Gods and Foolish Grandeur: City and countryside - the etchings of Maurice Victor Achener

I don't know the setting depicted. The engraved portion of the etching measures four by seven inches.

I can't remember where I found this etching - was it my grandmother's, did I find it pressed in an old book? - but it seems like I've had it forever. Always putting it somewhere safe - flat and dry - and pulling it out again, puzzling unsuccessfully over the signature, then putting it away yet again. A few weeks ago, I tried again to make sense of the scrawled writing. I asked G what she thought it might spell. She thought the beginning of it might be the initial M, and then followed by ACH.... She also thought the name might end in an R or an S.

Seemed about right, so I hit the internet and scrambled about trying to find something to match up with that start. Nothing, so I just dove into Google Image and started looking for similar sorts of images. After not too long, really, I came across an etching by a Maurice Victor Achener that seemed fairly close in style to mine... hmm? So I Googled him specifically and found many, many examples of his work, almost all signed just as this one is. Quite remarkable, after all this time wondering if the little print was "anything", that I would find the maker, an artist whose work is in museum collections all over the world, and that I would find him that suddenly.

Maurice Victor Achener (17 September 1881, Mulhouse, Alsace - 19 April 1963, Paris), French painter, engraver, and illustrator. He studied at the École supérieure des arts décoratifs in Strasbourg, and continued his studies in Munich at the Kunstakademie. He was a student of the painter Ludwig von Löfftz and of the engraver Peter Halm, who was a major influence in his pupil's turn toward etching, the work for which Achener is now best remembered. He settled in Paris in 1905 and, having become a naturalized French citizen in 1913, he fought on the side of France during World War I. (He fought under the name of his Geneva-born wife, Émilie Patry.) After a long and busy career as an engraver and illustrator, he died at the age of eighty-one, and was buried in the cimetière de Montmartre next to his wife.