[Seurat] Ajalbert (Jean) - Lot 29

[Seurat] Ajalbert (Jean) Women's landscapes. Impressions. Drawing by J.-F. Raffaëlli. Paris, L éon Vanier, 1887; booklet in-8, bradel half-cream vellum, untrimmed, cover (period binding). 76 pp. excluding frontispiece, 2 ff. First edition. Lithographed frontispiece, enhanced with watercolors by Raffaëlli. Autograph letter signed: "à Seurat, bien sympathiquement, Jean Ajalbert". "I would like to create the Jockey Club of art, the free club, without registration." Lawyer, playwright, novelist, canoeist, explorer and, finally, académicien Goncourt, Ajalbert began his literary career with three collections of "impressionist verse" - the present Paysages de femmes, Sur le vif (1886) and Sur les talus (1887) illustrated with a circular lithograph by Paul Signac. The lithograph evokes the particular atmosphere and materials dear to the young poet: sooty skies, broom trees, palisades, lampposts, benches... elements of scenery often celebrated in Ajalbert's urban and suburban peregrinations, evoking in painterly fashion Parisian barriers and suburban landscapes, the factory corners of Saint-Ouen, the bare banks of the Seine in Asnières, the wastelands of Levallois-Perret, Clichy-la-Garenne, Pantin... "The modern painters gave you a sense of color and arrangement. You wrote as they painted," said writer Robert Caze (preface to Sur le vif). It was in the modest home of this former Communard that Ajalbert met the modern painters who were to influence him so much: Pissarro, Dubois-Pillet, Raffaëlli, Luce, Angrand, Signac and Seurat. Early on, Ajalbert owned drawings by Seurat. He was one of Seurat's first admirers, and published one of the first articles devoted to him (along with Fénéon), celebrating Dimanche après-midi à l'île de la Grande Jatte in his Salon des impressionnistes (Revue Moderne, politique et littéraire, June 20, 1886). Very few books dedicated to Seurat are known. We have listed three: Les Palais nomades by Gustave Kahn, the present Paysages de femmes and Strophes artificielles by Rodolphe Darzens.