Felix Jasinski, after Durer (1862-1901)
Portrait of Oswald Krell
£4,800
Leopold Wellisz, Felix-Stanislas Jasinski, graveur, sa vie et son oeuvre, Paris, 1934, cat. no. 39
Felix Jasinski studied at the Julian Academy 1882-4 where he became a close friend of Felix Vallotton, who painted Jasinski's portrait in in 1887 (Finnish National Gallery). Jasinski wanted to go on to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but to do this he required the authority of the Polish ambassador, which was refused because of his parents' radical political connections. He became an etcher in Paris.
Jasinski experienced a kind of revelation whilst in Florence, whence he had been sent to etch Primavera after Botticelli for Jules Hautecouer in 1890/1. Halfway through the commission, he abandoned etching altogether for the burin (a V shaped chisel that cuts directly into the copper). The resulting print caused a sensation, a masterpiece of technique and interpretation, and, it coming to the attention of Burne-Jones, Jasinski engraved a series of marvellous plates which made him famous in England.
Just before his Florentine watershed, Jasinski had etched this portrait, of Oswald Krell after Dürer, on a small scale for Hautecouer's Gazette de Beaux Art. After his revelation, he engraved it again but with the burin on this larger scale, but he suffered from ill health and died before he could complete the plate, oppressed and obsessed at the age of 39 in 1901. There is something intense - almost manic - about this extraordinary engraving, that projects and amplifies the unsettling nature of the original painting. Astoundingly, Jasinski made his cuts join in the middle, because he didn't like the way the burin broke off abruptly out of the cut, preferring to tail delicately in from each end. The marks visible in the margins of the print were practising this.
The National Museum in Warsaw has another impression of the third (probably final) state of this extraordinary engraving, which was acquired from Jasinski's biographer Wellisz. It appears to be the same state as the rightmost impression in our set.
