The Traces of Foreigners

The history of books illustrated by artists begins with illuminations: delicate arabesques and ornamental designs that decorated manuscripts and parchments, produced manually in convents and abbeys during the Middle Ages.

With the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, the woodcut technique, long used by the Chinese, became popular in the West. Its expansion throughout Europe gradually led to the replacement of manuscripts,

becoming one of the main methods for reproducing illustrations, producing sacred images, and even playing cards, in a more utilitarian function.

The progressive increase in book production and new social and scientific demands led to the formation of a group of artists dedicated to creating pictorial materials that accurately reproduced the content of the texts...

...a task later taken over by photography, which proved to be more suitable for accurate visual description.

During the 19th century, some artists made their forays into the field of book publishing, bringing their art in the form of illustrations in keeping with the written text.

The MNBA collection includes a collection of engravings by the artist, created together with Joseph Héliodore Pisan (1822-1890), for the book Don Quixote de La Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616), a fundamental landmark in the history of the modern novel.

Released in  1605, the book Don Quixote de La Mancha presents as its protagonist an ordinary man – unlike classical heroes –, full of weaknesses, anxieties, insecurities and who has an idealized vision of reality.

This innovative approach transforms the narrative into a profound reflection on the human condition.

In 1780, Histoire Naturelle was among the three most widely read books in France and influenced scientists who became famous for their evolutionary theories, such as Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882).

Pablo Picasso was one of the most important and influential figures in 20th-century art and artistic movements. The illustrations for the French classic Histoire Naturelle were commissioned by the famous publisher and art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939).

The book with Picasso's illustrations was published in 1942, three years after Vollard's death. The 31 domestic and wild animals, reptiles and birds depicted by the artist...

...are among the most spontaneous engravings of his immense artistic production and were created from his own visual, rather than literary, idea of a bestiary.

Another artist who was in high demand for illustrating books in France was Carlos Schwabe (1866–1926). A student at the Geneva School of Fine Arts, he moved to Paris,

where he illustrated The Dream, by Émile Zola (1840-1902), The Flowers of Evil, by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and many other books. In 1900, he received a gold medal at the Universal Exhibition.

The prominent French art scene of the 20th century also gave the world Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), a multifaceted artist who called himself a poet but also worked as a novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and visual artist.

During the 1920s, he devoted himself to writing novels and created the work Les Enfants Terribles while undergoing treatment at a clinic to recover from opium addiction.

The book, published in 1929, focuses on the obsessive relationship between a brother and sister and received critical acclaim for its haunting evocation of childhood. 

Years after the book was published, Cocteau drew illustrations of scenes from the story and, in 1935, released the album Soixante dessins pour “Les enfants terribles”. In the preface to this publication, Cocteau explains his desire that readers not only read Les Enfants Terribles...

...but be affected by it, just as the protagonist Paul was hit by the snowball thrown by his colleague Dargelos. For the author, “nothing is more disturbing than the end of a book, the end of the word that exiles the reader, the cruel abandonment of the characters.”