Duinlandschap met een gezicht op La Falaise, Baie de St. Malo 1889 - 1890

Félix Hilaire Buhot made this landscape print of the Baie de St. Malo in France, using etching. The image is visually arresting, not only for the landscape it depicts, but also for its highly decorative border. The border is not just ornamental. Notice that it is integrated with the central image. Buhot made this print during the late nineteenth century, when the formal institutions that had long defined the French art world were starting to break down. Government-sponsored salons, for example, were becoming less important as places to show and sell art. Artists were experimenting with new forms of expression and questioning traditional boundaries. Buhot mirrors this institutional shift by incorporating the frame into the image. To better understand this artwork, we might ask what other kinds of cultural shifts it reflects, and how those shifts were playing out through formal artistic choices. We might ask how the French landscape was being re-envisioned at this moment in time, and how that vision might relate to the nation’s changing relationship to its own history.