Pig Head

Tête de Porc (original French title)

Woodcut on wove paper, n.d.
Reference: Bertin 316. Second state, after the background was removed.
Signed in ink (a stamp?), and with the monogram stamp (Lugt 1157).
Cut outside the image, as shown.  The paper pierced in a few spots, due to the wetness of the ink at printing.  One area is in-painted and consolidated with tape, clearly very long ago (by the artist?).

An observer of life, Guérard had a propensity to see subjects that may have seemed uninteresting or odd to others.  He also liked the darker side of life, drunks, death, dusk...  While landscapes dominate, and Japonist subjects also make frequent appearances, on certain days he turned to memento mori subjects such as these.  A slaughtered pig’s head hangs from a butcher’s hook.  No more needs to be said.  This proto-expressionist woodcut is like a foreboding of the slaughter that will be depicted during and after the two world wars to come.