About this work
- **Medium & dimensions:** Etching, 20 × 13.5 inches, signed lower right (Heritage Auctions record)
**Subject:** A pretty lady and her dog set against a Japanese folding screen background, with notable detail throughout (Chasen Antiques / multiple auction sources)
**Period context:** Icart's peak Art Deco output, 1920s–1930s, when his popularity surged in both Europe and the US; his Japonisme-inflected compositions reflect the broader cultural fascination with East Asian decorative motifs
**Technique:** Etching with hand-coloring, combining drypoint and aquatint
Here is the product description:
*Pretty Lady* is an etching measuring 20 × 13.5 inches, its vertical format perfectly suited to its intimate subject: a fashionable woman and her dog posed before a Japanese folding screen. The screen behind her is not mere backdrop — it is a compositional event in its own right, rendered with a density of detail that pulls the eye between the decorative panels and the figure herself. Icart's hand-coloring, applied over the etched lines with an expert's control of soft tonal transitions, gives each impression a unique, painterly quality — warm flesh tones and the muted lacquer-like hues of the screen converging into something that reads as both print and painting. The woman is the unmistakable Icart type: poised, self-possessed, dressed with the considered ease of a woman who knows she is being watched. The dog at her side adds a note of lively domesticity, grounding the composition in the intimate world of a Parisian interior.
The work belongs to Icart's peak decade. In the late 1920s, Icart was very successful both artistically and financially, and he had begun 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. The Japanese screen backdrop is no accident: Japonisme had been coursing through Parisian aesthetics since the Impressionists, and by the 1920s its vocabulary — flat planes, decorative pattern, geometric poise — had been fully absorbed into the Art Deco idiom. Icart deploys it here not as exoticism but as fluent visual grammar, working in his own style derived principally from the study of eighteenth-century French masters such as Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard while keeping one eye firmly on the fashionable present. His portrayal of modern women — confident, graceful, and fashionable — captured the cultural mood of 1920s Paris with unusual precision.
*Pretty Lady* is a work that earns a quiet, well-lit wall — a study, a dressing room, a sitting room with lacquered furniture or warm wood tones that echo the screen's palette.
