Fairy Tales by Madame Leprince de Beaumont illustrated by Gavarni
This post is dedicated to fairy tales written by Madame Leprince de Beaumont who is almost exclusively known as an author of the most popular version of Beauty and the Beast(before Disney) but, as we can clearly see, created numerous other works for children as well.This collection is just a small part of Leprince de Beaumont's huge opus and apart from fairy tales (contes) which she always wrote as an educating material we can also find fables and short stories (histoires).
Here is a complete list of tales in the presented volume:
1. La Belle et la Bete
2. La Femme curieuse
3. Mignone et le Prince Desir
4. Le Roi bon et le Prince Cheri
5. Le Fantomes
6. Le Prince Charmant
7 Le Pecheur et le Voyageur
8. La Reine des Fees et Joliette
9. Le Roi Guinguet et le Prince Tity
10. Aurore et le Roi Fourbin
11. Le Prince Fatal et le Prince Fortune
12. La Veuve et ses Deux Filles
13. La Femme Colere
14. Le Prince Spirituel
15. Angelique et Roland
16. Le Prince Gustave
17. Le Trois Souhaits
18. Bellotte et Laideronnette
19. Elise et Mira
20. L'Ean Magique
In time some of the tales will be presented with a short summary but for now, we'll focus on illustrations only.
Beauty
Fairy
Prince Hyacinth
Good King
Prince Darling
Prince Charming
The Traveler
The Fairy Queen
Prince Tity
Violent King
Treacherous King
Prince Fatal
The Fairy
Widow and her Two Daughter
Prince Spirituel
Prince Gustave
Three Wishes
Drawings are signed by Gavarni (Paul Gavarni), which is a pen name of Hippolyte-Guillaume-Sulpice Chevalier. He was a designer, lithographer, and watercolorist.While we can find Paul Gavarni in numerous encyclopedias, he actually never used Paul as his First name. Just Gavarni, after the place in Pyrenees (Gavarnie in Luz-Saint-Sauveur).
His father was a cooper and Sulpice Guillaume Chevalier worked with him in a mechanical factory. He soon realized his progress in work is very much dependant on The ability of drawing, so he took evening classes to learn architectural and mechanical drawing.He also worked at land surveying and mapping what brought him a position of draughtsman in the Government Ordnance Department.
As an artist, he published his first work in Journal des modes when he was almost thirty years old.His sense of observation and witty portraits of people in everyday situations quickly made him popular and he began publishing Jurnal of High Society.This publication failed after only 18 numbers, making him so indebted he wen in prison in 1835 for almost a full year.
The next decade established his career as a caricaturist, with a significant change of style after the end of his marriage and death of his mother.Trip to London in 1847 led to a series of illustrations from the everyday life of poor people, one of his Creative heights. He never felt out of work, drawing for magazines and illustrating books like Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Fantastic Tales by Hoffmann, and Fairy Tales by Leprince Beaumont presented here.
As you can see, he didn't create classic illustrations with the strongest scenes from each tale. Instead of that, he focused on portraying the characters trying to bring out the essence of each with his insight into human nature.This unique approach can dissatisfy an average observer yet it brings us a very specific series of fairy tale illustrations incomparable to anything else from the same field, bringing fairy tales by Leprince de Beaumont closer to Dicken's works than to the tales of Perrault or Brothers Grimm. Gavarni (1804-1866 ) was the father of a successful painter Perre Gavarni (1846-1932).