CHAMPFLEURY (Jules François Félix Husson dit). Le Violon de - Lot 5

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Estimation :
80000 - 100000 EUR
CHAMPFLEURY (Jules François Félix Husson dit). Le Violon de - Lot 5
CHAMPFLEURY (Jules François Félix Husson dit). Le Violon de Faïence. Unique copy, by the author, in a slipcase with porcelain plates by Taxile Doat. Le Violon de Faïence. Paris, E.Dentu, 1877. In-8,2ff. bl. n. o.c., masthead, frontispiece (laid paper folio), title with color vignette, preface [V-VIII], 173 pp. o.c., 3 ff. n. o.c. (recto and verso folio of Dentu bookshop publications, and 2ff. endpapers). paperback. Volume housed in a gilt-edged blue marbled paper slipcase, the whole set in a morocco box-binding, spine ribbed, boards decorated with inlaid glazed earthenware plates; inside the box decorated with a gilt fillet frame and covered with the same blue marbled paper as the slipcase. Deluxe edition and separate first edition of which only a few copies were printed, on strong vellum. Illustration: out-of-text etchings by Jules Adeline, color vignettes in the text by Émile Renard. The painter Émile Renard (1850-1930), who worked at the Manufacture de Sèvres, finely colored designs borrowed from the most beautiful French, Italian and Dutch earthenware motifs. The engraver Jules Adeline (1845-1909), for his part, reproduced the earthenware violin in the Rouen museum. The printing of this remarkable work, featuring an original use of chromolithography, took no less than two years, three printers and nine successive editions (according to the publisher's publication announcement). Not only is the book's illustration a great artistic achievement, with its delicacy, finesse and perfect rendering of colors, but it is also highly original. Champfleury did not attempt to illustrate his work with representations of his characters or a few scenes. By choosing only ornamental earthenware motifs, he has recreated the atmosphere that permeates the work, without slavishly illustrating it. Champfleury, writer and administrator of the Manufacture de Sèvres. While pursuing a career as a man of letters alongside his friends Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire, Champfleury (1821-1889) had become a specialist in the art of faience. Appointed curator of the Musée de Sèvres in 1872, he was administrator of the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres until his death. He was a recognized authority on the subject, and in 1867 published a scholarly study devoted to the History of patriotic earthenware under the Revolution. Le Violon de faïence brings together two of Champfleury's passions: earthenware and collecting, in his case to the point of mania. In this story, originally published in 1862, he portrayed himself in the guise of Gardilanne: "Up at six, [he] ate a modest meal; and whether it was windy, hailish, snowy or rainy, the office manager pounded the pavement for three hours, starting in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and ending on the Quai Voltaire. Gardilanne claimed to be without passions: he was the most passionate being you could ever meet, more ardent than a hunter, more worried than a lover on his first rendezvous, more tyrannized than an ambitious man, more feverish than a gambler, his eyes more inflamed than a Corsican on the lookout for his enemy, more brilliant than a gourmand in front of Chevet's display, his hands more convulsive than a man whose last cavity represents ruin or fortune. No passions!" cried Gardilanne. He had them all, fused into one, the most vivid, the passion of the collector!" Gardilanne infected his friend Dalègre, who became possessed by the obsession of unearthing one of the five or six known earthenware violins in the world. He then entered into competition with Gardilanne, who ended up stealing it from him. An exceptional box-binding with glazed earthenware plates. For his personal copy, Champfleury chose to have an exceptional binding made. The work was entrusted to two artists working for the Manufacture de Sèvres: the draughtsman Paul Avisse (d. 1886), who supplied models for the Manufacture for over thirty years, and the English-born painter and ceramist Taxile Doat (1851-1938), who also worked there for many years and was one of those who opened the Manufacture to Art Nouveau. The two glazed earthenware plates (size 205x135mm, thickness 3mm) are inlaid on the sides of a full-brown morocco box closed on two sides, one reproducing the titled spine of a 5-nerve binding and the other, painted in gilding, imitating the head of a book. The first plate, on the front of the box, is signed in gilded letters by the two artists from the Manufacture de Sèvres.
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