1911
The Little Mulatto
Jacques Villon (Gaston Duchamp)French, 1875 - 1963
This portrait of Renée was traditionally called The Little Mulatto, because of the young girl's dark complexion. Villon made this work — a smaller version of the drypoint Renée, Three-Quarter View — as an etching, greatly increasing the number of lines that cross through and around the figure as well as over her face. By using etching (a technique in which the lines are drawn into a wax ground and bitten by acid), he was able to create fine lines more easily than he could with drypoint. Villon was developing a new sculptural treatment of figures at this time, and may have been testing the effects of a more "diagrammatic" network of lines over the figure.
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