Art card Jean-Jacques Henner, Églogue, Petit Palais, Lapina Paris

French art postcard in colour halftone reproducing Eglogue by Jean-Jacques Henner, a painting held in the collection of the Palais des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, better known as the Petit Palais. The card was issued by Lapina in Paris under number 639, with multilingual captioning in French, Russian and Italian, and carries the characteristic Printed in Paris imprint and the orange-red correspondence layout on the reverse. The composition shows two nude female figures in a twilit wooded landscape beside a pool: on the left a seated flute player with red hair, on the right a standing figure leaning against a stone altar. Unposted, in used condition with the trace of an old label on the reverse and a slight mark on the face of the right-hand figure, the composition remaining fully legible.

Jean-Jacques Henner, born at Bernwiller in 1829 and died in Paris in 1905, was an Alsatian painter who, within the academic milieu of late nineteenth-century Paris, devised a singular register of twilit forest nymphs, red-haired nudes and pastoral scenes of mythological cast. His work belongs to what would later be called dreaming academism, a tendency that set, against the sharper accents of naturalism and the vivid colour of impressionism, a contemplative counter-voice. The title Eglogue refers back to the ancient bucolic poem, a poetic genre which nineteenth-century painting summoned to evoke a timeless Arcadia. The Paris-based publisher Lapina specialised around 1905 in art cards with multilingual captioning, including Russian, in order to serve the European art traveller's market as far as the tsarist empire.