Women Printers: Widow Cadart
Courtney Wilder, Sullivan Collection Curator
While cataloguing more than 500 late nineteenth-century etchings originally collected by George Sullivan, we noticed several credited in the print’s captions to the publisher “Veuve [The Widow] Cadart.” This intrigued us, because the publisher Alfred Cadart (1828-1875) was a founder of the French Etching Revival and issued important series of prints by well-known artists such as Édouard Manet and Charles Meryon. A few sources have acknowledged that the business passed to his wife and teenaged son, Léon, following Alfred Cadart’s unexpected death in 1875; but none offer further information, and in many online museum catalogues, prints that she published are still credited to Alfred! We began researching Veuve Cadart, aka Célonie Sophie Cadart (1823-1888), with the goal of better understanding her role in the business and why it had failed by early 1882.
Uncovering Veuve Cadart’s life dates was an important first step that immediately provided the sense of a real person beyond the business. Was she also an artist? Célonie Sophie Cadart’s maiden name, Chifflart, links her to her brother, the Prix de Rome-winning artist François-Nicolas Chifflart. He published prints frequently with Alfred and then with his sister when she took the business over (we have several prints by him in the Sullivan Collection). I presented these initial discoveries in September to fellow experts as part of an online panel hosted by the Nineteenth Century French Art History researcher’s group, and am excited to continue digging up information on this forgotten inheritor of the French Etching Revival movement and on women print publishers more generally.
Images, left to right:
Adolphe Potémont Martial, Headquarters of the Société des Aquafortistes (siège de la société des aqua-fortists), etching. Paris: Cadart & Luquet, 1864. Vanderbilt University Museum of Art, Gift of Mary Mildred and George Sullivan, SC1001
François Chifflart, Surprise, etching, from Eaux-Fortes Modernes, vol. 4, plate 196. Paris: Cadart & Luquet, 1865. Vanderbilt University Museum of Art, Gift of Mary Mildred and George Sullivan, SC1291
