About this work
- *Salome* by Louis Icart is catalogued as H., C. & I. 388, dated **1928** (with some sources citing 1929 for the copyright/print date — this is consistent with Icart's practice of copyrighting works in the year following creation). - It is an **etching, drypoint, and aquatint with hand-coloring on Rives paper**, pencil-signed, with the artist's blindstamp. - The subject is Salomé — the biblical/theatrical dancer famous for the Dance of the Seven Veils — a theme highly charged in early 20th-century culture via Oscar Wilde's play and Richard Strauss's opera. - One known version features Icart's wife **Fanny** as the model, with a **transparent golden veil rendered in gold ink** (Figure 401 at Chasen Antiques, which cross-references with Salome). - The etching is noted for **bright colors** and strong decorative impact. - The late 1920s were the apex of Icart's commercial and artistic success.
*Salome* (catalogued H., C. & I. 388) is a hand-colored etching, drypoint, and aquatint on Rives paper, pencil-signed by the artist and bearing his distinctive blindstamp. The composition draws on one of Western art's most mythologized figures — the daughter of Herodias, whose dance before King Herod made her the defining image of dangerous femininity in the European imagination. The Dance of the Seven Veils is Salomé's performance before Herod Antipas, an elaboration on the biblical story of the execution of John the Baptist; the name was chiefly popularized through the 1894 English translation of Oscar Wilde's play. Icart renders her in his characteristically fluid register: he used his wife Fanny as the model, and the transparent golden veil is rendered with actual gold ink — a glittering technical flourish that makes the figure shimmer against the deep, richly aquatinted ground. Bright colors animate the composition, while Icart's mastery of drypoint gives the figure's contours a velvet warmth. What the viewer encounters first is pure arrested motion: a woman caught mid-dance, her silhouette all curve and suggestion, the veil still catching air.
In the late 1920s, Icart was very successful both artistically and financially with his publications and his work for large fashion and design studios. *Salome* belongs precisely to this triumphant period, arriving just as Paris's Art Deco fever peaked and the Orientalist imagination — kept alive by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Wilde's play, and Strauss's opera — remained a powerful current in Parisian visual culture. Icart's etchings of female figures in seductive poses — often in the guise of the courtesan or temptress — were
