Recueil de scenes de societe. Bound WITH: Recueil de scenes populaires.

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With 100 Hand Coloured Lithographed Plates Two works in one large folio volume, each work with fifty numbered hand coloured lithographed plates depicting humorous scenes, each with two or three figures in costume of the period. Contemporary half brown roan over marbled boards with two red morocco gilt lettering labels on front cover. Smooth spine ruled in gilt, marbled edges, some foxing and minor staining. Not dated but 1822, plates lithographed by Langlume. Overall, an excellent copy. (349*256 mm). (Ray p196. Colas 2366 and 2365. Hiler p710. Ray, The art of the French illustrated book, 128 & 129). Beraldi makes the painter Pigal the occasion for denouncing the vulgarity of the caricaturists of the 1820s, allowing only that his Scenes de societe may offer 'some information about the costume of the period.' The 'superlatively vulgar' Pigal, he concludes was 'the Paul de Kock of the print' (x, 276-278.) Surely Baudelaire (p995) is nearer the mark in what he writes of this 'amusing and kindly' artist. 'Pigal's scenes of the people are good. It is not that the originality is very lively, nor even that the design is very comic. Pigal is comic in moderation, but the feeling in his compositions is good and just. These are vulgar truths, but still truths.' Pigal does play to the groundlings, and no one would accuse him of excessive delicacy, but he knew his world and could depict in incisively in his lithographs. Consider the economy of 'Rely on me, my dear fellow,' of Scenes de societe (no 30). A nervous suitor, hat in hand and fumbled glove on the floor before him, is approaching a bureaucrat, who gives him his little finger. In the official's other hand is the suitor's letter, which will shortly join many similar appeals in the basket beside him. This study of abjectness and disdain epitomises the insolence of office.