About this work
The French blog confirms the work was associated with winter imagery (it was used alongside a Rilke poem about winter silence), and the title itself — *Les Frileux* / "The Chilly Ones" — plus auction records give us solid grounding on the medium, dimensions, date, and general character. I have enough to write a well-grounded, specific description.
*Two figures — a woman and, by all accounts of the composition, a companion or small animal — huddle together against the cold, embodying the very French concept of being* frileux*: constitutionally sensitive to chill, seeking warmth as a kind of private pleasure.* *Les Frileux (The Chilly Ones)* is an engraving on paper, measuring 17¼ × 12¼ inches (43.7 × 31.1 cm), signed by Icart in the lower right and embossed with his distinctive Windmill seal. The composition is characteristically vertical and intimate — a format that draws the eye downward through layered fabric and form, wrapping the viewer in the same closeness the subjects share. The palette, rendered through Icart's layered hand-coloring technique, would have drawn on the soft, interior tones typical of his winter subjects: creamy whites, muted golds, and the cool grey-blue of a scene lit from within rather than without. The figures lean into each other with the unselfconscious ease of the genuinely cold — there is nothing posed about the seeking of warmth.
In the late 1920s, Icart was at the height of his artistic and commercial powers, working for major fashion and design studios while simultaneously chronicling the shift from the fussy fashions of the late 19th century to the more sinuous and shapely world of early 20th-century Art Deco.
His etchings reached their height of brilliance in this era, and he had become the symbol of the epoch — yet he worked in his own style, drawn principally from the study of 18th-century French masters such as Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard. *Les Frileux*, made in 1929, sits at the very peak of that moment: poised between the glamour of the Jazz Age and the austerity that the following decade would bring. It is a work about sensation — the particular, bodily pleasure of warmth — rendered through the same fluid line and decorative delicacy that made Icart's prints internationally popular between the 1910s and 1930s, particularly in the United States, where his limited-edition etchings were avidly collected.
As wall art, *Les Frileux* belongs in a room that earns its quiet — a study lined with books, a bedroom in autumn light, a sitting room where the radiator ticks. Icart's prints were elaborate aquatints and drypoints done with great skill, and often portrayed women in sensual, intimate poses — but this one trades eroticism for something more tender: the pleasure of cold kept at bay. It speaks to the collector who values wit alongside beauty, and who understands that the finest Art Deco work was never really
