University of Virginia Library

4. Jean-Émile Laboureur

Jean-Émile Laboureur's achievement as a print-maker, and over the
past few years the attention devoted to his place in the early development
of cubism, have given him a standing in the larger world of art not
matched by either Barbier or Schmied. We are concerned with him as a
book artist, however, and here it is enough to assert that by common consent,
he, Barbier, and Schmied continue to be regarded as the leading

Art Deco illustrators. At the same time his work differs so greatly from
theirs that he has rarely been seen as their rival. He dealt almost entirely
in black and white rather than in color. He relied far more on vignettes
than on plates. And his cool, austere designs stand in marked contrast to
their warm, ornate creations. Rather than seeking to "load every rift with
ore," he was frugal with his illustrations, realizing each with a disciplined
selection of lines and dotting every series with a sparing hand
throughout the text which it was to decorate. To many books, indeed, he
contributed nothing but frontispieces, and only occasionally did his
illustrations, despite their small size, exceed 20 in number.

Moreover, far from aspiring to be an architecte du livre, a master of
all the arts of the book, Laboureur was not even a bibliophile. "In an
illustrated book," he told Marcel Valotaire, "only the designs interest
me."[138] Not for him were the infinite pains taken by Barbier and Schmied
to ensure that all aspects of their books would fully realize their intentions.
For Laboureur that was the business of the publisher. Hence Jean
Prinet, in the standard inventory of books illustrated by Laboureur,[139]
was able to describe 132 titles, a much larger number than the production
of Barbier and Schmied combined. In the survey of his career which
follows it will be necessary to limit consideration to certain salient yet
representative books from this long list.

Laboureur was deservedly fortunate in his publishers, who admired
him, allowed him to select texts which interested him for illustration,
and did their best to ensure that the mise en page, typography, and paper
of the resulting volumes would be worthy of his designs. From Camille
Bloch and the Nouvelle Revue Française, who were his early patrons, to
Au Sans Pareil and the bibliophile societies, who later performed a
similar service, his publishers saw to it that most of the volumes to which
he contributed were sufficiently attractive. The effect they sought was
one of understated elegance: open, airy pages to which an engraving or
an etching, usually in the form of a headpiece or a tailpiece, would add
the finishing touch. Such a setting harmonized with the works chosen,
which were invariably idiosyncratic, usually laconic, and often ironic.

Despite these pains, since Laboureur usually limited himself to black
and white, since his books were sparsely illustrated, since he favored
short texts which could be printed in small formats, even his major works
typically received only demi-luxe treatment by their publishers. The
outstanding exceptions to this rule were two books issued by societies of
bibliophiles—Jean Giraudoux's Suzanne et le Pacifique of 1927 for Les

Cent Une in an edition of 125 copies, and Aristophanes' La paix of 1930
for Les Bibliophiles du Palais in an edition of 200 copies—and Oscar
Wilde's Le portrait de Dorian Gray of 1928 published by Le Livre in an
edition of 280 copies. In consequence his work became much better
known at first hand among collectors in general than that of either Barbier
or Schmied. This circumstance has protected Laboureur from the
extremes of acceptance and rejection which the works especially of
Schmied have experienced.

Nowhere has this been more true, it may be noted, than in England
and America, where from the 1920s on he has had many admirers. Laboureur
was an Anglophile, who knew England and the English well,
and a number of his illustrations appeared in books published in England
or in books with English settings. In the former category his volumes
for the Golden Cockerel Press should be particularly mentioned, together
with his work for W. Heinemann, which was usually in the form
of frontispieces to Marcel Boulestin's culinary volumes. In the latter
were such titles as André Maurois' Les silences du Colonel Bramble of
1926 and Les discours du docteur O'Grady of 1929, both among his best
books.

As a preface to an account of Laboureur's career as a book artist, some
remarks about the formation of his distinctive style will be useful. The
most influential writers on the livre d'art in the 1920s, Clément-Janin,
Raymond Hesse, and the author of the volume on the book in the Rapport
général for the Art Deco exhibition of 1925, all emphasized the way
in which the decorative spirit of the time led book artists towards déformation
or distortion.[140]
Since literal realism no longer served their
purpose, they felt at liberty to discard it. Laboureur was the prime example
of this development, regarded as a leader by other illustrators. He
thought that the exact depiction of nature no longer had any interest for
the artist. Valotaire records his comments on the absurdity of reproductive
engraving in an age which had mastered photomechanical process,
and imagines him going on to remark about his original work: "This is
how it pleases me to represent the world in which I live and the people
who move restlessly around me. I wish to see them like that; I see them
like that because it amuses me" (p. 43).

Of crucial importance in the evolution of Laboureur's style was his
brief adherence to cubism, which began in 1913. Though his prints of
this period rank with those of La Fresnaye, Marcoussis, Picasso, and Villon,
the masters with whom he exhibited, his interest in cubism was
"decorative rather than analytical," and he used the new style from the

first for subjects of an anecdotal nature.[141] This personal emphasis became
more pronounced in the burins of his album, Petites images de la guerre
sur le front britannique of 1916, which Raoul Dufy thought superior to
his earlier etchings.[142] And when he turned to book illustration after the
War, he in effect left cubism behind him. Burr Wallen, the scholar who
has studied his cubist prints most closely, is able to claim for Laboureur's
books after 1920 only that "his elegant plates . . . carry the stylishness of
the Art Deco years to unrivalled heights of graphic refinement."[143]

Moreover, despite the geometric simplification of the images of Laboureur's
cubist phase—the elongation of his figures, their ovoid heads,
the reductions of his settings to their linear essentials—his work from the
beginning had a classic cast based on his grasp of what the early masters
of European engraving had to teach. "Whatever their anatomical distortion
by the artist," Valotaire observes, "however schematic their presentation,
[his people] still have a real existence; silhouette, attitude,
gestures are always translated, transposed, in exact keeping" (p. 43). And
as the years passed, the element of distortion in Laboureur's work progressively
diminished, in the process enhancing his range and subtlety as
an illustrator without impairing the distinctiveness of his style.

Born to a solid middle-class family in Nantes during 1877, Laboureur
received a humanistic education in that city before he enrolled at the age
of 18 at the Sorbonne.[144] His studies in Paris were widely dispersed, including
law as well as literature, and he was also much interested in the
visual arts. Cézanne was the master whom he most revered, but his
closest acquaintance was with Toulouse-Lautrec. Louis Godefroy relates
that, after Laboureur met the painter in 1895, "he often saw him at work
in the lithographic printing house which sometimes served as his studio,"
and that in time this association led him to take up painting himself, acquiring
in the process something of his mentor's "subtle penetration
into the comic aspect of men and things" (p. 20). Laboureur told Valotaire,
indeed, that Lautrec's conversation "opened my eyes on many
things; . . . he had the quickest of minds, spontaneous, altogether instinctive;
his words had a turn, a sense as sharp as his design" (p. 13). Meanwhile,
Laboureur was learning the technique of wood engraving from
Auguste Lepère, to whom he had been introduced by Lotz-Brissonneau,

the patron of the arts in Nantes who had also befriended Barbier. Though
his first wood engraving and his first etching both date from 1896, it was
not until after the War that his designs on metal began to outnumber his
designs on wood.

After performing his obligatory military service in 1898, Laboureur
began his long years of travel. A student devoured by insatiable curiosity,
he moved from country to country, at the same time applying himself
in a desultory way to his craft as an etcher and an engraver. In 1898
and 1899 he was in Dresden, where he worked in the Cabinet des Estampes,
pondering the prints of the early Italian, German, and French
masters of engraving. From them, Godefroy holds, Laboureur took "the
slightly unbending boldness of his precise figures, [his] often-used perspective
of the stained glass window, and [his] anecdotal relish," without
lapsing into false naïvete or anachronism (p. 21). Between 1903 and 1908
he passed much of his time in the United States and Canada, instead, as
he put it, of "vegetating in Nantes or Paris."[145] There he was particularly
drawn to Pittsburgh whose scenes of vast industrial activity he recorded
in his etchings. During these years he toured the continent as a lecturer
for the Alliance Française on subjects which touched both art and literature.
After a protracted sojourn in London, where he developed a passion
for Rowlandson, a trip to Greece in 1909 made him acquainted with
the decorative art of ancient vases and frescoes, and his immersion in the
Florentine world during the following spring led him to transfer the
vision they offered, so Godefroy maintains, to the world around him.
"The spectacle of modern life would henceforth suffice for Laboureur"
(p. 25). He returned to Paris in 1910, where he settled down at last to a
career as an artist.

With the outbreak of the War, he was soon in uniform. Speaking
fluent English, though with an American accent, he was attached as an
interpreter, first to the Twelfth Division of the British Army for more
than two years and then to the American Naval Base at Saint Nazaire. No
doubt active participation in organized communal life was a revelation
to Laboureur, but it should also be noted that his was a special sort of
military experience. "Here we hardly speak of the War," he wrote, "—but
of literature, cooking, travel, the arts . . . and we pay no attention to
cannons or airplanes, at any rate unless they are very near at hand."[146]
Falling in with Marcel Boulestin, a fellow army interpreter, he prepared
with him in 1915 a plaquette called Dans les flandres britanniques, which
contained, in Boulestin's words, "no concessions to public sentimentality,
no horrors, no patriotism—just picturesque little scenes of life in British

Flanders."[147] Stimulated by the success of these illustrations, Laboureur
devoted some of his abundant leisure the following year to the nine designs
of Petites images de la guerre sur le front britannique. For all its
slightness this album was of special significance in Laboureur's career as
a book-artist, displaying, as it did, what his friend Max Jacob had recognized
as his particular sort of cubism, tempered by a distinctive humor
and a full appreciation of Cézanne's contributions. It also saw the first
employment of what became his characteristic technique on metal. Unable
to carry about with him the equipment required for etching, he had
recourse to the burin, using his graver to work directly on copper plates
which he obtained from army stock. (The resulting prints are unlike
the typical dry point, and I shall refer to them simply as burins.) Several
plaquettes of wood engravings in a similar style ensued, among them
Types de l'armée américaine en France of 1918, recording his impressions
of the American Expeditionary Force.

Laboureur's last months in uniform were spent installing the collections
of the Musée de la Guerre. Once again a civilian, he had to consider
what the future held for him. Though he was well known as an
etcher and engraver, he discovered that a new career was opening out
before him. The combination of artistic talent and broad literary culture
which he had to offer was eminently marketable in the publishing world
of the 1920s. For several years, nonetheless, he remained primarily a
printmaker, the various books which he adorned being of relatively
minor importance. In 1923 he founded Les Peintres-Graveurs Indépendantes
and served as its first president. His profound mastery of both
the history and technique of engraving ensured that he would be in demand
as a lecturer and as a writer, and a forceful personality combined
with his many accomplishments to make him a person of consequence in
the Parisian art world.

Moreover, the erstwhile wanderer had settled down to a comfortable
domestic existence. After his marriage in 1919, he and his wife lived
chiefly on the Breton coast near Nantes, latterly in a house which they
built at Kerfahler in the Morbihan. Two sons were born to them. His
[148] appearance during this time of great prosperity is suggested by an affectionate
if teasing word-portrait which his friend Roger Allard drew
of him in 1925:

We may turn now to Laboureur's career as a book artist. His various
war-time albums have been mentioned. His first true book illustrated
with original graphics was L'Appartement des jeunes filles by Roger
Allard, who had written a letter-preface for Petites images de la guerre
sur le front britannique.[150] Projected before the War, it finally appeared
in 1919. To adorn his friend's poems about young women at play, enjoying
tennis, swimming, and less innocent diversions, Laboureur pro-
[151] vided six burins, still very much in the style of Petites images de la guerre.
Even so, they were not always received as cubist inventions, some critics
being reminded instead of the elongated bodies and small heads in Louis
Binet's illustrations for the novels of Restif de la Bretonne. Though
hardly more than a plaquette, the volume was well presented by its publisher,
Camille Bloch, and bibliophiles found it attractive.

Through his connection with the Nouvelle Revue Française, Allard
persuaded Gaston Gallimard in 1920 to commission designs from Laboureur
for Valery Larbaud's Beauté, mon beau souci, the story of a
romance between a young Frenchman and a London typist. This was a
much more substantial undertaking than L'Appartement des jeunes
filles. Allard knew now to ensure that, despite its being only a demi-luxe
edition of 412 copies, typography, layout, and paper were more than acceptable.
Instead of the six isolated plates of L'Appartement des jeunes
filles, drawn without regard for their placement in the text, Laboureur
designed a frontispiece and 38 vignettes. His evocation of London was
essentially what could be seen by a visitor quite outside the city's intimate
life. The flavor of English existence is conveyed chiefly through street
scenes—the top of an omnibus (p. 43), for example, or the Marble Arch
(p. 69). Only occasionally is the focus narrowed even to such a subject as
[152] the couple at tea in the Edgware Road (p. 72). It will be noted that the
distortion of Laboureur's figures has become less extreme than in L'Appartement
des jeunes filles. The many miniature illustrations dropped
in the text—a bouquet of flowers (p. 36), a pair of letters (p. 66), or a
[153] crocodile-skin valise (p. 139)—were already a trademark with the artist.

Beauté, mon beau souci was a key book for Laboureur in that it
established the pattern which he typically followed during his 20 years

as a book artist. His aim was to establish an ambiance for his text through
decorative compositions, not to detail once again in pictures what had
already been written in words. So the effect of his designs comes more
from their impact as a series than from the specific contribution of each
individual illustration. In a phrase once used by The New Yorker, what
counts is "all of the whole of the tout ensemble." When compared with
the blaze of color that one finds in Barbier and Schmied, Laboureur's
minimal blacks and grays may at first seem meager and drab. Yet the
strategy works, for the reader has been brought to a properly receptive
frame of mind by the decorative vision which Laboureur's spare and
elegant line imposes.

Despite its excellence, the small edition of Beauté, mon beau souci
was not exhausted for two years, a circumstance which Allard invidiously
ascribed to the vogue of "horrible coloriages printed in the style of
luxurious catalogues" (p. 73). Meanwhile, Laboureur was demonstrating
his mastery as a book-artist of other graphic techniques: of wood
[154] engravings printed in color in Évariste Parny's Chansons madécasses
[155] of 1920, of aquatint in Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville
of 1921, and of lithographs in Jean Giraudoux's Promenade avec Gabrielle,
which was finished in 1921 though it was not published until 1924.
Even if in the future he often resorted to wood engraving, and occasionally
to lithography, for his illustrations, he was henceforth regarded
primarily as an engraver and an etcher.

Passing by a variety of minor, though interesting, publications, we
may take up the tale again in 1925. Laboureur's position as an illustrator
was now established. His collaboration in a livre d'art guaranteed its acceptance
by bibliophiles. He could pick and choose among commissions,
sometimes taking the initiative himself with publishers, in fixing on
texts which appealed to his sophisticated personal taste. For a time the
major books to which he applied himself were off-beat stories of 20th
century French life, each revived for publication with his designs after it
had achieved a following among a discriminating public. These included
Jacques de Lacretelle's Silbermann of 1925, Remy de Gourmont's Le
songe d'une femme of the same year, and Colette's L'Envers du musichall
of 1926.

It is easy to see why Silbermann, originally published in 1922, recommended
itself to Laboureur. This short novel, which turns on the hostility
and persecution encountered by a sensitive Jewish schoolboy at his
Parisian Lycée, had a special significance in the perfervid atmosphere of
the 1920s. In his 16 burins, eight plates and eight headpieces, the artist
as usual devoted much of his attention to the ambiance of the tale.
Scenes at the Lycée, in and out of class, in the comfortable family apartments

of Silbermann and of his comrade who tells the story, and in the
country where the boys take their vacation bring an easy and cultivated
way of life before the reader. But Laboureur also shows an unaccustomed
interest in the characters and their crucial confrontations. Mme. Silbermann
is the subject of a full-scale portrait (p. 42). There is a stirring
[156] tableau of Silbermann pulling himself together after a fight at school
(opposite p. 68), and Laboureur does not neglect the moment of truth in
[157] which the narrator overhears his parents talking about his friend (opposite
p. 136). The result is one of Laboureur's more forceful series of
designs. Without subordinating his decorative scheme, he has become as
well an illustrator of psychological penetration. Published by the Nouvelle
Revue Française, and evidently patterned on Beauté, mon beau
souci, which that firm had issued in 1920, this demi-luxe book (442 copies)
is equally attractive in its presentation, and Laboureur's response to its
theme gives his illustrations a weight and meaning which do not detract
in the least from their grace and elegance.

Among the books illustrated by Laboureur of which Camille Bloch
was the publisher, Le songe d'une femme is the most successful. Paul
Escoube described Remy de Gourmont's novel in letters as "a kind of album
of attitudes towards love, from the most modest and chaste to the
most daring,"[158] and these attitudes are comprehensively suggested in the
[159] artist's 27 burins. Indeed, the frontispiece is dominated by a woman's
head in outline, beyond which are glimpsed her diverse imaginings. But
one may surmise that Laboureur found an even stronger reason for reviving
this book after 20 years in the opportunity it gave him to depict
the French countryside, thus embarking on what for him was a largely
unexplored range of subjects. Distinctive as his female figures are, it is
[160] the scenes of forest (p. 65), country house, and seashore (p. 109) which
most engage the reader's attention. Once more the miniature designs,
[161] country still-lifes such as just-prepared pots of jam (p. 31), have their
special charm. Bloch's realization of this small quarto, published in an
edition of 455 copies, has its ingenious touches, from the facsimiles of the
correspondents' signatures to the choice of an Italic type newly designed
by Bernard Naudin as "suitable to the epistolary form of the work."[162]
It may be mentioned that Bloch's final book illustrated by Laboureur,
Remy de Gourmont's Couleurs of 1928, though more elaborate is less
successful. The colors added to its 36 etchings seem superfluous in the
work of this master of black and white.

If we pass by the Tableau des grands magasins for the moment,
Laboureur's next work of importance was his friend Colette's L'Envers

du music-hall. Once again he had chosen a novel subject for his graver.
In this account of music-hall existence before the War, first published in
1913, Colette drew upon reminiscences of a difficult period in her life.
For its 440 copies Laboureur composed 32 burins, vignettes except for
five plates, which convey the harshness of second-rate performers' lives
[163] as seen from "the wrong side." The frontispiece, showing the troupe in
the rain as it sets out on its travels, sets the tone for all the designs which
follow. In consonance with Colette's vision there is glamor neither in the
vignettes, which depict the habitual round of the players and theri ani-
[164] mals—on stage (p. 9), at the side-scenes, or in the dressing-rooms—nor in
the plates, which present the chief figures of the anecdotes that she relates.
The artist has made his illustrations as bleak as his author's text.

After 1925 Laboureur's work as a book artist became so diverse and
abundant that it would be tedious and confusing to review it in strictly
chronological order. I shall comment instead on some of the principal
groups into which his books fall: (1) those with English subjects, including
those with English texts published in England; (2) those concerned
primarily with the material background of the life of worldly leisure;
(3) a representative selection from his less substantial works; and (4) the
two culminating books of the period, Suzanne et le Pacifique and Les
contrerimes. An examination of these volumes will make it clear why
Raymond Hesse could write by 1928: "Laboureur occupies a place entirely
apart in illustration and . . . presents a personality of the first significance"
(p. 54).

Such an examination will also reveal decisive changes both in his
approach to illustration and in his technique. Without ceasing to be primarily
a decorative artist, imposing his vision through the uniform style
of his many small designs, he made increasing concessions to illustration
as traditionally conceived. He no longer confined himself, as of set purpose,
to the marginal aspects of his texts. On occasion he allowed himself
to be direct rather than oblique, portraying leading characters and
depicting dramatic encounters. Moreover the calculated distortions and
rigidities of his style became less pronounced; indeed, the figures in his
designs assume almost normal proportions, and the settings in which
they appear are drawn with increasing freedom.

With regard to technique, Valotaire discerned a "second manner" in
Laboureur's development as a book artist beginning with Les silences du
Colonel Bramble. Supporting his argument from Laboureur's essays on
the art and history of engraving, the critic shows how he came to employ
a variety of tools, such as the etcher's needle and the roulette, to enrich
and make flexible his basic work with the graver. Laboureur achieved
thereby a fuller, subtler technique, better adapted to realizing the more

complex values which he wished to impart to his illustrations (pp. 39-40).
An example of Laboureur's "second manner" is offered by his contribution
to one of the most delightful of Art Deco books, the tricentenary
edition of Perrault's Contes published in 1928. Each of 33 graphic artists
contributed a plate, but it was left to Laboureur to provide the striking
[165] medley from Perrault's tales (Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, and
the rest) which opens this édition dite des "33 graveurs."

It will be remembered that Beauté, mon beau souci of 1920 had
London as its setting. Laboureur returned to an English subject in two
of his most engaging series of illustrations, those for André Maurois' Les
silences du Colonel Bramble and its sequel Les discours du docteur
O'Grady, in 1926 and 1929 respectively. The former, according to Valotaire,
was regarded as "the book which without any doubt has been the
artist's greatest triumph" (p. 33). A perfect match between author and
artist ensured that Laboureur would eventually illustrate these volumes,
which were originally published in 1918 and 1922. Maurois had served
as a liaison officer with the British Army during the War, and he based
his narratives on his memories of these years. Laboureur had gone
through very similar experiences; indeed, he might have been the interpreter
Aurelle who figures in Maurois' books.

Moreover, Maurois and Laboureur saw the world from a like perspective.
Both would have endorsed W. E. H. Lecky's affirmation, which
stands as the epigraph to Les silences du Colonel Bramble, that there are
few better models in life than the English gentleman. The humor and
charm of Maurois' ensuing text derives in large part from the imperturbble
acceptance by his little group of British officers of whatever may
befall them. Since they are serving behind the lines in Flanders during
the later years of a war of attrition, the trials that come their way are
relatively minor. Maurois' subject for the most part is not combat but
that equivalent of peace-time domestic life which men fashion for themselves
under such conditions and above all the conversations on all subjects
under the sun which are thereby encouraged.

Laboureur found much to appeal to his whimsical turn of mind in
such a subject: for example, the gramophone in the officer's mess which
becomes the Colonel's pride and joy (p. 13), or his being called upon to
[166] reassure a maiden lady who has complained of the "shocking spectacle"
presented by his soldiers at their morning ablutions (p. 167). Yet the
dreariness of such a war is not suppressed in Laboureur's graphic commentary,
as his frontispiece bears witness; nor are its dangers, as in his
rendering of Maurois' almost mathematical demonstration that a shell
[167] had to destroy Private Scott because no man escapes his destiny (p. 75). It
is significant, as well, that in Les discours du docteur O'Grady Laboureur

selects for illustration an anecdote related by Bramble which suggests the
ruthlessness which lay beneath his amiable manner. Private Biggs, a small
cockney, has complained that he runs so slowly that he will never get a
chance to kill. In the next attack his gigantic mates corner two Germans
[168] in their trench until Biggs can finish them off (p. 112). Throughout the
two volumes Laboureur characterizes his principal personages exclusively
through their bodily confirmation and posture. Their faces count
for nothing, yet their silhouettes identify them unmistakably, as in this
[169] rendering of the Colonel and Aurelle setting out for Ypres (Bramble,
p. 135).

Both Les silences du Colonel Bramble and Les discours du docteur
O'Grady have a frontispiece and 14 vignettes, burins in the first and
burins completed by etching in the second. They were printed in editions
of 440 and 430 copies respectively, but it must be admitted that,
except for Laboureur's engravings, they would hardly qualify as livres
d'art.

Laboureur's designs for Oscar Wilde's Le portrait de Dorian Gray
are among his best work, and once again they show him departing widely
from his usual strategy for presenting a text. The sober elegance of the
large headpieces executed by burin and roulette which introduce each
of the 20 chapters of this ambitious livre d'art, published in 1928 in an
edition of 280 copies, makes them highly decorative, but in their indirect
and understated way they are also true illustrations. Until his final design
Laboureur is content to play down the sensational elements of Wilde's
novel. For example, the reader never sees the portrait which must bear
the cumulative effect of Dorian Gray's misdeeds. In the headpiece to
[170] the first chapter, while Lord Henry Wotton speaks to Basil Hallward as
the painter adds his finishing touches (p. 1), the canvas is shown from
behind. Later it is wrapped for removal to storage (p. 183), and still later
our angle of vision is limited to Basil Hallward's reaction when Dorian
draws back the curtain which conceals it (p. 239). Again, when the young
actress Sybil Vane kills herself after her brutal rejection by Dorian, we
are shown her corpse (p. 143), but the true horror of the episode has
already been brought home by Laboureur's depiction of Dorian's sinister
[171] figure as he returns home at dawn through Covent Garden Market after
their confrontation (p. 125). Indeed, the stages of Dorian's degradation
are rarely presented in a broad or obvious way. The experiments in behavior
into which he is led by his absorption in Huysmans' À rebours are
suggested merely by a glimpse of him reading in his study. Yet in the
latter half of the book the mood of the artist's designs does become increasingly
threatening: blacks and dark grays predominate in his engravings

of London's gloomiest aspects. Then comes Wilde's melodramatic
climax, which even Laboureur could not resist. We see at last what the
portrait would have revealed, when Dorian, seeking to destroy the can-
[172] vas with the knife which he used to kill Basil Hallward, thereby kills
himself (p. 341).

Laboureur's extensive English connections led to his providing designs
for some 18 books with texts in English, nearly all of them printed
in England. The most considerable of these were Jacques Cazotte's The
Devil in Love of 1925, Thomas Carew's A Rapture of 1927, Sterne's A
Sentimental Journey and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy of
1928 and 1929-30 respectively (the last three for the Golden Cockerel
Press), and George Farquhar's The Beaux' Strategem also of 1928. Of
The Devil in Love 395 copies were printed for England and 365 for the
United States. The latter issue has six etchings. In dealing with this short
picaresque tale, first published as Le diable amoureux in 1772, Laboureur
paid more attention than usual to period decor and costume,
and though his plates are highly decorative, they are also tied to specific
episodes in the text with the relevant passages printed below the images.
Moreover, the moments Laboureur chose are crucial to the progress of
the story, as in this Venetian tableau of the seeming assassination of
[173] Biondetta, with whom the narrator is in love (p. 48). The result is a commentary
on Cazotte's text as pertinent as it is lively. A Sentimental Journey
may stand as representative of the works of classic English literature
which Laboureur illustrated. As with his 15 plates for Tristram Shandy,
his six for this work combine engraving and etching. Hardly more than
sketches of passing moments in Sterne's chronicle, his designs leave unexploited
such familiar passages as that on "The Dead Ass" in which an
old traveller discourses mournfully on the loss of his patient companion.
But in style and manner they harmonize with Sterne's carefully informal
text, just as they suggest the book's 18th century background. An ex-
[174] ample is Sterne's purchase of gloves from a fair shopkeeper in Paris
(opposite p. 69). Also deserving of comment is William Cowper's The
Diverting History of John Gilpin, published by Ronald Davis of Paris
in 1931 in an edition of 57 copies. It is stated of the comic drawings of
this little book that "the lithographs have been drawn by Lucien Serre
et Cie." In the style of English caricatures of the later eighteenth century,
and thus after their fashion contemporary with Cowper's poem, they may
have been intended by Laboureur as a tribute to a long-time favorite,
Thomas Rowlandson. They are altogether unlike his work on metal,
though they have a certain kinship to the lithographs from his own hand
in Jean Giraudoux's Promenade avec Gabrielle of 1921. As will be seen

[175] from the opening shown, their animation, color, and abundance (one to
a page) make an appeal quite different from that of Laboureur's usual
designs.

Finally, Laboureur's friendship for Marcel Boulestin led him to design
frontispieces for a number of the latter's culinary and gastronomical
works. They also collaborated in two books, Petits et grands verres, of
which more presently, and The New Keepsake for the Year 1921. For the
latter Boulestin selected the texts and Laboureur the plates. Among the
artists he chose were Robert Bonfils, Galanis, Marcel Gromaire, Marie
Laurencin, and Dunoyer de Segonzac—the French contemporaries whose
work he found most congenial. His own contribution, characteristically,
[176] was the portrait of a barmaid (p. 35), which may serve to represent his
illustrations for Boulestin in general.

Laboureur's frontispieces to Boulestin's books provide a natural transition
to an idiosyncratic category among his books of the middle and
later 1920s, those in which he took as his subject the material setting for
the life of worldly leisure. Himself a bon vivant who delighted in food,
wine, and the spectacle of society, he here concerned himself not so much
with its people as with its background and accoutrements. In his hands
these things, usually left to the often gross and always suspect attentions
of advertisers, were imbued with a grace and elegance which make them
a delight to behold.

J. Valmy Baysse's Tableau des grands magasins of 1925 surveys the
great Parisian department stores through informal essays and sketches.
Published in the collection "Tableaux contemporains," which included
another notable volume in Tristan Bernard's Tableau de la boxe with
etchings by Dunoyer de Segonzac, it appeared in an edition of 315 copies
with 12 burins by Laboureur: six plates, which are among his most ambitious
illustrations, and six headpieces. As the author observes, the department
store claimed all retail commerce as its province, and to attract
the public to this novel initiative it drew upon the boldest experiments
of contemporary decorative art (p. 25). Thus Laboureur's plates in their
small way are as representative of the Art Deco style as was anything in
[177] the great exhibition of the same year. An example is a scene before an
elevator (opposite p. 55). Elsewhere he shows the store at its busiest and
most animated, during sales, for example, or just before Christmas (op-
[178] posite table of contents). "The hectic, charming, Parisian atmosphere"
(p. 126) of the establishment is omnipresent in his engravings.

Petits et grands verres: choix des meilleurs cocktails of 1927 was translated
from the English of Nina Toye and A. H. Adair by Laboureur himself
under the pseudonym of Ph. Le Huby. The unsigned preface, the
work of Marcel Boulestin in the English version of 1925, has touches

which can only have come from Laboureur. The resulting small quarto
is one of the artist's most delightful books. Only the 260 copies of the
limited edition included his 10 burins, plates which again exceed his
usual scale. The preface opens with a nostalgic survey of the Parisian bars
of the beginning of the century. Included are reminiscences of ToulouseLautrec,
for whom "all bars were good, but he had his preferences" (p. 2).
Lautrec was not above inventing cocktails, it is related, though he himself
preferred a bottle of Scotch and a siphon. A section on the history of
the cocktail follows, in which assurance is offered that they are now served
as frequently at home as in public. There is a concluding admonition to
the reader to try his own hand at devising recipes, thereby contributing
"to the progress of a young art, which is full of promise" (p. 6). Laboureur's
plates begin with bars at various social levels, including a design
set in the 1890s and inscribed "hommage to Toulouse-Lautrec,"
[179] which shows the painter's occasional subject, "Chocolat dancing in a bar."
He proceeds to groups of drinkers in other settings, beside a tennis court,
in a boudoir, at a picnic, and—as a tribute to creole cuisine—on a plantation.
That the book was a labor of love for Laboureur, in both its text
and its illustrations, is evident throughout.

How Laboureur could transform the backgrounds against which the
leisure class led its life was shown again in 1927 through the 10 burins
which illustrated Valery Larbaud's 200 chambres, 200 salles de bain, a
volume issued in 366 copies. The glimpses offered of the appearance and
routine of this luxurious Portuguese hotel, which was considered large at
[180] the time—its exterior, the arrival of guests, its garden, its dining room,
and so on—show it to be a palace of distinction and elegance. These designs
lead one to speculate on what Laboureur might have made of
Arnold Bennett's Imperial Palace of 1930.

Before paying tribute to Laboureur's outstanding books of the later
1920s, Suzanne et le Pacifique and Les contrerimes, I should mention
three other works of interest. Georges Camuset's Les sonnets du docteur,
the poems of a nineteenth century practitioner resuscitated by a Dijon
publisher in 1926, has four etchings by Laboureur. An hors d'oeuvre
among the artist's books, it is yet worth mentioning for two reasons. It
shows him working in the same field as did Daumier, one of the masters
to whom he was most devoted, in Némésis médicale, and it contains a
[181] plate which in its way foreshadows his own fate. This striking design
depicts Camuset's great-uncle Bernard, "still vigorous, but very old,"
succumbing to a stroke at table after consuming an excellent but too
copious dinner (p. 52). Gastronomic subjects were always attractive to
Laboureur, but it is curious that he should have chosen one with such
admonitory overtones.

Les caves du Vatican, a sortie or entertainment by André Gide, was
first published in 1914. For the reissue of 1929-30, printed in an edition
of 372 copies by the Nouvelle Revue Française, Laboureur provided a
frontispiece for each of the five spacious volumes, as well as a headpiece
for each chapter, for a total of 44 etchings. An unusual feature was the
printing in bister of the headpieces with added touches of bister in the
frontispieces. The publication presents both artist and author in a lighthearted
mood, rather as if Eric Gill had undertaken to illustrate Steven-
[182] son's New Arabian Nights. The frontispiece of the final volume shows
Lafcadio committing his famous acte gratuite, a perfectly motiveless
murder.

Laboureur's designs for the 1930 reissues of Maeterlinck's La vie des
abeilles, La vie des fourmis, and La vie des termites, first published in
the years 1901 and following, constituted something of a tour de force.
In the rich illustrations for an edition of La vie des abeilles which had
appeared in 1908, Carlos Schwabe did full justice to the country settings
of that book but ignored the insects which are its main concern. Not so
Laboureur, who had at his command the delicacy and precision to deal
expertly with these tiny creatures. Only a few of the 32 burins of these
volumes are plates, such as that showing a beekeeper and his hives which
[183] serves as the frontispiece to La vie des abeilles. The rest are vignettes,
appearing on the opening page of each section of the three volumes,
hardly larger than the insects they depict. Most successful, perhaps, are
the headpieces for La vie des termites, made oblong rather than square
[184] to accommodate these white ants in their habitat. Here is Laboureur's
sketch of the queen and her consort, about which Maeterlinck wrote:
"this queen presents the most monstrous hypertrophy that one finds in the
whole world of insects, and yet Nature is not miserly with monstrosities"
(p. 89). Apart from Laboureur's designs these three volumes, published
in editions of 750 copies each, make only modest claims for themselves.

We come now to Jean Giraudoux's Suzanne et le Pacifique. A reissue
of 1927, six years after its initial appearance, it was undertaken for the
bibliophile society, Les Cent Une. Since Laboureur's 33 burins, all vignettes
but unusually large, made it one of his two or three finest books,
it is unfortunate that the limitation of the edition to 125 copies has prevented
most amateurs from becoming acquainted with it at first hand.
Giraudoux's fantasy on the tropical island theme is related by an 18-yearold
girl. Living with her tutor near Toulouse, Suzanne learns that she
has won a trip around the world in a competition held by an Australian
newspaper. Laboureur's designs for the early chapters, which show her at
[185] home and aboard an ocean liner on her way to Sydney (as on p. 62),
establish the familiar world from which she is swept by a tempest. Then

comes the heart of the book, her experiences on the island where she
finds herself. For Giraudoux the interest of the situation lay in her responses,
at once naïve and sophisticated. Laboureur found his opportunities
in the hitherto unexplored scenes offered to him, vegetation, birds,
animals, all under a different sun. Suzanne is cordially received by the
[186] island's creatures (p. 101), for in its way it is a paradise. At one with
[187] nature, her adventure becomes an idyll (p. 180). Indeed, her rescue,
[188] when it occurs, is an anti-climax (p. 244). Godefroy has well observed
how marvellously Laboureur contrived to associate "his brilliant linear
art with Giraudoux's sparkling, mannered prose. These small prints,
ethereal, transparent, and satin-like with tropical light, have the shimmering
brightness of the text which they accompany" (p. 29). It is revealing
to compare Laboureur's burins with the copper engravings which
the always estimable Jean-Gabriel Daragnès made for his edition of Suzanne
et le Pacifique the following year. Though dealing with a tropical
paradise, a subject which would seem to call out for bright colors and a
wide canvas, Laboureur's delicate art prevails.

Even if judged by entirely conventional expectations concerning the
livre d'art, Paul-Jean Toulet's Les contrerimes of 1930 has few rivals
among Art Deco books. Issued in an edition of 301 copies, it is a large
quarto to which paper, typography, and mise en page have all made their
appropriate contributions. The artist's 62 vignettes, distributed evenly
through its 145 pages, make it his fullest effort of illustration. The distortion
that marked the figures of Beauté, mon beau souci a decade earlier
has virtually disappeared, yet the subtler aspects of Laboureur's style
continue to give his designs a unifying stamp. Indeed, they are as harmonious
as they are varied, never departing from their note of urbane
elegance.

Among Toulet's hundred-odd poems—polished, witty, and worldly—
Laboureur seized upon whatever points happened to catch his fancy.
Often a passing image or allusion provided the hint for a small decora-
[189] tion. When love is compared to smoke, for example, a small engraving
shows cigarettes, a holder, an ashtray, and a matchbox, all in the Art Deco
style (p. 87). At the other end of the scale, a reference to Arles or London,
to Djibouti or Saigon, calls forth a more substantial rendering.
These crisp and economical evocations are usually generalized, but sometimes
they reflect special conditions imposed by the text, as when Toulet
[190] describes an elephant on the streets of Paris (p. 33). Since love, always
profane, is a prominent theme, Laboureur depicts many pretty ladies.
[191] So a young girl awakens from a dream of lost virginity (p. 30), or an orgy
is glimpsed during a moment of lassitude (p. 61). In sum, the world of
Toulet's imagination is offered to the reader with consistent distinction,

the poet's command of intricate verse forms being matched by the artist's
mastery of his graver.

Laboureur's career as a book artist had reached its peak between 1926
and 1930, when each year saw the appearance of several significant
volumes with his designs. Yet the financial crisis of 1930—31 was not the
disaster for him that it was for Schmied. It is true, however, that thereafter,
apart from the drawings for two volumes of Maupassant's Oeuvres
complètes in 1934 and 1936, which were reproduced by mechanical process,
only a few major commissions came his way, and those for the most
part were for editions of 200 copies or fewer, directed at the minuscule
market of wealthy collectors whose devotion to livres d'art had survived
the crash. Indeed, the most appealing of these, Perrault's Peau d'âne of
1935 with 31 etchings, limited to 75 copies, was issued by the artist himself.
But Laboureur had another string to his bow. Once again he turned
to print-making as his principal occupation, and some of his most ambitious
works, including the 25 landscapes of the series devoted to a vast
swamp near the Loire called La Grande Brière, date from this period.

The serious illness which had overtaken Laboureur at the end of 1938
left him permanently paralyzed at Kerfahler after an attack during the
following Easter vacation. Though he could no longer draw, a letter of
15 December 1941 to his friend and patron Jacques André in Paris, which
is mounted in a copy of Le portrait de Dorian Gray owned by a New York
collector, bears witness that he remained mentally alert and still concerned
with the interests of a lifetime. Dictated to his wife, but bearing
his faltering signature, it acknowledges the receipt of 2500 francs for
"putting all the color desirable" in a set of his illustrations for Wilde's
novel and expresses his eagerness to visit Paris in order to see the bindings
which Paul Bonet had created for André's copies of books with his illustrations.
Whether he was allowed to leave the zone interdite of which
the War had made Kerfahler a part is uncertain. He died there in 1943.

Though Laboureur was a supreme Art Deco book artist, and each of
his principal books exemplifies the style in a striking way, I should emphasize
in my conclusion that he also became an outstanding illustrator
in the traditional sense. An intelligent man of wide sympathies, as much
at home in literature as in life, he was expert at mastering and interpreting
the texts which he himself chose. Despite the abundance of his production,
he succeeded in avoiding repetition and monotony. Since he
worked through selection rather than profusion, he never overwhelmed
the reader with his designs. Once his cubist phase was over, his style
acquired a suppleness which enabled him to achieve the varied effects
demanded by his ever changing subjects, without losing any of the distinctiveness
which marked it as his own. Moreover, his way of seeing the

world was witty in itself. The human comedy is always amusing as presented
through his eyes. Since he invariably employed original graphics
over which he had complete control, his resourcefulness enabled him to
present his personal vision with a precise elegance which made the smallness
of scale to which he worked a major asset. In sum, his notable
volumes, among them Beauté, mon beau souci, L'Envers du music-hall,
Les silences du Colonel Bramble, Suzanne et le Pacifique, Le portrait
de Dorian Gray, and Les contrerimes, are among the classics of the French
illustrated book.