In a number of recent posts I’ve argued for the impact of book illustrations in shaping our reactions to and impressions and memories of literary works. I suggest that this influence derives in part from the experience of reading a book in conjunction with the illustrations provided with it, as the mental pictures evoked by the words are moulded and directed by the accompanying plates. Separately, though, images on their own have a power to create abiding impressions, a process which we often take for granted.
Various great paintings have become iconic because of the memorable quality of the scene or figure represented and because, over time, that image has come to be the sole way in which we are able to conceive of the subject. Repetition naturally entrenches this, making it ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ to imagine the subject in this manner or form. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus has embedded a particular perception of that goddess; the same could very well be said for our mental images of Jesus and Mary, which owe a great deal to the constant repetition of a particular look by Renaissance painters such as Fra Angelico, Raphael and Perugino.
What about literary characters? Once again, the book illustrator is proved to wield considerable power and influence. Is it possible to imagine Lewis Carroll‘s Alice without John Tenniel? He fixed the clothes and the hair for evermore. The same might be said of E H Shepard’s Piglet. The Walt Disney cartoon versions of these characters may be what most people now initially imagine, but they were drawn from the originals.
It might be significant that my last two examples came from children’s literature; the young reader is likely to be especially impressionable and well composed images could well have a greater chance of being absorbed. Confirmation of this appears to come from the Flower Fairy series of books by the English artist Cicely Mary Barker. Recent research has demonstrated how adults raised on these books are now inclined to believe that this species of fairies actually exists. As a result of this, individuals they shape their expectations of what a fairy would look like, if seen, to the ‘canonical’ form of Barker’s paintings. Never mind that the fairies were modelled by little girls attending Barker’s sister’s nursery in their garden in Croydon, dressed up in outfits they’d made themselves: her fairies are now, for many, what real fairies look like.
Images absorbed at an early age are highly influential but, even for adults, seeing can very often be more powerful than reading and imagining alone. The role of Disney films in shaping perceptions has already been mentioned: I’d suggest that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series has now indelibly affected the way that generations will conceive of Legolas (and elves generally), hobbits, orcs and so on; equally, can Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy ever now be separated from Colin Firth in a wet shirt? Perhaps during the last fifty to seventy years the cinematic image has displaced the artistic in determining how we feel about and remember dialogue and narrative, but that does not detract from my fundamental argument- that image and word combined reinforce each other. Hence my interest in the illustrated editions of the works of Pierre Louys in particular, and a broader interest in the partnership and interplay between art and literature as found in fine art, limited editions of books.
I have described before how Pierre Louys first found success as an author with his Chanson de Bilitis (Songs of Bilitis) in 1894. It was not his first book, as he had preceded it with Mines des Courtesans, a translation of Roman author Lucian, but it was his first work of creative fiction. The book claims to be ‘translated from the Greek’ on its title page, but it’s not- some of it is certainly stolen or adapted from the Greek (especially Sappho) but it is largely the author’s own work. Over the ensuing 130 years, Bilitis has proved persistently popular, as is reflected in the astonishing number of editions that have been published- which works out (very roughly) at one every three or four years. This remarkable popular demand has affected the way I decided to deal with my discussion of the illustrators of the book. There are so many that a single post was not feasible: instead, I divided them fairly arbitrarily into ‘styles’ to share them out.
Raphael Collin
Here, I consider those illustrators who chose to go for a ‘classical’ or ‘Greek’ style, authentic to the subject matter. Just as Bilitis is a pastiche of ancient Greek verse, these artists, in pursuit of a sort of authenticity (or to reinforce the author’s own subterfuge) elected to imitate historical precedents, such as the decorations of Greek vases and cups. Some scholars were actually taken in by the Songs when they first appeared (even sniping at Louys for poor translation!) but with these images we can simply admire the artists’ skills.
Frontispiece by Laurens, 1898
An early edition from 1898 was illustrated by Paul-Albert Laurens, who also worked on an edition of Louys’ Leda. As the frontispiece shows, his contributions bolstered the impression the author wanted to give that this was an authentic rediscovered Greek work.
Raphael Collin
Raphael Collin
One of the earliest illustrators of the text was Louis-Joseph-Raphaël Collin (1850-1916), who worked on an edition of 1906 for Pierre Zucker. Collin was a fairly conventional academic painter and ceramicist (although he was influenced by the new styles of Impressionism and by Japanese art, which was being discovered during the late nineteenth century). He studied in Paris with Bouguereau and Cabanel and began to exhibit his own work from 1873, soon gaining major commissions for murals in public buildings (such as the Sorbonne and the Odeon). All the same, much of Collin’s work features nudes in landscapes and classically inspired scenes such as Nymph and Faun, Nude Lying with Swan (i.e. Leda), Daphnis and Chloe, Four Nymphs and various ‘mythological scenes.’ He also illustrated an edition of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe in 1906, so these interests all made him an obvious choice to tackle Bilitis. Collin’s engraved plates are mostly rather staid and conventional very similar to those of James Fagan, who illustrated an English edition of 1904) and the strongly lesbian theme of the book only subtly suggested- although, even in his delicate way, Collin certainly does not avoid it in his 33 plates. He obviously drew heavily upon classical and Renaissance sculptures and paintings of Aphrodite and the like (and more recent imitations of these) for their poses. The image that heads this post, though, is more inspired: it seems to mimic a faded and damaged mural, or perhaps a fragment of painted material or papyrus, as if it too is a relic of the time of Bilitis (about 600 BC). It might be thought of as a copy of a manuscript of her poems or- better still- as part of the decoration of her tomb, for the entire book by Louys purports to have been copied from the inscriptions in Bilitis rediscovered burial chamber.
Two other remarks: the two dancing girls shown above are Glottis and Kyse from the book (songs 47-49), whom Collin has made rather older than Louys suggests. Secondly, Collin also worked on an edition of Louys’ Aphrodite in 1909, and his colour plate of the dead Chrysis is one of the few illustrations of the book that so honestly confronts the tragedy of its conclusion.
Here too I’ll note the illustrations prepared by the Italian Aldo Pagliacci (1913-90) for a 1960 edition of the book. Generally Pagliacci’s oil paintings might be characterised as a combination of Daliesque surrealism with a quattrocento Italian Renaissance style. However, the frontispiece for the Louys book seems to me to imitate a faded wall painting, with its apparent stains in the plaster, rather like Collin’s. The image may be presumed to represent Bilitis and her partner, Mnasidika, meeting some other women. Pagliacci has taken care to indicate the age disparity between the pair, which not all artists do- although he’s exaggerated it at the same time.
In 1906 the artist called ‘Notor’ worked on another new edition of the Songs. His actual name was Vicomte Gabriel de Roton (1865-1964); son of a postmaster, he came to manage a vineyard on behalf of his wife’s family whilst developing his own interests as an author, illustrator, archaeologist, traveller, journalist and Hellenist: his published works included Woman in Greek Antiquity (1901), Dance in Greek Antiquity (1911) and translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Roton illustrated these last two books himself, basing his designs on painted Greek vases, and he also provided illustrations for other ‘classical’ texts such Fénelon’s Adventures of Aristonoüs, Charles Marie Zévort’s translation of Lysistrata in 1898 and, of course, Bilitis. His work is highly authentic, but also very respectable, so that his plates for neither Lysistrata nor Bilitis reflect the sexual nature of the texts.
In 1928 a small selection of only 16 songs from the original book were translated into Latvian as Bilitis Dziesmas by Janis Sudrabkalns. This selection was published in limited fine art edition with 16 full-page plates and a frontispiece designed by Sigismunds Vidbergs.
Sigismunds Vidbergs (1890-1970) the most notable Latvian representative of Art Deco graphic art, one of his country’s most original artists of the twentieth century. He was a painter, decorated ceramics, designed posters and illustrated books and magazines. His subject matter included historical and religious scenes, urban and rural life, portraits and studies of architecture and nature. However, Vidbergs is best known for his erotic and risqué themes. For Bilitis, he reproduced Greek motifs in Art Nouveau style drawings pen and ink.
In 1930 Jean Lebedeff provided wood cuts for a new edition of Bilitis (see below). His strong, simple designs certainly bring out the antique and pagan nature of the setting of the book, as the Pan and fauns below demonstrate, but- once again- there is no real reflection of the true nature of Louys’ text itself.
The otherwise obscure artist Gilles Marie in 1960 designed a series of etchings for Bilitis. With their decorative borders, the two-page end papers are both striking, classical looking and (in the case of the rear papers) suitably erotic.
I close with two artists who I can’t quite fit anywhere else. Jean Jules Dufour (1889-1973) was just beginning his career when he was commissioned to illustrate a 1934 edition of the book. He worked in a variety of styles and media, producing etchings, woodcuts, pencil drawings and oil paintings. Dufour focussed on landscapes, street scenes, architectural images and illustrated books. His black and white images are vaguely Greek inspired, notably the cover, whilst the other plates showing figures have a kind of stillness and monumentality that remind me of statues.
Lastly, I include the Argentinian Raul Soldi whose illustrations for a 1945 edition of Bilitis are presented in a variety of styles: there are simple line drawings, black and white etchings and colourful plates based on bright watercolours that are loosely impressionistic. Some of the images are quite surreal, with bodies covered with eyes or mouths, but he is frank about the lesbian content and the attractive cover, framed by its column and pediment, is a lovely depiction of Bilitis and her wife.
In summary, what especially strikes me is how all of the illustrators featured here adopted a style imitative of ancient Greek ceramic decoration- and yet managed to produce such different interpretations. Each individual artist is, of course, different and their output is uniquely theirs, but the broad spectrum of difference in their responses once again highlights how their visions may impact upon those of readers. They all choose to emphasise varying elements in stories (or even within the same scenes) and their editing of their work (frequently unconscious, no doubt) accentuates this. As I have observed several times before, their departures from the text will inevitably shape the reader’s perceptions of it.
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.
Thomas Couture (1815-79) was a French history painter and teacher. Amongst his pupils were such distinguished later painters as Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, John La Farge and leading Symbolist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.
Couture was born at Senlis, but when he was 11 his family moved to Paris. In due course, this enabled him to study at the city’s industrial arts school (École des Arts et Métiers) and later at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied under Antoine Jean Gros and Paul Delaroche. Talented and ambitious, Couture was unhappy that he failed to win the prestigious Prix de Rome competition at the École six times, but he ascribed this not to his own shortcomings but to failings in the school. He was finally awarded second prize in the Prix de Rome in 1837 and this repeated overlooking of his work and his talent left him with a lifelong animosity towards the École des Beaux-Arts (as we shall see).
La courtisane moderne (or, The Thorny Path), 1873
Couture began to exhibit at the Paris Salon in 1838 with Young Venetian after an Orgy (a painting of a rather wan and hungover looking young man). While his early works were anecdotal genre scenes, his earliest true success came with The Love of Gold in 1845 (in which young women appear to be offering themselves to a miserly looking man who hoards a pile of coins), and then with the work often regarded as Couture’s masterpiece, Romans During the Decadence in 1847, for which he was awarded a first-class medal. This ostensibly historical work, inspired by some lines from the Roman poet Juvenal, shows an orgy in a colonnaded room with all the cliches of nudity, wild dancing and over-intoxication that we associate with Imperial Rome. The painting was widely regarded by contemporaries as an allegorical criticism of the contemporary French government. Surprisingly, therefore, it was the government that purchased the huge canvas (which took Couture three years to paint).
Soon after this recognition of his skills, Couture opened an independent atelier (teaching studio) with the intention of challenging the preeminent position of the École des Beaux-Arts for turning out the best new history painters. Like the academicians, though, Couture held the art of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as that of Renaissance Italy and Flanders, in the highest respect and considered them his stylistic predecessors. Beneath his outward iconoclasm, therefore, there were inescapable academic foundations that often makes his set-piece paintings rather formal and lifeless
Bust of a young girl
Couture’s innovative technique gained much attention, and from the late 1840s he received prestigious commissions from the new emperor Napoleon III as well as from the church, which paid for a mural in the chapel of the Virgin in the church of St. Eustache in Paris. The artist’s painting of the Baptism of the Prince Imperial (c. 1856–62), met with mixed reviews and two other public works were never completed. Discouraged by the unfavourable reception of his paintings, in 1859 Couture left the French capital, returning to Senlis, where he painted portraits and decorative paintings for private patrons. After 1871 he opened a new atelier and continued to teach young artists who sought him out. In 1867 Couture further snubbed the academic establishment by publishing a book on his own ideas and working methods called Méthode et entretiens d’atelier (Method and Workshop Interviews).
The Young Musician or Gypsy Girl
Jeune italienne (Young Italian)
In fact, it is Couture’s portraits, character studies and genre scenes that are far more lively and interesting than his great classical canvases. These include simple interior studies, such as the boy with his clay pipe in Soap Bubbles, another idle youth in Day Dreams and the snapshot of provincial life, A Lawyer (or Judge) Going to Court (1859), which shows him striding alone down a street that’s deserted except for a flock of chickens. Working children, such as in Return from the Fields or the Little Confectioner, were simple and honest realist images, but it was in studies of young females that Couture seemed to excel. The gypsy girl and young Italian illustrated above have a certain exoticism, but the painter evidently preferred simpler and more homely scenes.
Study of a young girl
Bust of young woman with bared shoulders
Couture occasionally painted nude women (for example, the poet Baudelaire with his lover, the courtesan Madame Sabatier)- and more often adult male life studies in the classical tradition of Michelangelo- but he seems to have preferred junior subjects. Couture initiated the fashion for a style of painting that I shall term ‘Girls on Rocks by Water.’ His Little Bather is the best example of this, a young girl seen with a demurely down-cast gaze as she sits pensively by a pool or stream. The presence of the apple, entwined as it is with the ribbon of the crucifix she was wearing, sends an interesting message about the girl. She is a young Eve, naked in the lush ‘garden’ of the woodland where she is bathing, but we can draw reassurance from the religious emblem (and, I suspect, her white dress) that she is symbol of purity and innocence and beyond any hint of temptation.
As we shall see, this juxtaposition of the innocent nude and a natural location was to be adopted by several subsequent painters, as it represented an ideal of childhood purity that came to dominate popular painting during the later nineteenth century. I shall return to discussion of this subject, and of the artists inspired by Couture, in subsequent posts. For more information on Victorian era art, see details of my bookCherry Ripe on my publications page.
The Little Bather (1849), The Hermitage, St Petersburg
Spanish painter Luis Ricardo Falero (1851-96) is today especially remembered for his faery paintings. He developed a signature style featuring slender young teenage girls equipped with large butterfly wings and labelled as fairies. The Poppy and Lily Fairies– both of 1888, Butterfly, exhibited in 1891 and Sea Nymph (1892), all typify this facet of his work, which derives its continuing appeal from the pretty, harmless and tiny conception of faeries which first prevailed in Victorian times and which he exploited so effectively.
These faeries, besides their rather sugary nudity, are pretty anodyne. The same probably can’t be said for the Nymph of 1878, who may have hazy butterfly wings but wears a much more serious, if not threatening, expression. As for Fairy Under Starry Skies (1885), this is remarkable for its leaping, flame haired girl, who is equipped with dove’s or angel’s pinions rather than the more conventional insect wings of the artist’s other fairy pictures. Feathered wings notwithstanding, she doesn’t look very angelic. Of course, Falero had a double defence that he could mount to any challenge to the propriety of his art: his topless teens were not just unreal (as supernatural beings), they were also of diminutive dimensions, living amongst flowers that were larger than they were (witness the Lily Fairy, no bigger than a fern leaf, yet somehow holding a microscopic lily stem).
A Fairy Under Starry Skies
Falero was a nobleman who chose art as a career after failed ventures in the military, science and engineering. He received his training in Paris from Gabriel Ferrier, a painter whose output was a curious mixture of portraits, orientalist and fantasy scenes and erotic or pornographic prints, amongst which topless young women and nymphs featured quite frequently.
After studying in Paris, Falero moved to London. In the year of his very early death, the painter was successfully sued for maintenance by his former housemaid and artistic model, Maud Harvey, for having seduced her at the age of seventeen and then made her pregnant. She must therefore feature amongst the many fantastical nudes that Falero painted. She could well be the red-head in The Artist’s Model, who also appears in numerous other of his pictures. Maud seems to be the model in the Reclining Nudes of 1879 and 1893, the second being a sumptuous scene in which she stretches out languorously on rich fabrics. The same young woman may be seen in Posing (1879), La Favourite (1880) and A Beauty (1885).
La Favourite
Witches going to their Sabbath (The departure of the witches): 1878
A substantial number of Falero’s canvases even more powerfully erotic than his nudes, depicting writhing naked females. Examples include Witches’ Sabbath (1878) and Faust’s (or Falero’s) Dream (1880), a picture that’s particularly notable for its jumble of entwined youthful flesh. More so than faeries, witches were associated with an uninhibited and ecstatic sensuality, as the cavortings with broom sticks demonstrate.
The witch, painted on a tambourine 1882
Faust’s Dream
Whilst Falero’s witches tend to be full-breasted, energetic women, slim young nudes appear very regularly too- usually in static, solitary poses- such as La Coquette (1878), Moon Nymph and Dawn (1883), Allegory of Art (1892), An Oriental Beauty (1895) and La Favourite (1896). All are full-length studies, focussing our gaze solely on the figure with no distracting narrative. Similar are the twinned young nudes clinging together, amongst which are Balance of the Zodiac, Moonlit Beauties, Twin Stars, Double Star (1881) and Leo and Virgo (1886).
Balance of the Zodiac
Prayer to Isis, 1883 (also called Mystic Blessings)
Alongside these supernatural fantasies, Falero also indulged the Victorian taste for nudity that was presumed to be found amongst ancient and non-European cultures. A canvas like A Prayer to Isis (1883) must derive from his teacher Ferrier’s orientalist interests. We see, in profile, a naked young woman playing the benet or Egyptian harp and, in front of her, a little nude girl holding aloft two sistra. By silhouetting the pair against the twilit sky, Falero has cleverly emphasised their beautifully modelled outlines. The Enchantress of 1878 derives from this same orientalist school that we’ve seen before, in which the ‘east’ (generally Egypt and the Levant for Europeans of the period) was a realm of exotic, liberated sexuality and provocative if impractical clothes (compare Ernest Normand’s Playthings).
The Enchantress
The classical world provided a similar distance in time and space, that allowed artists to justify as much bare flesh as they dared to paint. A Beauty of 1885 is along the same lines as the Egyptian scenes, except that it places the nudity in a Roman bath- something we’ve examined before in several postings. Closely related is the Reclining Nude of 1879. She luxuriates on a some fabric, it seems in an opium dream, but the lined material (to my eyes anyway) is contrived to look rather like an oyster shell, which arguably takes her away from the orgasmic pleasures the boudoir and deposits her on a sandy shore, suggesting instead that we view her as some sort of siren, naiad or sea nymph, or even as Aphrodite, born from the waves. See Gioacchino Pagliei’s nearly contemporary Naiads (1881) in Nottingham City Art Gallery, the picture that for me is immediately evoked by Falero’s image, although we could probably point to Alexandre Cabanel’s Birth of Venus (1863) as a strong contender for inspiration, as well as plenty of late Renaissance images of Venus on a bed too as possible precedents.
Reclining Nude
Cabanel, Birth of Venus
Pagliei, Gioacchino; The Naiads; Nottingham City Museums and Galleries
Planet Venus
One could probably justly condemn Falero’s work as glamour photography in oils. The Planet Venus of 1889 isa good example of this. It is a very curious image: the central figure, standing before a crescent moon, is a naked young blonde who is, for some reason, pressing her forefinger into her left breast just below the nipple. In the background four plump little naked girls gambol and pirouette amidst swirling draperies along the edge of the lunar sphere. The picture has an unsettling atmosphere of disturbing eroticism. In Falero’s picture Morning Star the nude female subject clasps and squeezes her left breast; exactly the same gesture is seen too in Leo and Virgo. It is an attitude that’s very familiar to us now from soft pornography- the nipple being offered in a manner that is at once both maternal and sexual.
For more information on Victorian art, see details of my bookCherry Ripe on my publications page.
As a complement to my recently released book, The Great God Pan, this posting offers a selection of some of the key representations of the god by artists over the last five or six hundred years. There are various ways of classifying these images- by nationality, by artistic style or by time period (which I chose in the book).
However, what emerges from a review of the pictures is that there are certain regular themes you see repeatedly on the canvases: these are drink (Pan is known for his association with Dionysus and their love of a good debauch); following from this, sex with nymphs is a major interest of Pan and his accompanying satyrs and fauns. Chasing nymphs, drinking with nymphs and copulating with nymphs take up a lot of the time of the god and his entourage. In the moments left over from drink and nympholepsy, Pan (as creator of the pan pipes) enjoys music and dance. Lastly, but rather rarely, he can be glimpsed in rather less self-indulgent scenes, such as giving advice to needy nymphs. For the gallery here, I have chosen to organise the images on the basis of theme.
Pan the Tipsy
Wine is a natural product that fuels Pan’s passions. Artists have known for centuries that scenes of drinking are popular, amusing and readily understandable. There’s no need for complex mythology; everyone can appreciate when a “party got out of bounds” (to quote the B52s).
The Drunken Satyr, Rubens
Venus Inebriated by a Satyr, Annibale Carracci
Poussin, The Triumph of Pan
Pan the Sex Pest
As we can see in the Poussin canvas above, once the wine has loosened inhibitions, affairs can easily degenerate into a Bacchic orgy (although Pan scarcely needed much excuse to have sex with a pretty young girl). His retinue was composed of nymphs and of human women who were ecstatic devotees of the Dionysian cult. Love was, quite literally, all around. It wasn’t all wild rutting, though: the image by Gerard von Honthorst shows a delightfully tender and affectionate pair. It’s also worth noting the tendency of artists to emphasise the youth of the nymphs, often in contrast to a hoary and gnarled old Pan. In the picture by Romako, we definitely seem to have something of a ‘trophy girlfriend’ for a balding, mature satyr.
Annibale Caracci, The Cult of Priapus
Gerard von Honthorst, 1623
Mason Satyr, Carracci
von Stuck, Faun & Nymph
Faun & Nymph, Anton Romako
Pan with Nymph, Fritz Schuckmuller
Faun playing harp; Paul Paede
Very rarely, we get a glimpse of a more diverse Arcady, in which female satyrs and infants exist. We have seen saw plenty of rutting, but homelier scenes are harder to discover. One of the very earliest paintings of satyrs, Pietro di Cosimo’s The Discovery of Honey by Bacchus (1499) features children and a mother satyr breast-feeding her baby faun and Arthur Brown Davies’ On the Banks of the Arethusa, dating from 1910 (below), shows a young brother and sister faun, reassuring us that the species will not die out.
Pan, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn
The last couple of images lead us into Pan’s musical associations. When Syrinx, a nymph he was chasing, was changed into reeds to protect her from potential rape, the god was devastated and dismayed. The only way of keeping her close was to make pipes from the reeds and, ever since, Pan has been the god of poets and inspiration.
Bocklin, Faun und Amsel zu pfifend
Franz von Stuck, Blasender Faun
von Stuck, Dissonance
von Stuck, Pan
Bocklin, Pan im Kinderreigen
Aubrey Beardsley, Pan in the Woods
Book plate by Austin Spare
Rupert Bunny, Pastoral
Other Visions of Pan
A few artists, from time to time, have imagined Pan performing other roles or, more and more commonly from the late nineteenth century onwards, they have miniaturised him and made him less threatening.
Pan Consulted by Psyche, Alex Rothaug
Ernst Klimt, Pan counsels Psyche
Beardsley Pan reading to a woman by a Brook, 1898. Plate taken from The Studio magazine, volume 13, no 62 (London, 14th May 1898).
Makart, Pan & Flora
Karl Pluckebaum, Faun & Fairy
Charles Sims, The Little Faun; Royal Institution of Cornwall
Further Reading
I have created a gallery of some of the more adult and explicitly sexual images of Pan on a separate page, which can be visited by clicking here– the content can verge on the pornographic, so be warned. These works of art, and many more, alongside a very rich heritage of poetry and prose, are examined at length in my book The Great God Pan. I also now have a page dedicated to nymphs: for lots more information, please visit my nymphology blog.
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