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Conservatoire de la Danse Moderne, Le
Paris: Chez Aubert & Cie., 1845. Item #04794
“The Academy of Modern Dance"
Forty-Four Highly Amusing, Hand Colored Vignettes Depicting Parisian Dances
[QUILLENBOIS, pseudonym of Charles-Marie de Sarcus, illustrator]. Le Conservatoire de la Danse Moderne. Charges Parisiennes. Paris: Chez Aubert & Cie, [1845].
Folio (13 1/4 x 9 3/4 inches; 337 x 248 mm.). [1, advertisement], [1, blank], 16 pp Aubert et Cie. catalog bound in at end. Twelve superb hand-colored lithographed plates, containing forty-four humorous captioned vignettes depicting 'The Academy of Modern Dance.' Plates heightened with gum arabic.
The plates are all titled: “Conservatoire de Danse Moderne" and are numbered from 1 - 12. Each of the forty-four hand-colored vignettes is captioned.
Publisher's yellow pictorial boards, corners a little rounded otherwise very fine. Chemised in a brown buckram portfolio within a matching brown buckram slipcase with a facsimile of the original cover pasted on front panel.
"The artist, under the pseudonym Quillenbois, gives caricatures of the most popular Parisian dances of the period, [including the Polka and the Cancan]" (Hiler).
Extremely rare with KVK, OCLC and RLIN only locating two colored copies, at the Harvard Theatre Collection and the New York Public Library. The Bibliotheque Nationale de France and Harvard University, Houghton Library also have examples - but their copies appear to be uncolored.
Charles-Marie de Sarcus, a.k.a. Quillenbois, (1821-1867) was born in Dijon and died in Paris. He was a French painter and caricaturist during the middle of the nineteenth century, best known for his cartoons, which were published in many newspapers and albums between 1845 and 1853, and signed Quillenbois. This pseudonym was due to the crutches that the young, disabled artist used to move around. He was a friend of Cham, a.k.a. Charles Amédée de Noé (1818-1879) and he contributed to the satirical newspaper La Revue Comique (1848-1849), providing drawings to Fashion, L Éclair as well as L'Illustration, and was the official draftsman of the Caricaturist (1849-1851).
Hiler, p. 777; Lipperheide, 3105.
Price: $8,500.00