Cham

rif. 04875 — Paris: Maison Martinet 1856. Three of Cham's Greatest Rarities Three Complete Hand-Colored Albums Bound Together Sixty Superb Hand-Colored Lithographs by the Great Master of French Comic Illustration CHAM pseudonym of Charles Amédée de Noé 1818-1879. L'Art d'Engraisser et de Maigrir à Volonté. & Mr. Papillon ou L'Amour Autour du Monde. & Pincez-moi à la Campagne!! Paris: Maison Martinet 1856-ca. 1860. Three complete first editions bound together in one folio volume. Folio 12 11/16 x 9 7/8 inches; 326 x 251 mm. Three magnificent pictorial hand-colored lithograph title-pages and sixty superb hand-colored lithograph plates all heightened with gum arabic and containing more than two hundred individual comic scenes. Plates lithographed by Fernique and Destouches. Late nineteenth-century olive-green buckram over boards marbled endpapers. Spine lightly rubbed. An exceptionally bright fresh copy the original hand-coloring remarkably vibrant throughout and beautifully heightened with gum arabic. Few artists captured the humor absurdity and quiet eccentricities of nineteenth-century French life more brilliantly than Cham. During a career spanning more than forty years Charles Amédée de Noé became one of the principal illustrators of Le Charivari producing thousands of caricatures that chronicled bourgeois society with inexhaustible wit and extraordinary graphic invention. While Daumier supplied biting political satire and Gavarni revealed the elegance and vanities of Parisian society Cham excelled in transforming the comic mishaps of everyday life into irresistibly entertaining visual narratives. His finest work appeared not only in newspapers but as luxurious hand-colored lithographic albums published by Maison Martinet. Intended for the fashionable drawing room rather than the newsstand these beautifully colored folios represent the highest achievement of French comic lithography during the Second Empire. Complete examples are today among the rarest survivals of nineteenth-century illustrated publishing. The present volume unites three of Cham's most elusive albums each complete and preserved with exceptionally rich contemporary hand-coloring. Together they comprise sixty large folio lithographs whose sparkling color and delicate gum arabic highlights remain remarkably fresh. The Art of Gaining Weight and Losing Weight Cham's wonderfully absurd satire on Victorian health fads follows the fortunes of two inseparable friends whose greatest ambitions could scarcely be more different. Monsieur Lesec painfully thin longs to become stout while the enormously overweight Monsieur Legras dreams only of becoming slim. Their increasingly desperate attempts at self-improvement lead them across Europe North Africa the Crimea Turkey and India where every new adventure - from lion hunting and camel riding to exotic diets and improbable medical cures - produces precisely the opposite effect. Cham transforms what begins as a parody of fashionable diet manuals into a wonderfully sustained comic novel in pictures culminating in a delightfully macabre conclusion worthy of the finest nineteenth-century satire. Only four hand-colored institutional copies are recorded worldwide. Mr. Papillon or Love Around the World Among Cham's rarest productions Mr. Papillon recounts the romantic adventures of an incurable optimist whose search for love carries him from country to country. Everywhere he encounters unfamiliar customs impossible misunderstandings cultural mishaps and romantic disappointment each episode providing Cham with fresh opportunities for gentle social satire. The album is one of Cham's most elegant narrative works combining graceful draftsmanship with an effortless sense of comic timing. Beneath its humor lies a sly parody of both sentimental romance and the fashionable travel literature of the period. Only a single institutional copy appears to survive. Pinch Me I'm in the Country!! Perhaps the rarest of all Cham's albums Pincez-moi à la Campagne!! is a masterpiece of observational comedy. Convinced that life in the countryside promises peace simplicity and healthy recreation an urbane Parisian eagerly exchanges the capital for rural France. His idyllic expectations collapse almost immediately. Instead he encounters uncomfortable lodgings impossible furniture sleepless nights aggressive livestock disastrous hunting expeditions endless insects suspicious villagers and every conceivable rural inconvenience. Each attempt to embrace country life merely compounds his misery producing one comic disaster after another. More than a century and a half later Cham's observations remain strikingly modern. His humor derives not from exaggerated caricature alone but from universal human experience - the city dweller discovering that nature is far less accommodating than imagined. The album anticipates the gentle observational comedy of Jacques Tati and possesses a timeless quality rarely found in nineteenth-century caricature. In more than one hundred years of recorded auction results we have been unable to trace another copy. Only eight institutional examples are known worldwide. Cham's comic albums occupy a unique position in the history of French illustration. They bridge the gap between the early Romantic lithographers and the mature social satire of the later nineteenth century combining sophisticated narrative structure with some of the most attractive hand-colored lithography ever produced in Paris. As Gordon N. Ray observed: "Among the most attractive. is Amédée de Noé known as Cham. of whom it was said that he had 'an idea a day' for Le Charivari. A good proportion of his thousands of lithographs were gathered into albums." The Art of the French Illustrated Book pp. 155-156. Three complete hand-colored albums by Cham are seldom encountered together. Preserved in such fresh condition with unusually brilliant original coloring and comprising three of the artist's rarest publications this volume represents one of the finest surviving monuments to the golden age of French comic lithography. Paris: Maison Martinet, 1856 unknown