Le Bonheur du Jour ou Les Graces à la Mode: Chez la Marchande de Pavots. 1920

Henri Reidel made this colour print, *Le Bonheur du Jour ou Les Graces à la Mode: Chez la Marchande de Pavots,* presumably by experimenting with a few different plates, pushing them through the press to build up the image bit by bit. I can see a group of languid figures and a dragon floating above them. You can almost smell the opium, can’t you? Everything looks like it’s slightly out of focus. I get the sense that he might have been trying to channel some kind of hallucinatory vision. I imagine Reidel, hunched over his printing press, carefully adjusting the alignment of each plate. He takes a print, and decides it needs more oomph. So, he wipes down a plate and starts again. Maybe, he’s thinking of ukiyo-e prints. Maybe he’s remembering a dream he had. He’s trying to capture a fleeting moment, a mood, an atmosphere. A sense of longing or a memory of something exquisite but slightly out of reach. All artists are magpies, pinching ideas across time. We see this image through all the other images that came before it.