris and the Museum of the 1930s in the Paris suburb of Boulgone-Billancourt.