Lucien Laforge - Les 1001 Nuits - 1912

The 1001 Nights, illustrated by Lucien Laforge

This is the first children’s book illustrated by Lucien Laforge, and one of his three major achievements in book illustration – alongside Ogier the Dane (1913) and The Film 1914 (1922). The text, laid out in two columns and framed by ornaments, is illustrated with 215 drawings – full-page color plates and black-and-white vignettes in the text. The content collects three emblematic tales from One Thousand and One Nights: Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp, and Sinbad the Sailor.

Lucien Laforge (Paris 9th arrondissement, July 10, 1889 – Paris 18th arrondissement, January 21, 1952) was an artist-painter and draftsman of radical originality, born to a mother who was a miniature painter and a father a violinist. Trained at the Humbert Academy, whose academicism he criticized very early, he began as a draftsman in 1910 and soon contributed to humor journals, especially left-wing and libertarian ones – Les Hommes du Jour, L’Humanité, Le Canard enchaîné, Le Libertaire. A man of deep pacifist convictions, he feigned madness twice, in 1915 and 1917, to obtain a (medical) discharge from the army. Close in spirit to Gus Bofa, his work was not recognized during his lifetime.

His graphic style is unique in the landscape of French illustration of the period: anti-pomposity by conviction, he advocates a clean, spare drawing that continually simplifies over the years, reducing the decor and details to their most essential expression to preserve only the force of the idea. In The 1001 Nights, this style, still colorful and nourished by Oriental sensuality – rounded forms, decorative arabesques inherited from Art Nouveau, warm palette – reveals the painter he was, who exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants as early as 1909. The meeting of this totally counterconformist spirit with the exotic universe of One Thousand and One Nights produced an album of striking originality, today uncommon and sought after by collectors of early 20th-century illustrated children’s books.

The album is presented in quarto (25 x 33 cm), 64 pages, bound in the publisher’s illustrated hard cover with a red cloth spine, boards illustrated in color, red edges. The cover is rubbed, corners worn. The book no longer holds to the cover, but the gatherings remain sewn together, loosely. The front free endpaper is missing. A lateral tear on page 16 and a small loss on page 17 (see photo).