"The Good Engraver (Adolphe Albert)" or "The Lithograph", by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)

The last two directors of the House of Goupil, Maurice Joyant and Michel Manzi, were friends of artists of their period such as Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. They influenced the artistic orientation of the company towards greater modernity, confirming the tentative trend that Theo van Gogh had begun when he was the manager of the Goupil art gallery in Paris from 1878 to 1890. Toulouse-Lautrec collaborated with the House of Goupil from 1892, transcribing some of his works into lithographs, such as At the Moulin-Rouge or The Englishman at the Moulin-Rouge. Other works were also reproduced as photoengravings.

Between 1897 and 1898, the House of Goupil produced five lithographs from the hand of Toulouse-Lautrec, including The Good Engraver (Adolphe Albert).  This original engraving, handled in a chiaroscuro recalling Rembrandt, shows the spontaneity of the artist's pencil. The procedure of lithography does not consist of incising a plaque of metal as in engraving, but in drawing with a wax crayon on a piece of limestone: the movement thus appears freer.