You don't need to be rich to go window shopping and this practice can surely provide you with some instant pleasure. If you're rambling around Venice and you like books, for example, you may find something truly unique in the windows of Linea d’Acqua.
The antiquarian bookshop recently put on sale a wonderful tome, Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses illustrated by George Barbier, considered as one of the masterpieces of 20th-century book illustration.
Born in Nantes in 1882, Barbier moved to Paris in the early 1900s after his studies at the local Ecole des Beaux–Arts. He soon became a versatile artist, working as a fashion illustrator, costume, set and accessory designer.
Fashion illustration is actually the art he excelled in as his work for the Gazette du Bon Ton, together with other well-known artists such as Iribe and Lepape, prove. Soon his fashion illustrations started appearing also on other magazines such as Le Jardin des dames et des modes, Modes et Manieres d'Aujourd'hui, La Ghirlande, L'Illustration, Les feuillets d'art, Femina and Vogue.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the story of aristocratic libertines and ex-lovers Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont who compete in the cruel art of seduction, is told through 20 magnificent illustrations by Barbier. The pochoir plates are characterized by lovely combinations of bright and pastel colours and clear lines.
The scenes Barbier depicted look a bit like vignettes: there are many erotic illustrations, but none of them are vulgar, they all retain instead a fairytale quality about them, also thanks to the style used to depict them, reminiscent of the pochoir plates made by Barbier between 1913 and 1925 for the Gazette du Bon Ton, the magazine edited by Lucien Vogel.
The amount of details in some of the illustrations in Les Liaisons Dangereuses and in particular the way Barbier depicted the characters' costumes and their wigs call to mind the plates the illustrator made for the almanacs Falbalas et Fanfreluches (1922-26) and Le Bonheur du Jour ou les Grâces à la Mode (1920-1924) in which he presented a sort of history of the costumes of various periods and countries, giving in this way the chance to future generations to get to know different styles.
This particular edition Les Liaisons Dangereuses - numbered, divided in two tomes and published by the French editor Le Vasseur et Cie in 1934 - is usually valued between €2,700 and €3,200, so, if you ever stumble upon it for less, (and you can afford it), you'd better buy it. .
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