The Printed Book

    "A La Fontaine."
It may be imagined what an engraver could produce working from 1650 and dying in 1715, that is, a life of work the longest that could be hoped for. Leclerc was the absolute contemporary of the King. He died, like him, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, leaving work widely scattered among books, funeral orations, and placards. After the example of Callot and Bosse, he did not disdain satire. One of his prettiest vignettes served to illustrate some pamphlet of Richesource against the journalists of his time; it represents a dandy of about 1679 offering his gazette.

By the side of this unrivalled antagonist it is permitted to place Lepautre, twenty years older than Leclerc, but whose studies had been principally on architecture. In the moments that he left his special work he devoted himself to frontispieces and vignettes; nevertheless, although he had before him the charming designs of Leclerc, he confined himself to a cold and hard manner, keeping, besides, as much as possible to titles, in which his particular talent could find scope. He designed also the Chartreux Missal of 1679, the Gallia Christiana after Marot, the Dioptrique Oculaire of P. Chérubin, engraved by Edelinck, and a thousand other works of small repute.

Very different was Francis Chauveau, who, without having the delicacy of Sébastien Leclerc or his art of arrangement, treated at least with grace little figures and illustrations. Certainly there is an enormous distance between these correct and commonplace engraved plates and the delightful wood engravings of the time of Geoffroy Tory, for example. But, be their worth what it may, they suited very well; and even with Molière they did not make such a bad figure. Chauveau was associated with many of the works of Leclerc, who caused him often to be less heavy, inasmuch as Leclerc corrected in engraving many of his compositions. It was so with Molière, and still more with Racine in the plate of the Plaideurs, in which Chauveau revealed himself a precursor of the eighteenth century. Unhappily he did not always follow this manner. Successively, and with various luck, he illustrated Alaric, Andromaque, and the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid for Benserade, with Leclerc; the Pucelle of Chapelain, and the Tragédies of Racine, to which Le Brun did not disdain to put his hand.

In short, the connecting link between the beginning of the seventeenth and that of the eighteenth century in the development of illustration is Sébastien Leclerc. He had known the artists of the first period; he was to see at his death appear one of the precursors of the vignettists of the following century, Claude Gillot. Thanks to him, overburdened titles and unskilful vignettes underwent a gradual transformation. In the delicacy and tenuity of his designs may be seen the dominant note of the eighteenth century, coquetry, and Choffard is divined. He was nearly the only one who did not fall into the exaggerations of the engravers of the time; he kept beside them without touching them, and preciously preserved his own well-accentuated personality. By the smallness and slenderness of his figures, Leclerc recalls somewhat the school of Fontainebleau; but he is above all the reflection of Callot, a Lorrainer like himself.

In Holland, a Frenchman, Bernard Picart, son of Stephen and pupil of Leclerc, was making a great name as an illustrator. He established himself as a print-seller at Amsterdam at the sign of "L'Etoile," and successively designed vignettes for many works, among others the Boileau of 1718. His vignettes and tailpieces, without possessing either the spirit of Leclerc or the grace of the eighteenth century, express an ingenious and inventive art that had broken with the strained traditions of preceding epochs.

From these two artists the decoration of the Book rapidly advanced. The form is found, and charming designers are not wanting to apply it.

The troubled state of England during the greater part of the seventeenth century no doubt accounts for the fact that the art of the Book made but very little progress. Theological controversies, the persecutions by the Puritans, and, above all, the great civil war and its antecedents and results, gave rise to a flood of publications of an ephemeral kind, which from their nature were hurriedly produced; and there was little room for pure literature and art. In the early part of the century, under the influence which Elizabeth left, and which James fostered, some important works were issued, with finely engraved illustrations; but wood engraving declined further and further, until it was artistically dead, to be revived in the next century. The works of the numerous poets and dramatists were printed in quarto, and collected editions of them in folio. Thus were issued the works of Shakespeare, first collected by Jaggard and Blount, 1623, folio, with an engraved portrait by Droeshout, the faithfulness of which was vouched in an opposite page of verse signed by Ben Jonson. "Don Quixote" first appeared in an English dress in 1612-20, published by E. Blount in quarto; and Jaggard, Blount's partner in the Shakespeare, published Boccaccio's "Decameron," in two volumes folio, 1620. Among other notable works of the early part of the century were Drayton's "Polyolbion," 1613; Chapman's Homer, 1611-15, folio, three volumes; Lord Bacon, whose essays and other single publications appeared in the seventeenth, to be collected as his "Works" in the next century; and William Prynne, whose Histrio Mastrix, 1633, so offended Charles I. by its references to the Queen and the court ladies, that the author had to undergo a severe and degrading punishment. Many of these works were illustrated with meritorious engravings on steel and copper by W. Hollar, P. Lombart, W. Marshall, Hole, W. Pass, W. Faithorne, and R. Vaughan. So that here were all the materials for the foundation of an English school, to be cruelly broken up shortly afterwards by the distractions of civil warfare.

In 1611 Robert Barker first printed the Authorised Version of the Holy Bible, which has been more often reprinted than any other book, and which exists to this day as the great standard of the English language.

The taste for books of travel which arose in the last century was largely increased by the voyages and discoveries of the English in North America and the subsequent Puritan exodus there. These early accounts of Virginia and New England, many of which are tracts of a few leaves only, now command fabulous prices. The great collection of voyages under the name of "Purchas: his Pilgrimes," was printed in five folio volumes, 1625-6, while De Bry, Hulsius, and Linschoten were enriching the world with their collections of travels, printed in Germany and Holland. All of these works were adorned with finely engraved plates, those to "Purchas" being engraved by Elstrack, and, besides, it had a famous map of the world, engraved by Hondius.

The controversial spirit engendered by the religious quarrels of the century and by the great civil war gave incessant work to the printers; and the many tracts and pamphlets thus produced were frequently illustrated by rude and coarse woodcuts, of no value from an artistic point of view, but curious from the indications they afford of the costumes and manners of the time.

The first edition of Walton's "Angler" was printed by R. Marriott in 1653, 16mo, with plates in the text, engraved on steel by Lombart. Butler's "Hudibras" appeared in 1663-78, and Milton's "Paradise Lost" in 1667, quarto. Fuller's "Worthies of England" was printed 1662, folio. We have roughly mentioned the principal English books of the century, and next approach the revival of literature and art in the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER V

THE BOOK IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The regency – Publishers at the beginning of the eighteenth century – Illustrators in France; Gillot – The school of Watteau and Boucher – Cars – The younger Cochin; his principal works in vignettes – French art in England; Gravelot – Eisen – Choffard – The Baisers of Dorat; the Contes of La Fontaine – the publisher Cazin and the special literature of the eighteenth century – The younger Moreau and his illustrations – The Revolution – The school of David – Duplessis-Bertaux – The Book in Germany; Chodowiecki – In England; Boydell and French artists – Caslon and Baskerville – English books with illustrations – Wood engraving in the eighteenth century; the Papillons – Printing offices in the eighteenth century.

LIKE experience has shown us in our time, but in another manner, the beginning of the eighteenth century produced, in the manners and tastes of the French, an unconscious but tenacious reaction. It seemed as if the conceptions of romanticism had lasted long enough, and that the cycle of Middle Age chevaliers had passed away, and that a return to what is called nature was effected in literature and art. At the death of Louis XIV., Olympus and its gods, majestic poses and suns, had become wearisome. By a little half-open door, gaiety escaped from its prison and fled. For the Book that door was the hand of Sébastien Leclerc.

The ancient school was replaced. Constrained during three quarters of a century, French manners began to be joyous under the regency of the Duc d'Orleans. If the representatives of another age still lived, if Rigaud always painted his portraits in peruke, there were new-comers, enlivened by the new fashions, less solemn and more bewitching. Le Brun was then far in the past, and as amusing to the ladies of the regency as are now to us the fashions of the Second Empire.

The Book, after its manner, followed the movement, and gradually found the elements of its decoration in the tendencies of the day. Small sizes were multiplied, types showed elegance, and vignettes became more and more agreeable and intellectual. Amateurs had their ex-libris engraved. The smallest pamphlets were covered with ornamental letters, vignettes, and tailpieces, already very clever. Costume also, in its shorter and lighter form, gave to designers a means of agreeably composing a page of illustration and disseminating fancy in the figures. These revolutions worked themselves simply from day to day, as taste became more pronounced and exacting.

The commerce of the Book was still extending from the end of the preceding century; and if the number of printers was limited and arrested by certain somewhat hard laws, production in Paris was enormous. Among regulations that weighed most heavily on publishers figured the obligation put upon them by the ordinance of 1713 to deposit eight copies of illustrated books. In 1725 the King issued other regulations to affirm the rights of the university against the corporation, forcing the masters to assist in a body at the processions of the Sorbonne and to offer on the Day of the Purification a candle to the rector. In spite of this ordinance, more religious than useful to commerce, the fashion of vignettes increased. The principal shops were searched, as they are still, for novelties; the Rue St. Jacques and the Quai des Augustins, where they were grouped, were resorted to. The most important booksellers in 1727 were Coignard, the Barbous – who essayed afterwards, with Lengley Dufresnoy, to copy the Elzevirs, – Cavalier, Robustel, Fournier, Ballard, and D'Houry. Of the two last, D'Houry printed the calendars, and Ballard had the privilege for music. Another, Leonord, published the books of the Dauphin. At these and other publishers', recent works were examined, those who did not buy gave their advice and took ideas, and so fashion slowly formed itself. It was thus that Houdart de la Motte published with G. Dupuis in 1719 a collection of fables, with illustrations of Claude Gillot, which was the talk at the booksellers'.

In this book all was original: the author, who had had, five years before, the eccentric idea of translating the Iliad without knowing a word of Greek; the text, a kind of imitation of La Fontaine, without salt or savour; the size, quarto, admirably printed by Dupuis, in the Rue St. Jacques, with plates by Coypel, Massé, and, above all, the charming vignettes of Gillot, the most pleasing and clever of all his collaborators, a sort of Callot fallen into the eighteenth century, and who ought to take the first place by birthright. Gillot has been called, not without reason, "the last pagan of the Renaissance;" and this pagan had the honour to give us Watteau.

The Count de Caylus tells the story. Gillot had quitted the pencil for the etching needle on seeing the work of his pupil. He had no reason to complain; his pictures were of no value, and his prints gave other artists the idea of imitating them. The whole French school of the eighteenth century may have had its origin in this forgotten book, illustrated by the master of Watteau. In fact, in the manner of the little etching here given we may easily perceive the coquetry and affectation that were later the dominant tone of vignettes. For, it may well be said, the graceful, feminine, and arch manner of which we speak was, above all, conventional and false. In opposition to the designers and engravers of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, who reproduced naturally scenes of daily life in ideal conceptions, it came, through the moral education of the artists, that they put forth the ideal in the most ordinary things of life. Shepherds were no longer the gross, rustic peasants that we find in primitive Flemish paintings or in the "Hours" of Simon Vostre; they were coxcombs, pomaded and adorned with ribbons, playing the bagpipes, and making love to the shepherdesses of the court.

At first it was Watteau who influenced all the engravers in the pretty and the smart; Boucher did the rest; and fatally the Book followed, and followed impetuously, surpassing, if possible, the painted works. If the severe poses, the grave touch, of the preceding century are no longer found, they often go a little far in the contrary sense. It may be well said here that the arts are ordinarily the result of the manners of an epoch. The system of Law was not without influence on the entire eighteenth century, by the terrible manner in which he upset fortunes, awoke appetites, gave rein to aspirations hitherto held in check. Claude Gillot, the designer, was one of the first victims of the Scotch banker; he lost his fortune on the Exchange; but who may say what his artistic ambition dreamed of in the midst of all these disorders? One thing is certain: that Watteau, his pupil, broke off very short with the style of the seventeenth century.

Laurent Cars was the engraver who multiplied the compositions of Boucher, and made them the fashion. He engraved also, after the painter of shepherds and nymphs, illustrations to Molière, the most agreeable that there are for style and spirit. In engraving certain works of Lemoyne, Cars did not completely desert the ancient school. He appears at the beginning of the eighteenth century as if divided between two manners each equally possible to him.

The work of these engravers was almost exclusively in etching, biting with acid a copper plate covered with varnish, on which the drawing was made by means of a point. This process, always previously used for sketches, served also for finishing vignettes, which up to then had been finished by the burin. The suppleness of the work was greater, and the artist remained more himself than he could be with the stiff cutting instrument of the seventeenth century.

The sizes of books had not yet all come to octavo or duodecimo. The works of Molière published by Prault in 1734 in six volumes quarto, under the direction of Marc Antoine Joly, give the idea of an important work, not at all of theatrical pieces. To tell the truth, these somewhat exaggerated dimensions allow artists more room for illustration; later, when smaller forms predominated, text and engravings were so compressed that they were not always clear and readable to every eye; but the quarto was not graceful, it was not in harmony with the finikin, the pastoral pieces, then presented, and it had to disappear as a current size in illustrated publications.

The class of artisans employed on the Book is not identical in the eighteenth century with that of printers and publishers. In the beginning, as we have seen, the cutters of wood blocks and the printers were often the same people, preparing their characters or their blocks, and afterwards putting them under the press. Large printing offices had very quickly changed that. Each particular work had its special workman. Typography had its type-founders, compositors, forwarders, inkers, and pressmen. In the eighteenth century this was complicated by designers, engravers, plate-printers, and these different professions occupied themselves on the Book in manipulating the sheets in their turn. In the midst of this crowd, the designers and engravers, esteemed as was their collaboration, were not the most honoured. Their homes often reflected the effect of their life as clever artists, quick to spend the money earned during the week; and we shall have occasion to name some of the more miserable among them.

The booksellers, on the contrary, had become great personages. In the preceding chapter we have seen Cramoisy and Vitré, to name only them, acquire the greatest honours, the latter painted by Philip de Champagne, with many others lords of the court. In the eighteenth century there were Brunet, Ballard, Mariette, Chardon, Didot, and a host of others, during the time of Watteau, Boucher, and Cars, of which we shall shortly speak; and these several publishers had houses of their own, and furnished shops and printing offices with the best apparatus. Saved from falling into negligences by royal regulations on printing, they composed with admirable characters, on paper of the first order, imperishable works; and, usual consequence of their high situation, they paid the artists badly charged with their work. It would be long and tedious to enter into this matter in detail. They made progress by slow degrees, and in good time they marvellously united copper plate engraving to printed text, so marvellously, that in comparing their works to the wood blocks of the sixteenth century, it may be asked which of the two styles is superior in elegance and good taste.

One of the ancestors of this group of vignettists was the younger Cochin, who had engraved the plate of the monks in the fables of Houdart, illustrated by Gillot. Cochin, in spite of his passion for allegory and his very marked taste for affectation, gave, it may be said, with the designer-engraver St. Aubin, an enormous impulse to the art of adorning books. From the beginning of his career he worked for the publishers, composing frontispieces, ornamented letters, and tailpieces, or transferring to copper the drawings of others. Singular type of artist, besides, educated, well brought up, epicurean and spendthrift, friend of great lords, and protected by Madame de Pompadour. When he travelled in Italy with her young brother Abel Poisson, Cochin did everything, was ready at the least request, inventing curious menus, giving representations of fêtes, and yet finding the time to decorate books and design vignettes profusely.

He worked chiefly for Jombert, a sort of learned bookseller, King's printer for the artillery, who dates from July, 1736. Jombert was visited by painters. He gave little private soirées, which Cochin attended, and where he daily made numerous friends. It was in this house, of so special a character, and, it may be said, so little artistic at first sight, that Cochin invented his best frontispieces, among them that of the Calcul Différentiel, that of the Astronomie Physique, and the plates of the Méthode de Dessin, after Boucher. He was one of the first to produce engraved titles, with which the publisher Prault ornamented his dainty volumes, and which were imitated, up to the end of the eighteenth century, by all the illustrators who followed. In that to the works of Madame Deshoulières the letter itself is engraved. Since then the open letter has been copied in typography. These vignettes were used many times by publishers, sometimes simply effacing the inscription, sometimes reproducing the original design by a different artist. The boy with the swan had decorated in 1744 a "Jerusalem Delivered" in Italian, by the same publisher, Prault; it was then engraved by Aveline. Fessard engraved the second plate, which is here reproduced.

Nearly all the frontispieces of the Book with vignettes of the eighteenth century preserve this arrangement: an ornamented and draped border, with garlands of roses, symbols, and cupids, in the middle the title, in red and black, composed in open letter, often a scroll with the address of the publisher, but rarely a mark. It was the time of little winged cupids, goddesses, and gods. The goddesses were the favourites of the kings, Madame de Pompadour or the princesses, but rarely the virtuous Marie Leczinska, too homely and too much ignored to tempt the artists; the kings or the princes were the gods.

After Jombert, Prault, and Coustellier, Cochin worked for François Didot, syndic of the printers, for whom he prepared a set of illustrations to Molière. Unfortunately Didot died in 1757, and the project fell with him. Of the work of Cochin there only remains the set of Tartufe etchings in octavo.

In the vortex into which he was plunged, he successively illustrated the works of Rousseau, published at Brussels, quarto; those of Boileau, published by David and Durand, octavo; and Henault's "History of France," in the same size, with numerous vignettes. One of these should be noted in a book treating of printing; it is that in which Cochin pretends to show to his contemporaries the interior of a workshop in 1470. Without doubt the sketch of this print was taken in one of the houses frequented by him – at Jombert's, Didot's, or David and Durand's – for that room in which compositors are working and printed sheets drying was not an invention of Cochin, and served to reproduce a printing office of the eighteenth century.

With Cochin soon worked a number of designers and aqua-fortists, too prudent to lose the opportunity. The fashion arrived for books beribboned, festooned, and flowered. Hubert François Gravelot had carried to London this style of new works, which he knew how to decorate, in his manner, better than any one, with letters, figures, and tailpieces. He did not engrave much himself, leaving this work to lesser artists, and contenting himself with subtle invention and graceful subjects. With Eisen, Cochin, and Moreau, he is the French artist in the sense of the time, free, bold, and ingenious, but perhaps a little out of place in England. He published his plates to the "Decameron" in 1757, one of the most curious of his sets of plates, and a hundred various vignettes. On his return to France he designed the Théâtre of P. Corneille, from which the Galerie de Palais is here reproduced, on account of the illustration of bookselling which it gives. In 1764 the large salon of the Palace was still, as in the time of Abraham Bosse, a place where shops were fitted up and the new books discussed. Side by side with the dressmakers and merchants of every category, the bookseller offers to his customer the recent products of Parisian presses. Certain works were sold under cover and not shown; there is here something to pique the curiosity of unoccupied young men who strolled about and prolonged their stay in the galleries.

Eisen has a simplicity, a good taste, and a special and singularly perfect economy of artistic effect combined with typography. It appears hard that the designer had no consultative voice in the choice of impression and disposition of the Book. The union of the two forces, the vignette and the composition, is so close that it may be believed one was made for the other, neither venturing to assert itself. In the pretty and elaborate inventions of the artists reigned a lackadaisical affectation that was delightfully becoming; the rock-work, which it still had, suited admirably the borders of the first page. The Lettres d'une Peruvienne has a very agreeable title, but little different, on the whole, from that of Madame Deshoulières, by Cochin. It is the same with the Lettres Turques, published at Amsterdam in 1750, and generally in all the frontispieces signed by him. As to the other decorations of the Book, there were also a number of ingenious artists, confusing cupids and flowers, imposing blazons, delighting in playing with accumulated difficulties. Under this assuredly involuntary but real direction, publications attained proportions of luxury and coquetry until then unknown. The volume of Baisers of Dorat would not have lived but for Eisen and the delightful fancies with which he adorned it.

At the same time, we find Choffard, another designer and etcher of much repute, and sought after by the booksellers. Under his pencil the vignette became a chef-d'œuvre, the tailpiece was a delightful compound of judicious and sportive ornament, the taste for which grew more and more. From delicate foliage are suspended roses, shepherds' pipes, lyres, and zithers. With the zephyrs scrolls or ribbons float, carried by winged cupids. The initial letters are real pictures, of such fineness and precision that the difficulties of their reproduction prevent us from putting them before the reader.

When the fermiers généraux, those great amateur financiers of the last century, conceived the idea of an edition of the Contes of La Fontaine at their expense, their eyes naturally fell upon the artists best prepared to illustrate the inimitable fancies of the great poet, Eisen and Choffard. The first had for his task the composition of the plates, Choffard the general decoration. Ficquet was added for the portrait of the bonhomme La Fontaine – Ficquet, whose specialty in this genre was dazzling in its delicacy and spirit; Diderot wrote a short introduction; the composition was confided to a printer of the first order, and it was put on sale by Barbou.

It is not a book to be recommended from a moral point of view, but the typographical art, joined to that of designers and engravers, never obtained a more complete success: the size in octavo, the impression clear, united with the dimensions of the plates in a harmonious elegance, well calculated to please the three rich personages and the joyous amateurs to whom the Contes address themselves. True, Eisen has dressed the greater part of the characters in the costume of his time, which is a little hurtful to one's feelings to-day; it may be imagined, however, that it was La Fontaine who was mistaken, so that these delicate, risky tales appear to be created for the seigneurs of the time of Louis XV.

All the special literature sought for then by rich people had not the value of the Contes. There was at Rheims a person, who has to-day become the mode, as he was in the time of Louis XVI., who sold under cover a quantity of licentious books of the better kind, adorned with figures by Eisen, Marillier, or Cochin; this was Cazin, an artist in his way, but whose good name suffered under a scandalous trial. An order of the Council of State in 1764 enjoined him to cease his trade in the Place Royale at Rheims, where he sold his particular merchandise. It appears that the sentence was not without appeal, for we find Cazin at Paris about 1785. He was one of those who were ruined by the Revolution, after he had popularised the editions known as Petits Formats, printed by Valade, of Paris.

We have come to the most beautiful illustrated books of the eighteenth century, and to the illustrious artists of whom we shall speak in good time should be added the younger Moreau and St. Aubin, the former nephew by marriage of the publisher Prault, and therefrom a decorator of the Book, the other thrown by Gravelot into full work, and rapidly becoming the most subtle and adroit of the etchers of the time. Moreau did not wait long after his marriage before setting to work. He began with ornaments destined for the Histoire de France of President Henault; then he composed, in his own personal manner, titles and tailpieces for his uncle. In the Book he is the propagator of garlands of roses, which he grouped with an ideal grace; he twined them in the borders of his frontispieces, and put them judiciously in his tailpieces. He excelled in inventing subjects referring to the text which were not commonplace ornaments suitable for anything. The tailpiece on p. 202, taken from the works of Molière, brings forcibly to mind the Médecin malgre Lui, with its wood-cutter unmercifully beaten with sticks and muffled in a scientific robe. It is the same with other illustrations, that cannot be displaced from the position assigned to them by the artist without disappointment.

The year 1773, which saw the publication by De Bret of the works of Molière, may perhaps be considered as that in which the French Book of the eighteenth century reached its culminating point. M. de Laborde, first valet de chambre of the King and governor of the Louvre, published with De Lormel, printer to the Academy of Music, his celebrated collection of Chansons, dedicated to the young Dauphiness Marie Antoinette, and partly illustrated by the younger Moreau. The work is exquisite, of powerful yet simple grace. The sentimental note of the century was struck in it, the insipid love of shepherdesses there tenderly sighed, and the designer has delightfully rendered this arch side of the pastoral song.

Our task does not permit us to linger over the works of this prodigious and charming artist, but we must mention his inimitable plates to J. J. Rousseau, the finest and most agreeable of his compositions and vignettes, also his chef-d'œuvre, the Histoire du Costume.

As evidencing the activity of French artists of the Book in the eighteenth century, we cite the number of works illustrated by the respective artists enumerated in the last edition of M. H. Cohen's valuable Guide de l'Amateur de Livres à Gravures du XVIIIe Siècle: —

Aliamet, 34.

Audran, 16.

Aveline, 33.

Baquoy, 87.

Basan, 9.

Binet, 48.

Borel, 29.

Boucher, 47.

Bovinet, 34.