22. Félix Buhot
(1847-1898)

Première Vignette pour « Le Diable Amoureux » de Jacques Cazotte (First Vignette for Jacques Cazotte’s « The Devil in Love »)

(click on image to print)
Buhot, Première Vignette

Première Vignette pour « Le Diable Amoureux » de Jacques Cazotte (First Vignette for Jacques Cazotte’s « The Devil in Love »)

Etching and drypoint, 1878, B/G 96 ii/ii, 50 x 70 mm. Superb proof impression on thin, old wove paper with good margins, signed with the red owl stamp and bearing the triangular Buhot family stamp verso. Buhot was enamored of literature (he was, early on, torn between becoming a writer or an artist), and particularly of the strange and fantastic. The eighteenth-century French writer Cazotte exactly fit the bill, and Buhot did a series of three vignettes for a nineteenth-century edition of some of Cazotte’s writings, the first two of which actually illustrated the story. Copies of the book are rather scarce, but proof impressions before the book edition, are quite rare. Tiny in size, these vignettes are yet packed with imaginative content.