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Militairiana
Paris: Chez Aubert & Cie., 1840. Item #06381
“He draws richly and wittily, and his caricatures, like all he does, have the causticity and unexpectedness of the observer poet.” - Charles Baudelaire
JACQUE, Charles-Émile, illustrator. Militairiana [Charges burlesques]. Paris: Chez Aubert & Cie., [1840].
Folio (13 3/16 x 9 15/16 inches; 335 x 252 mm). Tinted lithographed title-page, lettered in gold, and twenty superbly comic hand-colored lithograph plates, comprising a total of seventy-seven individual scenes, all heightened with gum arabic, producing a rich, slightly raised surface and a lively saturation rarely encountered fully intact. With the sixteen-page publisher’s catalogue bound in at the end (light foxing). Title-page with faint foxing confined to the blank margins; occasional minimal marginal foxing to a few plates, the images themselves fresh and bright.
Mid-nineteenth-century quarter dark blue calf over blue patterned boards, smooth spine, lightly faded, corners gently rubbed. A particularly attractive and honest binding of the period. An excellent example.
A remarkably scarce satirical album. OCLC records only three institutional copies worldwide: the United States Military Academy, West Point; California State University, Long Beach; and Brown University.
Militairiana stands among the most incisive and visually inventive military caricature albums of the July Monarchy. Conceived during Jacque’s own seven-year period of military service, the work is neither patriotic nor polemical, but observational - an insider’s view rendered with wit, empathy, and quiet subversion. Soldiers, officers, camp followers, and bureaucrats are reduced to their essential gestures and vanities, their humanity revealed through humor rather than cruelty. The cumulative effect is closer to lived experience than theatrical satire.
Although Charles-Émile Jacque (1813-1894), is best remembered today as a leading animalier painter and a member of the Barbizon circle alongside Millet, Militairiana reveals a different facet of his intelligence: swift, graphic, and psychologically acute. These plates anticipate the observational realism and compressed narrative later perfected by Daumier, and it is no accident that Jacque would soon contribute caricatures to Le Charivari.
Baudelaire’s admiration is telling. He recognized in Jacque’s caricatures the rare fusion of poetry and immediacy - drawings in which the idea “comes out well, and at once.” Militairiana occupies a liminal space between high art and popular satire, between lived military experience and the emerging language of modern caricature.
"Jacque, that excellent artist of many-sided intelligence, has also on occasion been a caricaturist worthy of commendation. Besides his paintings and his etchings, in which he has always shown himself to be serious and poetic, he has done some excellent grotesque drawings, where the idea comes out well, and at once. Look for example, at Militairiana and Malades et médecins. He draws richly and wittily, and his caricatures, like all he does, have the causticity and unexpectedness of the observer poet." Charles Baudelaire. Selected Writings on Art & Artists (Translated by P.E. Charvet)
Complete examples are seldom encountered; copies in fresh condition, with original hand coloring and intact gum-arabic highlights, are rarer still. A key early nineteenth-century French caricature album, prized equally for its humor, historical insight, and its place within the evolution of modern graphic satire.
Price: $4,500.00