When in 1995 she came across drawings signed HP Dillon among her grandmother Dillon’s possessions, Maryvonne Lépinoy-Guégan was curious. ‘’I’d seen them before, but never had the time to find out more about them,’’ she says.
She did some research, and found that she was a distant cousin of Henri Patrice Dillon, a French painter and lithographer well known in Paris at the turn of the (19th to 20th) century during the period called the Belle Epoque. She also found more work by the artist at her grandmother’s, what amounted to a small collection.
Lépinoy-Guégan lost no time. By 2007, she had compiled and self-published not only a catalogue raisonné, or work catalogue, in French and English of 75 paintings, some drawings, and hundreds of lithographs (not counting the various ‘’commercial’’ lithographs the artist produced), but a French-language biography. Virtually nothing outside art dictionary listings existed about Dillon before this.
HP Dillon Centenary Exhibit
Lépinoy-Guégan also began setting wheels in motion for a one-man show, and, in this centenary year of the artist’s death, the first exhibit devoted to him since before his 1909 death opened at the Musée de la Tour Prisonnière in Cusset. It comprises some 75 posters, illustrated books and lithographs from her family collection, and is on until September 30, 2009.
Dillon had links to Cusset, which is in the Auvergne in central France some 210 miles from Paris: he and his wife Pauline (the couple had no children) spent summer holidays there at the home of his sister Francisque de Biotière and her writer husband.
Recognition Late In Coming For HP Dillon
If wider recognition of Dillon is just beginning, his name has always been known to specialists in Belle Epoque prints. Dillons (including the occasional painting) were bought and sold at auction in France and elsewhere. Lithographs could be found at Left Bank print galleries, and researchers could access some in print rooms like that of Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale. Scant, sometimes conflicting, biographical information about his life and work was regularly included in compendia such as Janine Bailly-Herzberg’s Dictionnaire de l’Estampe en France 1830-1950.
‘’There is a collection of Dillon lithographs at the Jane Vorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey,’’ says Lépinoy-Guégan, ‘’there are paintings in French museums and at the French Embassy in Madrid, but since the catalogue came out so many people have contacted me from around the world with work I’m still unfamiliar with, all lithos so far, so I’ll probably have to publish an update.’’
HP Dillon: Biography
The son of the French Consul in San Francisco, where he was born in 1850, Dillon at first chose diplomacy as his own career and worked briefly in the French consulate in New York. But he had a change of heart, and trained as an artist from 1875 in Paris where he stayed and embarked on a successful career (that did not, however, make him rich) as a painter whose work was exhibited in the Salons, and a much-in-demand lithographer.
He produced imaginative calling cards, menus, greeting cards, calendars, illustrations for programs, sheet music, books and magazines, and posters. He also produced limited editions. This was before fine art prints were numbered as they now are, but Dillon had a propensity for printing on different papers, and making variations such as whimsical sketches known as remarques in the margins, so none of these prints were run off in great numbers. Some but not all were hand-signed.
According to David Karel’s Dictionnaire des artistes de langue française en Amérique du Nord, Dillon kept some US ties: he was a member of the American Art Association of Paris, and showed in 1884 at the National Academy of Design in NY.
HP Dillon Also An Art Teacher
Lépinoy-Guégan says Dillon very much depended on his income as an art teacher to make ends meet, but he was also a driving force behind projects to publish original lithographs by well-known artists of the day, and as such is considered to have made a major contribution to giving new life to the medium (drawing or painting on a flat stone surface then pressing paper to it, invented in the late 18th century).
He occupied leadership positions in associations such as the Société des peintres-lithographes. As the 19th century drew to a close the French government made him a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.
Characteristics Of HP Dillon’s Work
Dillon’s work was influenced by Japanese prints both compositionally and technically. He made much use of the spatter (crachis) technique to suggest shadows and atmospheric conditions like fog and rain. He sometimes used full color, mainly in large posters, but more frequently monochrome brown, grays, black which heightened the sense of mood.
Many of his lithographs are cheerful but some have a brooding, mysterious quality like the enigmatic 1908 Drawing Lesson, where a male instructor stands surrounded by a group of seated women in street clothes, some wearing hats, who but for one are ignoring him. Nor are they absorbed in drawing (one is napping). It is impossible to know if they are bored, or if the man is not an instructor at all but an artist imagining models who have posed or will pose for him.
Dillon’s scenes are also noteworthy for his ability to capture subtle ranges of human expression. They remain very much in a visual aesthetic of another era, have a definite historical interest for that reason, but may also appeal to modern viewers for their psychology and because of Dillon’s skill as a draftsman and printmaker.
Asked what she would highlight about HP Dillon’s work, Maryvonne Lépinoy-Guégan replies: ‘’Polichinelle [the Commedia dell’Arte figure Punch the trickster]. He drew him so often in the margins of his lithos he became identified with the character’’.
More about the exhibition and books.
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