About this work
The scene is immediately kinetic: a young woman stands beneath a dramatic tree, accompanied by two borzoi dogs wearing red collars, the tree's branches arching overhead while her dress billows and catches in the wind. Everything in the composition is in motion — the woman's silhouette yields to an unseen force, her gown a cascade of soft, clinging fabric, while the lean, elegant hounds flank her like sentinels in a world briefly off-balance. Icart built this image using etching and aquatint with touches of hand-coloring — techniques he wielded with a printmaker's precision and a painter's instinct for atmosphere. The result is a palette of tonal restraint punctuated by vivid accents: the dogs' red collars pulling against the softness of pale skin and wind-stirred fabric.
*Coup de Vent* is a 1925 aquatint etching, published by Les Graveurs Modernes in Paris. It belongs to one of the most prolific and critically celebrated periods of Icart's career — a year that also produced landmark works like *Laziness* and *Spilled Milk*, cementing his reputation as the defining visual voice of Art Deco Paris. The borzoi, a recurring presence in Icart's imagery, was a creature deeply associated with the fashionable Parisian aristocracy of the era, and their pairing here with a windswept, waifish figure captures something essential about his sensibility: beauty caught in a suspended, slightly precarious moment. The medium — aquatint etching — allowed Icart the rich tonal gradation and velvety surface texture that gave his prints their characteristic warmth and intimacy, something no mere illustration could achieve.
As wall art, *Coup de Vent* rewards rooms that have some stillness to them — a study, a bedroom, a reading corner where the movement within the image provides all the energy the space needs. The print speaks to collectors drawn to the elegance of the 1920s without its stiffness — there's nothing posed or static here, only a woman and her dogs caught in a private, windblown instant. It brings a whisper of Parisian romance with it, the feeling of an afternoon in the Bois de Boulogne just before everything changes.
