Les Compensations
Paris: Chez Ostervald ainé, Rittner, & Hautecœur, 1828. Item #04943
One of the Earliest Masterpieces of French Romantic Caricature
Charles Philipon's Exceptionally Rare Les Compensations
Forty-Eight Superb Hand-Colored Lithographs by the Founder of La Caricature and Le Charivari
PHILIPON, Charles. WATTIER, Émile. Les Compensations composées et dessinées par Ch. Philipon, lithographies par Wattier. Paris: Chez Ostervald ainé, Rittner & Hautecœur, [1828].
First edition. Quarto (14 x 11 inches; 355 x 280 mm.). Forty-eight magnificent hand-colored lithographic plates, all mounted on stubs as issued. Plate 3 bis with two small clean marginal tears; plate 4 with a tiny stain in the inner margin, not affecting the image; plate 16 trimmed approximately one-half inch shorter at the fore-margin. Occasional light marginal foxing and toning, but an exceptionally attractive copy. The contemporary hand-coloring is of remarkable freshness and quality, beautifully heightened throughout.
Contemporary quarter maroon straight-grain morocco over pebbled cloth boards, smooth spine ruled and lettered in gilt, marbled endpapers. Small loss at foot of spine, extremities lightly rubbed.
Issued in four separately published parts, each containing twelve lithographs. Without title-page, as issued.
Published in 1828, before the founding of La Caricature and Le Charivari, Les Compensations stands among the earliest and most ambitious works of Charles Philipon, the man who would become the single most influential publisher of French political and social caricature during the nineteenth century. Within only a few years Philipon would discover and publish Honoré Daumier, Grandville, Traviès and many of the greatest satirical artists of the July Monarchy, forever changing the course of illustrated journalism.
Here, however, Philipon appears not as publisher but as artist. Working with the gifted lithographer Émile Wattier, he created forty-eight brilliantly observed comic scenes exploring the endless contradictions of everyday life. Each plate presents a pair of opposing conditions - the "compensations" of the title - in which every advantage is balanced by an equally absurd disadvantage. Love is contrasted with convenience, youth with old age, creditor with debtor, charity with ostentation, public bravado with private cowardice, fashionable society with the gallery gods of the theater, political ambition with political reality, and countless other ironies of bourgeois existence.
Rather than relying upon grotesque caricature, Philipon's humor is subtle, urbane and psychologically acute. His figures remain recognizably human, their vanities and weaknesses observed with remarkable sympathy. The result is less political satire than an elegant visual study of human nature, anticipating the sophisticated social comedy that would later characterize the work of Gavarni, Cham and Daumier.
The contemporary hand-coloring is exceptionally refined, employing a delicate palette that enhances rather than overwhelms Wattier's graceful lithography. Few surviving copies display color of such freshness and brilliance.
The work is of extraordinary rarity. OCLC records no complete copy in any institutional collection, identifying only nine individual plates held separately by various libraries. We have traced only a single other complete example, encountered nearly three decades ago in a private collection. The work is not recorded by Bobins, Colas, Hiler, Lipperheide, or Gordon N. Ray.
Les Compensations occupies an important place in the history of French illustrated books. Published during the formative years of Romantic lithography, it forms a direct bridge between the earliest experiments in comic lithographic albums and the magnificent flowering of French caricature that would dominate the 1830s and 1840s. Complete examples, particularly with original hand-coloring of this exceptional quality, rank among the great rarities of nineteenth-century French illustration.
Price: $14,500.00