Portrait de Petit Garcon, Marcel Bing

This is a very richly inked original etching by French artist Albert Besnard. The image size is 11 3/8 x 7 5/8 inches, published in 1887 in an edition of fewer than 100 impressions, cat: Coppier- 63, pencil signed. Besnard studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and for the beginning of his artistic career concentrated on a very academic style of painting and composition, before adopting a more impressionistic approach of portraying light and color; later he went to England to study portraiture with Thomas Gainesborough and Joshua Reynolds.