A French etcher, painter and arts scholar, Louis Godefroy first studied art in Paris under Caro-Delvaille. His first attempts at etching took place in 1905 and his first work of art in this medium was published in 1906. Throughout most of his career, Godefroy’s etchings were published in Paris by Marcel Guiot. A constant traveler, Godefroy etched views of France, Holland, England, New York, Venice, Greece, Turkey, China, Japan, Angkor, Macao and Ceylon. Louis Godefroy was a master of both landscape and architectural views. A central element within all his etchings is his fine rendering of atmospheric effects, particularly light and shade. Louis Godefroy was also an important scholar of the graphic arts and wrote such catalogue raisonne as, L’oeuvre grave de Albert Besnard, (1929), and L’oeuvre grave de Adrien van Ostade (1930). Altogether, Louis Godefroy created slightly under one hundred original etchings.
Louis Godefroy visited Thessaloniki in the period 1917-1923. He made at least two etchings with Salonika cityscapes: “Croquis Pour le Cafe au Platane, Salonika (Salonique), Macedonia 1923 » published in the magazine “The Print Connoisseur « in April 1923. One example of this etching is on sale at the fine art gallery www.artoftheprint.com,. Another work is “Les fontaine des tziganes (Salonique) » in the collection of the British Museum. The etching with title “Salonique Avril 1917” is in the collection of the author of this lexicon.
