The Fairy Ballet Carnival

And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.
Last came Anarchy; he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

PB Shelley - The Masque of Anarchy, 1832

"The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in 16th and early 17th century Europe [..and..] involved music and dancing, singing and acting, within an elaborate stage design, in which the architectural framing and costumes might be designed by a renowned architect, to present a deferential allegory flattering to the patron." [source]

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"The designs [..below..] are from the workshop of Daniel Rabel (1578-1637), the artist responsible for creating costumes for the spectacular entertainments performed by and for the French court. The ballets were based on the social dances of the day, but this was social dance elevated to an elaborate art form which combined choreography with poetry, music, song and pageanty, and included elements of satire and burlesque.

The ballets were enormously popular. Most were given at least three performances and all required a great amount of work from their creators and performers[..] Some professional dancers, actors and singers took part but the majority of the participants were members of the nobility. Many of these aristocratic amateurs were skilled performers, including the King, who adored dancing and devised some of the ballets himself." [source]

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The sketches in this post (slightly cropped and lightly background spot-cleaned) are from a suite of about ninety illustrations in a 1620s album by Daniel Rabel, encompassing three ballets: Ballet des Fées de la forêt de Saint Germain, Ballet de la Douairière de Billebahaut and Ballet du Chasteau de Bicêtre.

Entrée des hiboux et des corneilles

Enter owls and crows

Ballet du Chasteau de Bicêtre

(technique/materials - this applies to all drawings below) watercolour, brown ink & pen, silver & gold highlights
(keywords) carnival, stage costume, fancy dress, dance

Jacqueline l'Entendue et un hibou

Jacqueline l'Entendue (character) and an owl

Ballet des Fées de la forêt de Saint Germain

carnival, dance, fancy dress, bird

Entrée du Roi à Atabalipa

Enter King Atabalipa

(last emperor of the Incan empire [W])

Ballet de la Douairière de Billebahaut

carnival, sedan chair, stage costume, dance, fancy dress

Alizon la Hargneuse et son dragon

Alizon the Surly and his dragon

Ballet de la Douairière de Billebahaut

carnival, stage costume, dance, fancy dress, winged dragon

Entrée des Coupe-têtes

Entry of the Head-Cutters

Ballet des Fées des Forêts de Saint Germain

carnival, dance, decapitation, fancy dress, sword

Entrée des Androgynes

Entry of the Androgynes

Ballet des Fées des Forêts de Saint Germain

ballet, carnival, dance, fancy dress, [androgyny]

Entrée de la Douairière et de ses dames

Entry of the Dowager* and her Ladies in Waiting*

Ballet de la Douairière de Billebahaut

caricature, carnival, stage costume, dance, fancy dress, old age

Entrée des Médecins courant la Guinteine

Entry of the Doctors running the ?**

Ballet des Fées des Forêts de Saint Germain

armour, carnival, knight, equestrian battle, stage costume, dance, fancy dress, tournament

**ADDIT: La guinteine is the French archaic term for a quintain. A quintain is a jousting dummy training device, hinge-mounted on a wooden pole, and either filled with sandbags, made of a target shield, or, sometimes, holding a human target/training partner. Knights would strike the quintain with their lance and the assembly would rotate away from the horse and rider as they proceeded through. Over time, the practise evolved into something of a game, including bursting containers of water and the tilting at rings. See: here & here. The Joust of the Quintain Festival has been held each year since 1946 in Perugia, Italy. I note that the Carolina Renaissance Fair, over ~6 weekends starting in October, boasts "A Joust to the Death" as part of their program. Charming. [Thanks to Will C & Owen!]

Entrée du Grand Can et de ses suivants

Entry of the Great Can (?)** and his followers

Ballet de la Douairière de Billebahaut

ballet, camel, stage costume, dance

I think Will C is right when he kindly wrote to suggest that Can is most likely a variant of Khan, "perhaps in this case meaning the ruler of Persia, since the character on the camel is wearing a radiance costume, associated in a kind of garbled way with the (non-Muslim) sun imagery of Ahura Mazda."

Bagage des Grenadins

{Granada*}

Note: Jean Rochefort (famous French actor, horse enthusiast and co-author of 'Le Louvre à Cheval' {2011}¹; ²) sees something of a chimera in this image, which he refers to as a givaldros: a subtle crossing of giraffe, horse and camel.

Ballet de la Douairière de Billebahaut

ballet, horse (animal), stage costume, costume, dance, saddle

Musique de l'Amérique

Ballet de la Douairière de Billebahaut

"The history of court ballet can be understood as a series of movements toward and against the literary element. After a period (1590-1605) where dancing prevails, the following periods (1610-1620, 1620-1636) saw the development processing romantic themes, and burlesque ballet (the Dowager of Billebahaut, 1626)." [source | outline]

carnival, dance, fancy dress, percussion instrument, wind instrument, llama (animal)

Entrée des laquais et des singes

Entry of lackeys and monkeys

Ballet des Fées des Forêts de Saint Germain (Ballet of the Saint Germain Fairy Forest) is a five act ballet, including 26 stage entries. It was danced by Louis XIII and his entourage at the Louvre in February, 1625. It was illustrated by ~30 drawings (by Daniel Rabel) of mythological, allegorical, exotic and grotesque costumes.

ballet, stage costume, dance, monkey

Grand Ballet (with 16 male performers)

Ballet des Fées de la forêt de Saint Germain

carnival, stage costume, dance, fancy dress

Entrée des Lutins

Entry of the Elves

Ballet du Chasteau de Bicêtre
See: 'L'aristocratie française et le ballet de cour' 1956 {W}

carnival, castle, dance, fancy dress

Entrée du héraut et des tambours

Entry of the Herald and drum(mer)s

Ballet Fairy Forest of Saint Germain

carnival, dance, fancy dress, musical instrument

Entrée des vaillants combattants

Entry of the Brave Fighters

Ballet des Fées des Forêts de Saint Germain

ballet, carnival, dance, fancy dress, warrior

Musiciens de campagne

Rural Musicians

Ballet Fairy of the Forest of St. Germain

ballet, carnival, horn, stage costume, fancy dress, wind instrument

Entrée des Parrains et de leurs pages

Entry of the Promoters (?) and their Pages

Ballet Fairy of the Forest of St. Germain

carnival, dance, fancy dress, dwarves  little people

Musique servant de récit au Grand Ballet

~(?)Music Recital for the Grand Ballet

(specific ballet not named)
dance, fancy dress, stringed instrument

Seconde entrée du Grand Seigneur

Second entry of the Great Prince (Lord)

Ballet de la Douairière de Billebahaut

canopy, ballet, stage costume, oriental costume

Perrette la Hazardeuse et un chat

The hazardous Perrette and a cat

Ballet des Fées de la forêt de Saint Germain [10 Dec 2012]

ballet, cat (animal), stage costume, dance


The humorous masquerade costume design grotesqueries, for three 1620s French royal ballets, were sketched by Daniel Rabel and are available (in modest size only) via the website of Réunion des musées nationaux et du Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées. [home search page - put daniel rabel in free text box if the previous link doesn't work or via here]

• Highly recommended : {pdf warning} 'Daniel Rabel and the Grotesque' (2001) by John H Astington IN: Early Theatre - A Journal Associated with the Records of Early English Drama, Vol. 4 Issue 1. It gives a brief account of the influences and genres involved and the way these various elements developed and moved from place to place around Europe. That whole broad subject, covering the origins and propagation of tropes, like caricature and grotesque, is perhaps my favourite aspect of ignorantly delving into art history from the Medieval to Early Modern periods. [more]
• Court Comedies and Masques from Theatre Database.
• 1600-1649 Ballets, Mascarades, Divertissements, Comédie & Tragédies en musique.
• Elizabethan Masques.
• Masque and Pastoral.
• A great collection of Daniel Rabel illustrations (most are grotesque cartouches) at the Rijksmuseum.
• Forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

Translation from here: "The Ballet Fairy forest of Saint-Germain was danced at the Louvre in February 1625, by Louis XIII himself (in the role of a "valiant fighter") and his court.
It was painted by Henri de Savoie, Duke of Nemours, on texts by the poet René Bordier, with instrumental pieces of dance master Jacques de Belleville and stories of Anthony Boesset, Superintendent of music.
Each creature appears in an allegorical act devoted to him: Guillemine-the-hacking, Fairy of Music; Gillette-the-Hazardeuse, fairy Players, Jacqueline Heard the fairy of the Lame Brains; Alizon-the-snapping, fairy Valor Affairs; Macette la Cabrioleuse, fairy Dance.
This ballet is a brilliant comic and a wealth of machinery."

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Shakespeare The Tempest Act IV Scene I

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Addit: Zeck wrote to advise the following (I've edited out the image identification numbers which are readily accessible from the links above):
-le premier, le Ballet des fées des forêts de S. Germain, dansé le 9 février 1625
-le second ballet est le Ballet de la Doairière de Billebahaut dansé par Sa Majesté en février 1626 dans la salle du Louvre
-le troisième ballet, le Ballet du chasteau de Bicêtre dansé le 8 mars au Louvre, à l'Arsenal et à l'Hôtel de Ville

Dapper Days in China

Engravings of religious, civic and natural scenes of China

as understood or believed by Europeans in the 1670s

[All the images have been cropped but I don't recall doing much

in the way of background cleaning or any other adjustments]

Despite never leaving his homeland, Amsterdam clergyman and doctor, Olfert Dapper (1635-1689), became an historical travel writer during the Dutch ascendancy in the Golden Age of exploration and discovery*.

The book featured above was just one title from a renowned body of work Dapper turned out, introducing an enthusiastic public to little known exotic locations from around the world. What Dapper may have lacked in first hand experience, he more than made up for in academic diligence over a quarter of a century of painstaking geographical and ethnological research.

After publishing an initial history of Amsterdam in the early 1660s, Dapper went on to write valuable and well respected books on Africa (his best-known), Persia, Asia, Georgia, Arabia and, of course, China. Far from being mere repetitions of earlier works though (as I admit I was expecting to discover), Dapper's books appear to have been rather exceptional in the world of educational scholarship for their time:

"Dapper avoided all ethnocentric connotations and became the first person to adopt an interdisciplinary approach, weaving together the separate threads of geography, economics, politics, medicine, social life and customs. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Dapper produced a genuine work for posterity, not just a compendium of exotic curiosities." [source]

The illustrations for Dapper's 'Description of China' were undoubtedly produced by Jacob Van Meurs, a fellow countryman with his own celebrated reputation as cartographic engraver, who collaborated with Dapper on a number of projects. The visual recording of the country runs the gamut from what is likely faithful renderings of idols and religious and civil buildings from Taiwan and the Mainland, to mystical approximations or downright absurdities and fanciful botanical and biological specimens.

A few of the illustrations are obviously produced by, or copied after, traditional Chinese artists. Dapper relied on a large number of sources, including first hand visitor reports, and it's logical to assume that some of the illustration work was modelled after earlier efforts or became exaggerated the further away from the original source or travel report they got. If you publish a new style of book (travel literature) with outlandish and fabricated pictures that can't be readily checked for accuracy, so much the better for publicity and profits no doubt.

• 'Beschryving Des Keizerryks Van Taising Of Sina: Vertoont in de Benaming, Grens-palen, Steden, Stroomen, Bergen ... Tale, Letteren, &c. ; Verciert met verscheide Koopere Plaeten' is online in full at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg (1670) [click anything below 'Inhalt' and then on 'Vorschau', up top, for thumbnail pages of the whole book] {the middlish Dutch translates approximately to: 'Description of the Empire of Taising or China: outlined through the place names, border markers, cities, streams/rivers, ... language, letters, etc and illustrated with various copperplate engravings'} .
• The Olfert Dapper Museum in Paris is bilingual and includes about the best biography of our protagonist online [W].
• See the previous Conjuring 17th Century Japan BibliOdyssey post that shows more of Jacob van Meurs' characteristic illustration style. (I was very tempted up above to quote myself quoting myself from my original quote, but I feared the blog would collapse under the weight of rhetorical recursion, despite said quote from said post from unsaid book still having merit)
• Books featuring - Olfert Dapper & Jacob van Meurs.
• The Digital Library of Dutch Literature (DBNL) biographic/bibliographic record for Olfert Dapper [T]
• Thanks Nina!
• Addit: One particular book (series) that conveyed insight into the true nature of Dapper's work - at least, seen in snippets - 'Asia in the Making of Europe' by Donald F Lach (1990s)

Paris Boulevards

Hand-coloured etchings of 1870s street 

scenes in Paris by A.-P Martial

'Les Boulevards de Paris' - title page / preface

*the text is approx. the etymology of the word boulevard
*horse-drawn vehicles = véhicules hippomobiles
*Porte Saint-Denis [monument] seen top left

Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle : Rues de la Lune, Beauregard et de Cléry

Boulevard Poissonnière : Voitures, chaussées (cars [cabs], roads)

*featuring Colonnes Morris : Morris columns (in colour) displaying advertisements

Passage de l'Opéra : Boulevard des Italiens^

Boulevard Saint-Martin : Théâtres de la Renaissance^ et de la Porte Saint Martin

Bureau des omnibus

Boulevard de la Madeleine : Station des Omnibus

Omnibus de l'Odéon

Eglise de Bonne-Nouvelle

*Florist's street store with the Church of Good News in the background

Perron du Théâtre Déjazet Gaité - Folies dramatiques : Boulevard du Temple

Refuge rue de Sèze

Tavernier Bonvalet - Jardin Turc : Boulevard du Temple

Boulevard Montmartre. : Passage Jouffroy

{Les Passages Couverts}

Boulevard Montmartre : Passage des Panoramas [W & F]

Boulevard des Italiens : Tortoni

*Tortoni: the dessert legends: ONE -><- TWO

Boulevard des Italiens - Librairie Nouvelle^

Boulevard des Capucines : Place de l'Opéra

"The Boulevard des Capucines is one of the four 'grands boulevards' in Paris, a chain of boulevards running east-west that also includes Boulevard de la Madeleine, Boulevard des Italiens, and Boulevard Montmartre."

Boulevard des Capucines : Maison Violet rue Scribe

"The tone is essentially aristocratic. Inner boudoirs sell the paraphernalia of the toilette, notably the house’s own exclusive ‘Reine des Abeilles’, or Queen Bee, cosmetic preparations, by appointment to the Empress."*

"*The Guide to Gay Paree 1869 – Part 5: Shopping" is an excerpt from 'Paris Partout! A guide for the English and American Traveller in 1869 or How to see PARIS for 5 guineas' [see all 8 posts excerpted from that book] -- from the Victorian Paris: Life in 19th Century Paris blog.

Figaro

*Le Figaro is a daily newspaper founded in 1826 [F--E--W]

Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle : Poste de Police

*Florist (+/- itinerant traders) outside police station

Boulevard Beaumarchais - Théâtre Beaumarchais

*The Beaumarchais Theatre, in the 4th arrondissement^, was established in 1835 and rebuilt in 1892 (the scene features a street toilet)


{All the images above have been cropped from their usual appearance as centrally-located, small illustrations on otherwise blank pages; a few have been very lightly background cleaned. Library stamps have been removed from each print and the images above with black borders were spliced together from screenshots}


'Les Boulevards de Paris' (1877) consists - here - of a suite of forty six etched prints by M-Potémont, hosted by Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie. [other names associated with this work : E de Saulnat, Xavier Aubryet, Faugere-Dubourg and (?V) Prouté -- editor(s) & publisher(s)]

I say -here-, above, as it seems that a few different editions of this material may have been released - perhaps for different markets - in 1877 (and after then too). One book has half the number of illustrations; another has a longer title and there might be varying amounts of accompanying text as well. All of this is quite esoteric and beyond the scope of this blog entry: it's something for the keen bibliographers out there to investigate, if they wish. [the situation is made complicated by the illustrator's long history of sketching Parisian outdoor scenes]

Jules Adolphe Theodore Martial-Potémont (known professionally, most often, as A.-P Martial) (1827-1883) was a French painter, engraver and etcher. His preferred medium was etching in which he produced a larger number of illustrations over a forty year period, primarily for the publisher, Alfred Cadart.

Martial spent some years honing his craft on the island of Réunion (near Madagascar) before returning for the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1867. His art was on display at the Salon of Paris for four decades and, despite the range of subjects and styles through his works (from children's books to landscape painting), Martial was perhaps best remembered for the etchings he made of Paris scenes - in a sense he was the city's historical reporter.

As Neil writes at Idbury Prints:--->>> "A great many of Martial's etchings take his home city of Paris as their subject, starting with the 300 etchings collected as L'Ancien Paris in 1864, and including several portolios inspired by the turmoils of 1870-1871. All published by Cadart, these include Paris pendant la Siège (12 etchings), Paris Incendié (12 etchings), Paris sous la Commune (12 etchings), Les femmes de Paris pendant la guerre (15 etchings), Les Marins de la défense de Paris (16 etchings), and Les Prussiens chez nous (12 etchings), comprising six or the twelve parts of Cadart's grand publication Paris, Siège et Commune."

'Les Boulevards de Paris' was no doubt an homage to the artist's birthplace, but since publication, it has been rightfully touted as an advertisement and travel guide for prospective visitors to the city of Paris.

• Adolphe Martial-Potémont Wikipedia [T]
• Idbury Prints on A. -P Marial.
• VIA the BnF's Gallica blog, which also reports on some older Martial prints. [T]
• Artfact lot [T].
• Entry at Toronto Library.
• Previously: France.
• Addit. Amazon listing.