Jérôme Doucet / Maurice Leloir - La Chanson des Mois - 1904-1904

Jérôme Doucet and Maurice Leloir, La Chanson des Mois, Reims, L. Michaud Editeur, 1904, a highly refined and rare art edition of the Belle Époque conceived as a commemorative poetic and aesthetic hymn to the passage of time, safeguarded within an exclusive editorial binding in full cloth executed with a pied-de-poule geometric motif in blue and cream tones, whose large-format leaves with wide untrimmed margins house a premier iconographic apparatus composed of forty engravings and color lithographic plates finely washed in watercolors signed by the famous painter and illustrator Maurice Leloir; the work unfolds in a lyrical and visual sequence of exceptional painterly grace devoted to the twelve months of the year, each introduced and marked by unique compositions in which the cycle of the seasons comes to life through graceful nude female allegories or refined drapery, lively costume scenes and detailed symbolic elements, beginning with the winter compositions of January and February enriched with garlands of bare branches, ribbons, masks, and puppies, passing through the awakening of April with baskets full of painted Easter eggs and figures arising from the shell, to the summer explosion of August celebrated among golden ears of wheat, scythes, cornflowers, poppies and light insects, and to the autumn intoxication in which wine becomes the divine son of light and flame among wooden casks, grapevines, period bottles and cups raised to the sky, concluding with the evocative snowy atmospheres and sledges of December; the extraordinary calligraphic precision of the titles and verses blends harmoniously with the floral ornamentation, making the exemplar, even in the presence of physiological and slight scattered foxing on the period paper that do not affect the brilliance of the figurative line, a bibliophilic testimony of notable rarity and charm, of very high collectible value and of extremely hard scarcity on the international antiquarian market. In folio, pp. 40 nn.