Author: GAVARNI, Paul [pseudonym of Guillaume Sulpice Chevallier]
Title: Les Lorettes
Description: Paris: Chez Aubert, 1841. Love is their business, and they drive hard bargains They are as luxurious and idle as they are beautiful Their lives are a tissue of deception and hypocrisy" GAVARNI, Paul. Les Lorettes. Paris: Bauger et Pannier, June 1841-December 1843. One of the rarest of all the Gavarni albums. First edition. Folio (13 1/8 x 9 7/8 inches; 334 x 251 mm.). Seventy-nine hand colored lithographs, all heightened with gum arabic. Plate 79 mis-bound before plate 77. Eight-page Aubert et Cie. catalog bound in at end. A few plates lightly toned in blank margins, some very occasional light foxing. Publisher's violet ribbed cloth, front cover lettered in gilt, spine faded. Loosely inserted is a hand written note signed by Gavarni. An remarkable example of this extremely rare Gavarni Album. OCLC locates just one example in libraries & institutions worldwide: Clark Art Institute (MA, US). There have been just four complete copies at auction since 1901. A second series titled Les Lorettes Vieillies appeared in the 1860's. This second series contained thirty hand colored lithographs. OCLC locates just two copies of this rare work - they do not state that the plates are colored: University of Miami (FL, US) & Northwestern University Library (IL, US). "Les Lorettes- This is the most masterly of Gavarni's earlier series. Ladies of the evening of a certain standing had come to be called lorettes because they often lived in the handsome new buildings of the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette. No subject could have been better suited to Gavarni's talents. Indeed, Paul de Saint Victor observed (preface to D'Après nature, II, 2) that "the lorette is for him what the actress of the Italian Comedy was for Watteau." Gavarni shows them without malice and without indulgence, exactly as they were. The grisette of Les étudiants de Paris was an ingratiating figure; not so the lorette. Love is their business, and they drive hard bargains. They are as luxurious and idle as they are beautiful. Their lives are a tissue of deception and hypocrisy. Among themselves their conversation is cynical to the point of brutality. Their men, usually twice their age, also cut a poor figure. At best these gentlemen command a wry irony which derives from their awareness of being dupes. Gavarni presents these brittle and glittering creatures with great deftness. The packed and subtle dialogue of the legends would not be amiss in a novel by Stendhal. It is difficult to select from his remarkable compositions, but one cannot overlook- no. 27, in which a lorette in her bath indulges in a rare moment of speculative conversation with a friend." (Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book, pp. 223-224). Note. Gordon Ray's copy had 73 of the 79 hand colored lithographs - missing nos. 19-24). "Lorette was a colloquialism for a new type of prostitute who was kept in relative luxury in the apartment buildings that had been constructed in the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette church. Gavarni's sharp-eyed observations of Parisian society in works like these demonstrate his value as a documentarian of his times." (Bobins V, p. 64, #1541). “In 1837 Gavarni began his connection with Le charivari, which did not conclude until 1848. In all he drew 1054 lithographs for his journal-Most of these appeared in series, some twenty-five of which extend to ten or more plates, and were afterwards published by Aubert in albums. Perhaps the best of these collections are Fourberies de femmes en matière de sentiment, Les étudiants de Paris, Les débardeurs, and Les lorettes; but some of the rest are of hardly inferior interest. Still further series, contributed to periodicals other than Le charivari, were also issued as albums. Baudelaire had this part of Gavarni’s work particularly in mind when he wrote-that ‘the true glory and the true mission of Gavarni and Daumier has been to complete Balzac.’ Certainly the pictures of Parisian society provided by the two artists perfectly complement each other. Daumier’s preoccupation was the working middle class with faces and figures heavily marked by life. Gavarni remained for the most part outside the humdrum bourgeois round. He preferred to show ‘youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm.’ His pretty girls and sleek young men are bent on enjoyment. They live lives of graceful dissipation, with love intrigues and balls on the one hand, and pawnbrokers’ shops and debtors’ prisons on the other-[In 1846, Gavarni] returned to Le charivari, to which he had hardly contributed since 1843. He wished to call the series that ensued Choses de Paris but was persuaded instead to employ the general title Oeuvres nouvelles. Its major albums were Carnaval; Impressions de ménage, deuxième série, thirty-nine lithographs, 1846-1847; and Baliverneries parisiens, twenty-four lithographs, 1847” (Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book, pp. 217-218). Armelhault & Bocher 763-841; Beraldi VII, p.51 # 107; Bobins V, 1541.        . .

Keywords: Books in French Caricatures Erotica French History


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