Frederic Lees about artwork by Paul Cesar Helleu at The Pall Mall Magazine 1903 “A monograph of woman . . . feminine grace translated with a diamond on a copper plate, infinitely more eloquent than the most sensitive of the photographer, that, indeed, is what is constantly impressed upon us in looking at M. Helleu’s etchings, so fluent yet correct in their drawing, and so inimitably refined.” “No branch of art, even though its range be as limited as that of the fashionable portraitist, is unworthy of our dmiration, provided it reveals, in faultless manner, one or other of the many complex sides of modern life. We should be as ready to delight in the charming grace of Paul Cesar Helleu as in the masculine sincerity of Alexandre Steinlen—as quick to appreciate the good qualities of a picture of a fine Parisian dame in her drawing-room as those of a sketch of a laundry-girl, heavily burdened with her basket of clean linen, passing along the street with weary step. Salon or boulevard exteieur is all one if that truthful reflex of life which we seek in the work of every great artist has been recorded upon the canvas.
However much, therefore, some people may be inclined to disregard M. Helleu’s work on account of its narrow range, it seems to me to need no apology.Nay, its very limitations have made for its success ; since, by directing his attention almost exclusively on a small corner of the great world of Paris, he has produced an exhaustive, and, from the historian’s point of view, invaluable record of the society woman of to-day. The supreme manner in which he has depicted in his dry-point etchings -”at once so light and so coloured ” -every pose of the modern Parisian lady of fashion was pointed out years ago by a master-critic whose judgments in questions of an were rarely, if ever, at fault.”
excerpt from essay abour Paul Cesar Helleu by Frederic Lees. The Pall Mall Magazine 1903
