It was entitled, "Oceanie," and the tiny legends at the base informed me that it was lithographed by someone named Nordmann, and published by a firm named Firmin Didot Et Cie. That gave me a lot to go on. It had, at one point, been a two-page spread in a book--that was obvious, as it had been folded in half, and the binding remained stuck to the back along the fold-seam--and had quite obviously been published by a French firm. With all that to go on, it didn't take long to track down the piece's story, and it's fascinating for two reasons--its content, and its nature.
"Oceanie" is a page from a six-volume book by an artist named Auguste Racinet called "Le Costume Historique." Published over twelve years, from 1876 to 1888, it attempted to chronicle the entire history of human clothing across the entire world. Racinet, who drew the pictures, worked with dozens of different lithographers, including F.G. Nordmann, a Swede.
You have to love the French, and these pages, while depicting the costume of the indigenous people of the South Pacific, simply drip with Gallic sensibilities. "L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace," Danton said, and Le Costume Historique was nothing if not audacious--who but the French would attempt a visual history of everything everyone had ever worn?
And the figures reveal French sensuousness and attention to form. They're beautiful, the people in this print--the figure of the woman near the bottom with the papoose on her back, holding her baby as she cocks her head to kiss him has a sort of subtle eroticism about her, the way her skirt drapes her hips, her ironic stance, the curves of her body, the rondure of her calves, even the insouciance of her ponytail. I think we can be glad it was a French artist who attempted this project.
"Oceanie" and the other illustrations in Le Costume Historique are chromolithographs, Lithography, by the time Le Costume Historique was published, had been around for a while, having been invented by the German printer Alois Senefelder in the 18th century. It involves drawing with a greasy crayon on a matrix made of stone (thus "lithography"--stone-writing). The matrix is then rubbed with a gum arabic solution, and then the image is inked with oil-based transfer ink, and pressed.
Chromolithography takes the process one step further. One can do limited colors on a lithograph, but with chromolithographs, each color-patch gets its own matrix, and the colors are then pressed onto the paper in layers. The result is an almost unlimited potential for color, and when you hold "Oceanie" under the light, you can see how the layers of color were applied--first the tans of the skin-tones, then the gold, then the oranges, then the shadow-tones for shading.
"Oceanie" fits my collecting scheme, if I stretch the parameters a bit, insofar as it depicts the people of a faraway and exotic place--it's the kind of thing an explorer, as well as a historian of dress, might have sketched, and doubtless it transported its readers the same way travel-prints did. But even if it didn't, I'd still be glad to own the piece. Its vibrancy, its colors, the arrangement of the figures on the pages all combine to form a uniquely compelling image, the kind of thing your eye would be drawn to even if you don't give a damn about clothes.
"Oceanie" is a page from a six-volume book by an artist named Auguste Racinet called "Le Costume Historique." Published over twelve years, from 1876 to 1888, it attempted to chronicle the entire history of human clothing across the entire world. Racinet, who drew the pictures, worked with dozens of different lithographers, including F.G. Nordmann, a Swede.
You have to love the French, and these pages, while depicting the costume of the indigenous people of the South Pacific, simply drip with Gallic sensibilities. "L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace," Danton said, and Le Costume Historique was nothing if not audacious--who but the French would attempt a visual history of everything everyone had ever worn?
And the figures reveal French sensuousness and attention to form. They're beautiful, the people in this print--the figure of the woman near the bottom with the papoose on her back, holding her baby as she cocks her head to kiss him has a sort of subtle eroticism about her, the way her skirt drapes her hips, her ironic stance, the curves of her body, the rondure of her calves, even the insouciance of her ponytail. I think we can be glad it was a French artist who attempted this project.
"Oceanie" and the other illustrations in Le Costume Historique are chromolithographs, Lithography, by the time Le Costume Historique was published, had been around for a while, having been invented by the German printer Alois Senefelder in the 18th century. It involves drawing with a greasy crayon on a matrix made of stone (thus "lithography"--stone-writing). The matrix is then rubbed with a gum arabic solution, and then the image is inked with oil-based transfer ink, and pressed.
Chromolithography takes the process one step further. One can do limited colors on a lithograph, but with chromolithographs, each color-patch gets its own matrix, and the colors are then pressed onto the paper in layers. The result is an almost unlimited potential for color, and when you hold "Oceanie" under the light, you can see how the layers of color were applied--first the tans of the skin-tones, then the gold, then the oranges, then the shadow-tones for shading.
"Oceanie" fits my collecting scheme, if I stretch the parameters a bit, insofar as it depicts the people of a faraway and exotic place--it's the kind of thing an explorer, as well as a historian of dress, might have sketched, and doubtless it transported its readers the same way travel-prints did. But even if it didn't, I'd still be glad to own the piece. Its vibrancy, its colors, the arrangement of the figures on the pages all combine to form a uniquely compelling image, the kind of thing your eye would be drawn to even if you don't give a damn about clothes.
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