Author: GAVARNI, Paul; [pseudonym of Guillaume Sulpice Chevallier]
Title: Fashionables
Description: Paris: Chez Tessari et Cie. 1837. Extremely Scarce No Copies Recorded in Libraries & Institutions Worldwide GAVARNI [pseudonym of Guillaume Sulpice Chevallier]. Fashionables. Paris: Chez Tessari et Cie. [n.d. 1837]. Large quarto (13 x 9 3/4 inches; 330 x 248 mm.). Twelve hand-colored lithographed plates, heightened with gum arabic, depicting couples during the twelve months of the year. Plates lithographed by Lemercier. Contemporary half green roan, ruled in gilt, over marbled boards, smooth spine decoratively tooled in gilt. Spine extremities a little worn. Some minimal marginal foxing or staining not affecting any images. An excellent copy of this extremely scarce series of plates. Not in Bobins, Colas, Hiler, or Lipperheide. Each plate, Janvier to Decembre, depicts the appropriate fashion for each month of the year. No records in OCLC and KVK (OCLC notes one of the lithographs, Avril, at Clark Art Institute). "In 1837 Gavarni began his connection with Le charivari, which did not conclude until 1848. In all he drew 1054 lithographs for his journal..Most of these appeared in series, some twenty-five of which extend to ten or more plates, and were afterwards published by Aubert in albums. Perhaps the best of these collections are Fourberies de femmes en matière de sentiment, Les étudiants de Paris, Les débardeurs, and Les lorettes; but some of the rest are of hardly inferior interest. Still further series, contributed to periodicals other than Le charivari, were also issued as albums. Baudelaire had this part of Gavarni's work particularly in mind when he wrote..that ‘the true glory and the true mission of Gavarni and Daumier has been to complete Balzac.' Certainly the pictures of Parisian society provided by the two artists perfectly complement each other. Daumier's preoccupation was the working middle class with faces and figures heavily marked by life. Gavarni remained for the most part outside the humdrum bourgeois round. He preferred to show ‘youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm.' His pretty girls and sleek young men are bent on enjoyment. They live lives of graceful dissipation" (Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book, p. 217). Not in Bobins, Colas, Hiler or Lipperheide. Armelhault & Bocher 2331-2342. The Plates: 1. Janvier 2. Février 3. Mars 4. Avril 5. Mai 6. Juin 7. Juillet 8. Août 9. Septembre 10. Octobre 11. Novembre 12. Décembre. .

Keywords: [pseudonym of Guillaume Sulpice Chevallier] Books in French Costume


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