TRAVIÈS, Charles Joseph

Histoire Complette de Mr. Mayeux, Dessinée par divers Artistes et coloriée avec soin. [Together with]: Album Mayeux. Portraits Imagerie Populaire. [Together with]: Album Mayeux. Lithographies en Series [And]: Album Mayeux. Pièces Isolées - Pièces Extraites - D'Ouvrages et Périodiques.

Paris: Hautecoeur-Martinet, 1819-1831. Item #06202

A Superb and Exceptionally Rare Collection of Mr. Mayeux
“To say that he is vulgar is totally inadequate”

TRAVIÈS, Charles Joseph. Histoire Complette de Mr. Mayeux, Dessinée par divers Artistes et coloriée avec soin. Paris: Hautecoeur-Martinet, 1831. [Together with]: Album Mayeux. Portraits Imagerie Populaire [cover title]. [Paris, 1819-1911]. [Together with]: Album Mayeux. Lithographies en Series. Paris, 1830. [And]: Album Mayeux. Pièces Isolées - Pièces Extraites - D'Ouvrages et Périodiques. Paris, 1830.

A total of 446 hand colored lithograph plates/plain lithographs etc., and nine original drawings.

Three folio volumes and one large folio volume.

All four volumes uniformly bound in early twentieth century quarter maroon scored calf over marbled boards, smooth spine decoratively ruled and lettered in gilt in compartments, gray endpapers.

Exceptionally Rare with only one example of the Histoire Complette at auction over the past 124 years.

Les Mayeux represents one of the most audacious visual phenomena of nineteenth-century French satire. Created in the 1830s by Charles-Joseph Traviès and rapidly adopted by the circle of Philipon’s Charivari, the grotesque hunchback Mayeux became the anonymous mouthpiece of political, sexual, and social caricature under the July Monarchy and the Revolution of 1848. Issued in numbered series, in black and in hand-colored states, before and after lettering, the Mayeux lithographs form a complex and highly collectible corpus, remarkable both for their biting immediacy and their technical variety. As Félix Meunié first demonstrated in his pioneering Essai iconographique et bibliographique, these images are not mere comic ephemera but essential documents of French public life in the age of Daumier and Gavarni, and they remain among the most revealing—and elusive—productions of Parisian caricature.

LES MAYEUX
The Grotesque Voice of French Political Satire, 1830–1850
In the riotous golden age of French caricature—when Daumier, Gavarni, Grandville and Traviès turned lithography into a weapon of social warfare—no figure was more audacious, more shameless, or more revealing than Mayeux.
Hunchbacked, leering, cowardly, and endlessly amorous, Mayeux was not merely a comic invention: he was a strategic disguise. By placing political outrage, sexual satire, and bourgeois hypocrisy into the mouth of a grotesque buffoon, caricaturists were able to say what could not safely be signed. Ministers, generals, husbands, lovers, and republicans were all skewered alike, under cover of a character who could not be held legally or morally responsible for what he said.
Between the July Monarchy and the Revolution of 1848, Mayeux became one of the most widely recognized figures in the visual culture of Paris. Issued in numbered series, in black and in hand-colored states, before and after lettering, and sometimes with variant numberings, the Mayeux lithographs formed a vast, shifting universe of imagery—part political theatre, part erotic farce, part social indictment.
Yet, like so much satirical ephemera, the Mayeux were long dismissed as throwaway journalism. It was Félix Meunié who first rescued them from oblivion, assembling, classifying, and dating them with scholarly rigor. His Essai iconographique et bibliographique remains the cornerstone of Mayeux studies, mapping portraits, series, isolated plates, theatrical adaptations, songs, and related objects with a precision that allows modern collectors to identify rarity, state, and completeness.
Today, the Mayeux stand not only as wickedly entertaining caricatures, but as some of the most revealing visual documents of French public life in the age of Philipon, Daumier, and Le Charivari—a grotesque mirror in which a whole society saw itself reflected.

“Though he began as a painter, Charles-Joseph Traviès soon became a professional lithographer… Traviès has one incontestable claim to fame, his creation of Monsieur Mayeux… a hunchback dwarf with a vast, slack mouth, usually on the grin… To say that he is vulgar is totally inadequate. He is so egregiously, so monumentally vulgar as to command laughter” (Ray, pp. 198-199).

Price: $120,000.00