The background image is Tosca one of my Icart favorites.
I love the detail in some of his work and again this is an artist who clearly had an appreciation for beautiful women.

Louis Justin Icart (was born September 12, 1888 - 1950) the poet, philosopher, playwright, gourmet chef, and decorated World War I flyer, was best known and admired for his talent as a highly individual artist which made him one of the most wealthy Frenchmen of his period.

During the first half of this century his paintings and "bedroom etchings" of beautiful women were in great demand all over Europe and America. And popular they were!

One art critic of the period estimated that "seven out of ten domestic Hollywood interiors have at least one Icart on the wall."

Many of Louis Icart's etchings feature women surrounded by huge bouquets of flowers or seated provocatively on a love seat or bed. It should be clear right away why they were known as "bedroom etchings." Their warmth and sometimes risque quality immediately deems the bedroom the most suitable place for them.

He did a series of etchings of heroines from operas and fairy tail heroines and they are as beautiful and as subtly humorous today as they were 50 years ago.

The inspiration for much of his work came from second wife, Fanny, and the international center of beauty and art, the city of Paris. During his forty year artistic career Icart delighted lovers of Art Deco, a fashion directed almost exclusively towards women on both sides of the Atlantic. Art Deco was a period of perfection of workmanship and this factor in Icart’s work related him to the period.

Born in the south of France to parents that owned a millinery shop, young Louis began sketching the hats he saw at age 6. At twelve, he drew faces with the hats, and by his teenage years, he was designing costumes. He was discovered by an aunt who happened to own the most fashionable millinery shop of its day, in Paris, which was at that time the uncontested international center of art and beauty, and his career was begun. As a fashion artist, Icart was quickly successful, establishing many of the of the day with his daring imagination.

The greater part of his time was spent painting in oils, often traveling throughout Italy, Spain, and his native France, all the while perfecting his own highly individual style. His first exhibition revealed him to his startled friends of the Parisian beau monde as a painter of formidable stature. The war interrupted this blossoming stage of Icart's career, he served brilliantly with the 10th Aeronautic Squadron under the leadership of the French hero Guynemer. "Throughout the war," Icart's wife once related, "he would sketch on any suitable thing he could find. A piece of scrap copper and a steel knitting needle often served as etching plate and diamond point".

      

After the war, Icart continued his development as a painter, culminating with his election as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1927, one of France's highest civilian honors. But his greatest fame and fortune was to come from his etchings. Icart was considered a master of the etching medium in all its phases; dry point, line etching, aquatint, their variations. His draftsmanship is impeccable, the result of years of fine arts discipline. His work is in the tradition of such French masters as Watteau and Fragonard, and his appeal attributed to a subject matter of basic and universal interest: the grace of women and the comedy of love.

His popularity in the 1920's and '30's was broadened to an international market via the Paris Exposition of 1925. Introduced to America around this time, his arousing yet humorous erotic illustrations were considered scandalous, and it was reference to the Icarts that beget the expression, "come up to my studio and see my etchings". But ever conscientious of the general public's preference for a cultivated type of imagery, his depiction of elegant and supremely chic women captured the haunting and seductive vogue of the 1920's, thus entrenching the attitude of an era.

His works were owned by the who's who of the upper echelon of the day. Icart's work found its way to Hollywood and became a sensation, collected by many or early filmdom's most renown celebrities. one may find when viewing a vintage file from the '20's and '30's, upon close examination, and Icart print used as a prop in the background.

His works are considered highly collectable today, and often fetch high prices well into the thousands at major auction houses throughout the world.