Illuminating ‘The Twilight of the Nymphs’- illustrating ancient myths retold

Paul Albert Laurens, Leda

Between 1893 and 1898, French writer Pierre Louys produced a series of retellings of classical myths- the stories of Leda, Ariadne and Byblis– which were accompanied by The House Upon the Nile, a story set in Hellenic Egypt. These were later grouped together, along with Louys’ version of the story of Danae, as Le Crepuscule des nymphes (The Twilight of the Nymphs). Several illustrated versions of this were published after Louys death in 1925. This post reviews the artworks generated by this pleasant, if minor, collection of stories.

Laurens, Leda

The first illustrated volume in the series was Leda, issued in 1898 with plates provided by Paul Albert Laurens. I have mentioned edition this in other posts. Laurens (1870-1934) was born in Paris, the son of the distinguished painter and sculptor Jean-Paul Laurens. He undertook his artistic training at the Académie Julian and during his artistic career he won a variety of medals and prizes for his work. Laurens undertook a wide variety of commissions, including street scenes, still lifes, figures, murals and book illustration. During the First World War he helped to devise camouflage schemes and from 1898 was teacher and later professor of drawing at the École Polytechnique in Paris. His plates for Leda are very attractive little vignettes, faithfully portraying the rather alien blueness of the nymph and contrasting her slender nudity with the coarseness of the river gods.

Wagrez, Byblis

The same year as Leda, an edition of Byblis, illustrated by Jacques-Clément Wagrez (1850-1908), appeared. This little known story concerns the nymph Byblis and her brother Caunos, the twin children of the river nymph Cyanis (the naiad Kyane, who is evidently just as blue as Leda). Being continually alone together, the siblings fall in love with each other and their mother determines to terminate their incestuous romance. She therefore has the boy carried off by a centauress. Byblis is heart-broken to lose her twin, sole companion and lover. She sets out in search of him but becomes hopelessly lost. In despair, she breaks down in tears of grief and is turned into a fountain.

Like Laurens, Wagrez was the son of a painter and studied École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before travelling in Italy. He became a painter (especially in watercolours) as well as a decorative arts designer (including tapestries). His compositions were often inspired by the artists of Renaissance Florence and Venice, as well as by classical mythology. In addition to the edition of Byblis, he also illustrated editions of Shakespeare’s plays, Balzac, Wagner and Boccaccio’s Decameron. His illustrations for Louys are conventional and not very exciting (sorry Jacques-Clément).

This last edition of Byblis was far surpassed in 1901 by Henri Caruchet’s art nouveau design, a truly stunning little book, on nearly every page of which the text is framed by beautiful studies of entwined flowers, foliage and nymphs.

Henri Émile Caruchet (1873-1948) was a French painter in oils and watercolours, illustrator and poet. He studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris in 1892, attending classes with Gustave Moreau amongst others.  Subsequently, Caruchet worked in many fields: he was a book illustrator, working on titles by Theophile Gautier and Anatole France, but he was also a press caricaturist, painter, and ceramics designer, in addition to which he was the author of poetry, reviews, stories and magazine articles. The Benezit Dictionary of Artists describes his “extravagantly floral style, typical of Art Nouveau.” The results are strange and beautiful.

Caruchet’s erotic illustrations have been described as symbolist: in 1904 he supplied twenty gorgeous art nouveau designs for an edition of Jean de Villiot’s Parisienne et Peux-Rouges, published by Charles Carrington; it was one in that company’s series La Flagellation à Travers le Monde (Flagellation Across the World).  The book was raised above its genre by the plates, which are stunning little works of art, both bizarre and beautiful: amongst them are a naked woman being molested by an octopus against a background of stars and a woman who is wearing only stockings and holds a small puppet of a man dressed in a suit and top hat, whilst apparently floating before a giant cobweb in which are trapped numerous babies. These are uniquely disturbing and yet lovely images.

Abandoning chronology for a moment, in 1929 a rather similar edition of Crepuscule appeared, designed by Sylvain Sauvage. It bore the title Contes Antiques (Ancient Tales) and was decorated with thirty-two colour engravings, as well as ornamental initials and decorative head and tail-pieces in colour. This stunning book is another example of the idea of the illustrated book as gesamtkunstwerk to which I have previously referred.

Contes Antiques (House on the Nile)

Contes Antiques, ‘L’Homme de pourpre’

Gervais, The House on the Nile

In 1904, an edition of Ariadne or The Way of Eternal Peace, combined with The House on the Nile or The Appearances of Virtue, was published. The two stories were illustrated by Georges Antoine Rochegrosse (1859-1938) and Paul Jean Gervais (1859-1936) respectively. Rochegrosse was the stepson of the author Theodore de Banville and was brought up in a very cultured environment, beginning his artistic education aged just twelve. He painted orientalist scenes in Algeria as well as depictions of Egyptian and Classical culture; later he portrayed scenes from the works of Wagner.  Rochegrosse was much in demand for book illustration, working on Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Petronius’ Satyricon, Flaubert’s Salammbo and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, amongst others. He was extremely popular in his day, but is now largely forgotten. Gervais had studied under Gerome in Paris and became a painter of murals, allegorical and historical paintings and book plates (such as Aristophanes’ Lysistrata). Both artists’ illustrations of Louys are very conventional ‘academic’ and neo-classical images; perhaps the most notable thing about them is how Gervais has departed so much from his text: two young African girls in the House upon the Nile have become two white women under his brush, thereby losing much of the point of the story (contrast this plate to those by Clara Tice and others already reproduced).

Rochegrosse, Ariadne

Then, in the year of the author’s death, 1925, the first consolidated edition of Twilight of the Nymphs was issued, with woodcuts designed by Jean Saint-Paul. Born in Paris in 1897, he was a designer of tapestries, painter and illustrator; he is probably best known for this work on Louys. The images are strong and bold and seem to have been quite influential: an edition of the Collected Works of Louys issued in the USA in 1932, with translations by Mitchell S. Buck, included woodcuts by Harry G. Spanner. His version of Byblis bears marked similarities to Saint-Paul’s.

Byblis by Jean Saint-Paul

Byblis by Harry Spanner, 1932

As with many of Louys’ books, a small flurry of new printings then followed. The major Swiss artist and writer Rodolphe-Theophile Bosshard (1889-1960) worked on another edition in 1926. He had studied at the Geneva School of Fine Arts, before travelling to Paris in 1910 where Expressionism and Cubism had a great impact on his style. After the First World War, Bosshard returned to live in Paris for four years, getting to know Marc Chagall and André Derain amongst other writers and artist. On his return to Switzerland, the artist designed murals and painted portraits, landscapes, still lifes and mystical/ religious scenes, but it was female nudes dominated his output. He depicted their bared bodies in increasingly cubist and abstract manner.  Bosshard also undertook book illustrations, leading to his rather austere set of ten lithographs for Le Crepuscule des nymphes the year after Louys died. They have a cool, sculptural quality to them that is in some ways appropriate to these Greek myths.

Bosshard

Clara Tice, Danae

In 1927, the Pierre Louys Society in the USA issued a translation of Le Crepuscule, with gorgeous and lavish illustrations by Clara Tice. The pastel colours, highlighted with gold and combined with Tice’s delicate, naïve style, make for a memorable and highly appealing edition of the book. 

Another English translation was published in 1928 (and reissued in 1932) by the Fortune Press in London (it was intended, initially, as a small press specialising in gay erotica). Perhaps this is why the young Cecil Beaton was commissioned to provide the illustrations, even though he was almost unknown at that stage. despite his lack of formal qualifications, there’s no denying the unique flare of his five plates.

In 1940, the designer Louis Icart was commissioned to work on a couple of Louys’ works, including Leda. I have featured some plates from this edition in my post on the career of Icart.

Cecil Beaton, 1928

Lastly, in 1946, the established post-Impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) provided lithographs for a further edition of Le Crepuscule des nymphes. He was a pioneer of Post-Impressionism in his youth, forming the Nabis group along with Gauguin, but over his long career Bonnard constantly stayed alert to and adapted new artistic styles. Nudes were a regular feature of his painting, but he was always interested in the integration of art into popular media, such as posters, magazine covers and book illustrations, as well as into ordinary household objects and decoration, including murals, painted screens, textiles, tapestries, furniture, glassware and ceramics. It was in this context that such a well-known and distinguished figure was commissioned to work on another edition of Louys’ book. His 24 lithographs give quite a detailed account of the events in the text.

Bonnard, Byblis, 1946

There have been several other editions of Louys’ short stories, many unillustrated and in a variety of combinations, often including stories from other collections that the author wrote. An example is the English language Collected Tales, of 1930, which featured illustrations from John Austen.

For a complete discussion of the illustrated editions of the works of Pierre Louys in their wider context, see my book In the Garden of Eros, available as a paperback and Kindle e-book from Amazon.