DRAGON: George Barbier

Showing posts with label George Barbier. Show all posts

Friday, September 22, 2023

William Phips by Marcel Schwob

Illustration by George Barbier

WILLIAM PHIPS

Treasure Hunter

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / William Phips

WILLIAM PHIPS William Phips was bom in 1651 near the mouth of the Kennebec River and those forests from which the shipbuilders cut their lumber. In a Maine village, poor and small, he dreamed his dreams of fortune hunting and adventure for the first time. There, in the sight of ships and makers of ships, the shifting, changing light from the New England seas brought to his eyes a gleam of sunken gold—a gleam of silver buried beneath the sands. Wealth was out there under the sea, he believed, and he wanted it. He learned shipbuilding, earned a small stake, journeyed to Boston. Strong in his faith, he repeated this prophecy: “Some day I’ll command a king’s ship and own a fine brick house on Green Street.”

Sufrah by Marcel Schwob

Sufrah
Illustration by George Barbier

S U F R A H

Geomancer

by Marcel Shwob

Marcel Schwob / Sufrah

The story of Aladdin is in error when it tells how the African magician was poisoned in his palace and how his body, burned black by the drug, was thrown to the dogs and cats. His brother was so deceived by these appearances that he stabbed himself after donning the robes of the blessed Fatima, but it is nevertheless certain that Moghrabi Sufrah (for that was the magician’s name) only slept under the influence of the powerful narcotic. He escaped through one of the twenty-four windows of the great hall while Aladdin was tenderly embracing the princess.

Captain Kidd by Marcel Schwob

Captain Kidd
Illustration by George Barbier

CAPTAIN KIDD

Pirate

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / El capitán Kidd

How this pirate came by the name of Kidd is not altogether clear. The act through which William the Third of Eng¬ land granted him his commission of the Adventure in 1695 began with these words: “To our faithful and well loved captain, William Kidd, commander . . . greetings.” Certainly from that time on it was a name of war. In battle or maneuver some say he always had the elegant habit of wearing delicate kid gloves with revers of Flanders lace. Others declare he would cry out during his worst butcheries: “Me?—why, I’m as meek and mild as a new-born kid!” Still others there are who say he stored his treasure in sacks made from the skins of young goats, the custom dating from the time he pillaged a ship laden with quicksilver, emptying a thousand bags of this metal which remain buried even now on the slopes of a little hill in the Barbadoes. It is enough to know that his black silk flag was blazoned with a death’s head and the head of a goat, and his seal graven with the same emblems. Some who have hunted the numerous treasures Kidd buried in Asia and America have driven a little goat before them, thinking it would bleat if it crossed the Captain’s path, but no one has ever found his hidden gold. Guided by Gabriel Loff, one of Kidd’s old sailors, Blackbeard himself searched the dunes where Fort Providence now stands, finding no more than a few traces of quick silver oozing up through the sand. All this digging has been useless, for Kidd himself told how his secrets would remain eternally undiscovered because of the “man with the bloody bucket.” He was haunted by this man all his life, and his treasures have been haunted and defended by him ever since.

Clodia
Illustration by George Barbier

C L O D I A

Impure Woman

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / Clodia

She was a daughter of Appius Claudius Pulcher, consul. When only a few years old she was distinguished among her brothers and sisters by the burning brightness of her large eyes. Tertia, her older sister, married early, and the youngest submitted herself entirely to Clodia’s caprices. Her brothers, Appius and Caius, were already greedy for leather frogs, nutshell chariots and other toys; later they grew avaricious for silver sesterces. Pretty and feminine, Clodius became the companion of his sisters, and Clodia persuaded him to don a long-sleeved tunic, a little cap with golden strings, and a supple girdle. Then they tossed a flame colored veil over him, carrying him away to their own chamber, where he remained with all three. Clodia was his favorite, but he took also the innocence of Tertia and of the youngest girl. When Clodia was eighteen her father died. Appius, her brother, then ruled the domain from their palace on Mount Palatin, while Caius prepared for public life. Delicate and beardless, Clodius remained with his sisters, who were both called Clodia. They took him secretly to the baths with them, buying the silence of the slave attendants for a few gold pieces. Clodius was treated like his sisters in their presence. Such were their pleasures before marriage.

Septima by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob

S E P T I M A

Enchantress

Marcel Shwob / Septimia

Marcel Schwob / Septimia

Septima was a slave under the African sun in the city of Hadrumetum. Her mother, Amoena, was a slave, and the mother of her mother—all had been slaves, beautiful and unknown, to whom the dark gods had revealed the spells of love and of death.

Crates by Marcel Schwob

Crates
Illustration by George Barbier

CRATES

Cynic

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / Cratès

Marcel Schwob / Crates

Born at Thebes, he was a disciple of Diogenes and he also knew Alexander. From his father, a wealthy man named Ascondas, he inherited two hundred talents. Then one day, while attending a tragedy by Euripides, he beheld a vision. He saw Telephy, King of Mysia, dressed in beggar’s rags with a basket in his hand. So Crates stood up on his feet there in the theater, declaring he would give the two hundred talents of his inheritance to all who wanted the money. Henceforth, he said, the garb of King Telephy would suffice him. Shaking with laughter, the Thebans trooped before his house where they found him laughing even louder than they. After throwing all his money and furniture out of the windows he took up a plain cloak and a leather sack and went away.

Petronius
Illustration by George Barbier

PETRONIUS

Romancer

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / Petróne

Marcel Schwob / Petronio

He was born in the days when greengarbed clowns used to sit around a fire roast¬ ing young pig; when bearded porters in cherry-colored tunics squatted by the gay mosaics at villa gates, shelling peas into silver platters; when rich freedmen played politics in the towns of Provence; when minstrels sang their epic poems to the desert; and when the Latin language was stuffed with redundant words and puffed-up names from Asia.

Paolo Uccello
by George Barbier

PAOLO UCCELLO

Painter

by Marcel Schowob

Marcel Schwob / Paolo Uccello

His real name was Paolo di Dono, but the Florentines called him Uccelli or Paul of the Birds because of the many bird figures and painted beasts in his house, for he was too poor to feed live animals or to obtain those strange species he did not know. At Padua he was said to have executed a fresco of the four elements, with an image of a chameleon representing the air. He had never seen one, so he made it a sort of pot-bellied camel with a gaping snout (while the chameleon, explains Vasari, resembles a small dry lizard and the camel is a great humped beast). Uccello was not concerned with the reality of things but in their multiplicity and the infinity of their lines. He made fields blue, cities red, and cavaliers in black armor on ebony horses with blazing mouths, the lances of the riders radiating toward every quarter of the heavens. He had a fancy for drawing the mazocchio, a headdress made of wooden hoops so covered that the cloth fell down in pleats all about the wearer’s face. Uccello drew pointed ones and square ones and others in pyramids and cones, following every intricacy of their perspectives so studiously as to find a world of combinations in their folds. The sculptor Donatello used to say to him: “All, Paolo, you leave the substance for the shadow.”

Lucretius by Marcel Schwob

Lucretius
George Barbier

LUCRETIUS

Poet

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / Lucrèce

Marcel Schwob / Lucrecio

Lucretius belonged to a great familylong retired from public life. Memories of his early days recall the dark porch of a house far up on a mountain, a bleak atrium and silent slaves. From childhood he heard nothing but scorn of politics and men. Memmius, a noble of his own age, played with him in the forest—played whatever games Lucretius commanded. Together they stood astonished before the gnarled faces of old trees or watched the leaves trem¬ bling in the sunlight—light vibrant and virile, strewn like a veil with dust of gold. Often they gazed on the striped backs of wild pigs rooting in the soil, and sometimes in their walks they met a murmurous swarm of bees or a caravan of marching ants. Emerging one day from a dense underbrush they found themselves in a clearing set all around with ancient oaks so nicely placed that the circle of their tops formed a pool of clear blue sky above. The tranquillity of this spot was infinite. They were, it seemed, in a wide path leading straight to the divine depths of the heavens. Lucretius was touched by the calm benediction of the spaces.

George Barbier’s Imaginary Lives

It’s always satisfying when one perennial subject here connects to another. Imaginary Lives is a story collection by Symbolist writer Marcel Schwob that George Barbier lavishly illustrated in a new edition published in 1929. Wikipedia has a précis which conveniently explains the connection:

Imaginary Lives (original French title: Vies imaginaires) is a collection of twenty-two semi-biographical short stories by Marcel Schwob, first published in book form in 1896. Mixing known and fantastical elements, it was one of the first works in the genre of biographical fiction. The book is an acknowledged influence in Jorge Luis Borges’s first book A Universal History of Infamy (1935). Borges also translated the last story “Burke and Hare, Assassins” into Spanish.

This is one of the best of Barbier’s illustrated editions, and the only one which allows him to combine his favoured references to the graphic styles of the ancient world with those of later centuries. The nude figures are also more explicitly detailed than in his earlier drawings, something only seen previously in his illustrations for an overtly erotic title, Les Chansons de Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs. The final full-page illustration is a further departure for the generally light-hearted Barbier, a drawing that so closely resembles something from Edgar Allan Poe it makes me wish he might have attempted a Poe edition of his own.