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 brook 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."[57] Not for him were the infinite pains taken by Barbier and Schmidt 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,[58] 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 Rapportgénéral for the Art Deco exhibition of 1925, all emphasized the way in which the decorative spirit of the time led book artists towards déformationor distortion.[59] 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.[60] 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.[61] 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."[62]

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.[63] 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."[64] 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."[65] 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."[66] 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 [4.1] 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. [68] 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 [4.2] provided 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-luxeedition 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 [4.3] 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 [4.4] 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 souciwas 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 [4.5] engravings printed in color in Évariste Parny's Chansons madécasses [4.6] of 1920, of aquatint in Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainvilleof 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 music-hallof 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 [4.7] tableau of Silbermann pulling himself together after a fight at school (opposite p. 68), and Laboureur does not neglect the moment of truth in [4.8] 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 beausouci, 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,"[69] and these attitudes are comprehensively suggested in the [4.9] 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 [4.10] the scenes of forest (p. 65), country house, and seashore (p. 109) which most engage the reader's attention. Once more the miniature designs, [4.11] 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."[70] 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 [4.12] 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 their ani- [4.13] 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 [4.14] 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 imperturbable 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 [4.15] 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 [4.16] 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 [4.17] 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 [4.18] 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 Grayare 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 [4.19] 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 [4.20] 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- [4.21] 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 [4.22] 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 Journeymay 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- [4.23] 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 Serreet 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

[4.24] 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, [4.25] 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 [4.26] 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- [4.27] 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 quartois 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 Toulouse Lautrec, 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," [4.28] 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 [4.29] 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'oeuvreamong 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 [4.30] 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- [4.31] 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 [4.32] 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 [4.33] 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-year- old 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 [4.34] 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 [4.35] island's creatures (p. 101), for in its way it is a paradise. At one with [4.36] nature, her adventure becomes an idyll (p. 180). Indeed, her rescue, [4.37] when it occurs, is an anti-climax (p. 244). Godefroy has well observed how marvelously 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 Suzanneet 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- [4.38] 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 [4.39] describes an elephant on the streets of Paris (p. 33). Since love, always profane, is a prominent theme, Laboureur depicts many pretty ladies. [4.40] 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.