About this work
Three greyhounds, all leashed, lunge forward in a burst of motion — their owner, a woman in a flowing white dress, a breath away from being pulled off her feet. This is the electric heart of *Vitesse*, and Icart captures it with the precision of a stopped clock. The work transcribes speed and movement particularly well, the long horizontal format lending itself to a sense of hurtling across the picture plane. The composition is wide and low-slung — the image running to approximately 14.5 by 25 inches — and the palette holds the cool, luminous quality typical of Icart's hand-coloured etchings: the woman's white dress blazes against a softly worked ground, while the lean silver bodies of the hounds stretch forward in near-abstract streaks of muscle and line. What hits the viewer first is sheer kinetic energy; what holds them is the figure herself — elegant, windswept, entirely in command even as she is being dragged forward.
*Speed* (*Vitesse*) is a 1927 etching with hand-colouring, signed in pencil and numbered as an Artist's Proof, with Icart's distinctive windmill blindstamp.
It is catalogued as Figure 311 in the *Catalogue Raisonné* "Louis Icart: The Complete Etchings" by William R. Holland, published by Schiffer Publishing Ltd. The work sits squarely within Icart's most celebrated period: by 1927, Paris was deep into the decade that had made him a phenomenon, and *Vitesse* distils everything the era prized — velocity, feminine confidence, the thrill of modernity. The greyhound, a recurring emblem in Art Deco imagery, here becomes an almost allegorical force, pulling the new woman headlong into the future. Icart's financial and artistic success came in the late 1920s, and his work was featured in fashion publications and design studios across Europe and the United States.
As a fine art print, *Vitesse* rewards space and horizontal breathing room — a wide wall in a library, a drawing room, or a hallway with strong natural light will let the composition do what it was built to do: run. Icart often enhanced his etchings with hand-colouring, giving each piece a unique, painterly quality that holds up to close inspection and reads beautifully from across a room. This is a work for the collector who appreciates wit alongside craftsmanship — who wants a piece of wall art that carries narrative charge, not just decorative weight. The mood it sets is buoyant and a little breathless: the particular exhilaration of a world moving faster than it ever had before, rendered with absolute control.
