Fortunio

First illustrated edition, published in 1898 under the imprint of the Librairie des Bibliophiles, textually reprinting the first edition of 1838. The work is illustrated with 24 original colour lithographs by Alexandre Lunois. One of 100 deluxe copies on Japan or China paper, this copy on China paper, no. XLIII, numbered in ink and justified; the total edition was limited to 600 copies, the remaining 500 on Marais wove paper.

A particularly notable feature of the present copy is that all 24 compositions are present in three states - outline, black, and colour - making 72 impressions in all. As stated in the justification, the lithographic stones were erased after printing.

Early 20th-century half orange morocco with corners, signed Stroobants. Spine with raised bands, decorated with mirrored gilt tools within a sequence of compartments, gilt rolls at head and foot, top edge gilt, original wrappers and spine preserved. A few spots of foxing to the title and margins, but otherwise very scarce.

From the library of H. Del Monte, with his armorial bookplate engraved by Malatesta.

Painter, printmaker, and illustrator Alexandre Lunois (1863-1916) made lithographic wash one of the distinctive techniques of his art, working directly on the stone with the brush and achieving unusually supple effects of texture, depth, and colour. His travels in Spain, Algeria, and Morocco nourished an important part of his Orientalist work and sharpened his taste for strong contrasts of light, vivid tones, and deep blacks.

This chromatic sensibility had already struck Edmond de Goncourt who, after visiting the Salon of the Société nationale des beaux-arts on 2 June 1894, praised Lunois’s Danseuses espagnoles avant la danse in his Journal as “a plate of the greatest character [...] through the intensity of its tones”. Such an approach to colour found particularly fertile ground in Fortunio.

First published in 1838, Gautier’s novel unfolds within a world of luxury, sensuality, and exoticism in which fabrics, precious objects, architecture, and elaborate interiors play a central role. Lunois does more than illustrate individual episodes; he translates into lithography the very substance of Gautier’s colour-saturated prose, exploiting the contrasts between line, black masses, and colour.

The three states allow this process to be observed with unusual clarity. The first establishes the architecture of the composition; the second develops its tonal values and contrasts; the final state restores the chromatic intensity for which Lunois was particularly admired. Brought together in a single copy, these 72 impressions thus reveal the progressive construction of the image, from its initial design to its full realisation in colour.

Published under the imprint of the Librairie des Bibliophiles, founded by Damase Jouaust and long established as one of the principal Parisian houses for finely produced illustrated books, the edition unites one of Gautier’s emblematic Romantic fantasies with one of the most individual techniques of fin-de-siècle illustration.

Sixty years after the first publication of Fortunio, Lunois answered Gautier’s sensuous, colour-rich prose with lithographs that extend its visual brilliance; in this copy on China paper with all three states, the progression from line to black and finally to colour makes the encounter between their two intensely visual imaginations especially vivid.