Souvenirs de Garnison et des plaisirs attachés a la chose
Paris: Chez Aubert, 1850. Item #05996
Amusing Memories from a French Military Post…
With Thirty Finely Hand-Colored Comical Lithographs Heightened with Gum Arabic
[CHAM, illustrator, pseud. of Charles Amédée de Noé]. Souvenirs de Garnison et des plaisirs attachés à la chose. Paris: Chez Aubert, n.d. [ca. 1850].
First edition. Large oblong quarto (10 1/8 x 12 7/8 inches; 258 x 327 mm.). Pictorial lithographed title and thirty fine comical lithographed plates, all finely colored by hand and heightened with gum arabic. Each plate with printed caption below.
Publisher's original green lithographed boards, upper cover with the elaborate pictorial title design printed in black and red. Boards a little soiled, corners and extremities a little worn. Internally remarkably clean and fresh, the hand-coloring bright and well preserved. An excellent copy of this extremely rare Cham title.
A wonderfully amusing - and particularly desirable hand-colored - collection of Cham's comic observations on French military life.
The thirty lithographs present a succession of wonderfully absurd episodes involving officers, conscripts, cavalrymen and ordinary soldiers, lampooning virtually every aspect of garrison life: military training and theory, uniforms and grooming, inspections, discipline, illness, boredom, relations between officers and men, and the innumerable indignities of army service.
The humor is characteristically Cham: economical in execution, immediate in effect, and dependent upon the interaction between the visual joke and the printed caption beneath each plate. The brilliant reds and blues of the uniforms, together with more delicately applied coloring to the figures, landscapes and architectural backgrounds, give the present copy exceptional visual appeal. The application of gum arabic to selected areas further enriches the plates and provides a subtle gloss and depth to the coloring.
The work is also encountered with the lithographs uncolored; copies with the complete suite of thirty plates hand-colored and heightened with gum arabic are considerably scarcer. In more than fifty years we have handled only one other hand-colored copy, in 2011.
CHAM (pseudonym of Charles Amédée de Noé) (1818-1879). French caricaturist and lithographer, Cham published his first book, Monsieur Lajaunisse, in 1839 and from 1843 contributed regularly to illustrated journals, most notably Le Charivari. He became one of the most prolific and popular French caricaturists of the nineteenth century, producing thousands of drawings and lithographs satirizing contemporary manners, fashions, politics and everyday life.
Several artists “followed in the wake of Daumier and Gavarni. Among the most attractive of the former is Amédée de Noé, known as Cham (that is, Ham, the son of Noah)…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. His contributions to the Album du siège (173), in which Daumier was his collaborator, are typical of his work” (Ray, pp. 155-156).
Published by Aubert, the celebrated Parisian house closely associated with the flowering of French lithographic caricature, Souvenirs de Garnison is a particularly attractive example of the comic album at mid-century. Its generous oblong format allows Cham's compositions considerable scope, while in the present copy the hand-coloring transforms the lithographs into exceptionally lively scenes of nineteenth-century French military life.
The Plates:
L'Infanterie à Cheval.
De la Coupe.
La Théorie.
En V'la du Gruau!
Cas non prévu par la loi.
C'est pas amusant la Guerre.
Merci de la Préférence!
Heureux Conscrit!
Le Pansage.
Ah ça pekin, tu n'as donc jamais vu deux troupiers…
Non mon colonel la musique ne marche pas trop…
Coupe à 10 centimes, frisure gratis.
Monsieur le Vicomte.
Qué Bêtise!
Petit Inconvénient de la Salle de Police.
Oui, j'ai quitté le Service.
Cap'taine!
Ce qui prouve la nécessité de l'Étude.
Quel artifice!…
Réformes dans l'uniforme.
Le pas gymnastique.
Il faut consoler les malades.
Quel amour de bonnet!…
Inspection de Cavalerie.
Gueux d'Arabes!
En V'la des Inventions.
M'est avis, Jean Piarre, que ce beau Monchieu qu'tire le village…
Pacot, le pot-aux-roses est découvert…
Je fus hier à l'opéra… Fus-tu content?
Y ne savent quoi inventer pour nous époumonner!
A remarkably attractive example of this scarce Cham album, complete with all thirty lithographs finely colored by hand and heightened with gum arabic—a particularly desirable form of one of Cham's most entertaining satires of French military life.
Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book, 1700 to 1914, pp. 155-156.
Price: $4,500.00