Eugène Grasset
Who
Swiss-born designer, born in Lausanne on 25 May 1845 and died at Sceaux, outside Paris, on 23 October 1917. The son of a cabinetmaker, he studied architecture in Zurich from 1861, moved to Paris in 1871 and designed furniture, wallpaper, fabrics, tapestries, ceramics, stained glass and jewellery before turning to graphic design in 1877: posters, book illustration, covers and type.
Why they matter
He is one of the founders of the Art Nouveau poster, and the medieval one: his sheets look like stained-glass windows, with flat colour held in dark outlines and Gothic lettering. He was also its teacher. His 1896 La Plante et ses applications ornementales showed students how to turn real plants into ornament, he taught decorative composition at the Ecole Guerin from 1890 to 1903, and the typeface named after him, patented by Georges Peignot in 1897, was shown at the 1900 Paris Exposition. His Christmas poster for Harper's was the magazine's first experiment with the art poster, the start of the American poster craze of the 1890s.
What to buy
Originals: the posters are colour lithographs and the posters themselves are the originals. The full-size theatre sheets, such as the Jeanne d'Arc for Sarah Bernhardt (about 120 by 77 cm, printed by Draeger & Lesieur), are auction pieces; Swann's vintage-poster sales are the place to learn them. The affordable tier is Les Maitres de l'Affiche, the reduced colour-lithograph posters the Chaix press sent to subscribers from 1895 to 1900: Grasset's Salon des Cent is plate 98 and the Jeanne d'Arc is in the series too. Genuine plates are period lithographs about 40 by 29 cm, printed by Chaix, with the signature in the stone. Reproductions are everywhere; under a loupe a modern print shows a regular dot screen where a stone lithograph shows solid colour. Books: Dover's Grasset's Art Nouveau Flower and Plant Designs (2008) reprints 72 colour plates from La Plante, the cheapest honest way into his ornament. The serious book is the Lausanne museum's 2011 catalogue, Eugene Grasset, 1845-1917: l'art et l'ornement, edited by Catherine Lepdor (5 Continents, in French), which covers the posters, furniture, jewellery, stained glass and type together.
Notes
The V&A holds the Jeanne d'Arc poster; Poster House in New York has the design too. The Musee cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, his birthplace, holds his 1897 Larousse frontispiece and staged the 2011 retrospective. The Musee d'Orsay has his enamel brooch Apparitions, one of the jewels he designed for Henri Vever. Public domain, so scans are free on Wikimedia Commons.
Story
Anyone who has opened a French dictionary has probably met Grasset without knowing it. The Larousse emblem, a dandelion clock inside a circle with the motto "Je seme a tout vent" - I sow to every wind - was first drawn in 1876 by Emile-Auguste Reiber. In 1890 Grasset added the figure that made it famous: a young woman in profile, right hand on her heart, blowing the seeds off the dandelion, knowledge scattering with them. Local tradition in L'Isle-Jourdain, where the Larousse editor Claude Auge kept his family house, holds that Auge's own wife was the model. Grasset's sower became the house symbol; later designers redrew her, from Jean Picart Le Doux, who turned her hair into flames, to Karl Lagerfeld and Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.
Across the Atlantic he started something else. When Harper's first experimented with an artistic poster, it commissioned a Christmas one from Grasset, whose style, as American Heritage put it, was modern but not so avant-garde as to offend the magazine's conservative readers. In the spring of 1893 Harper's let one of its own artists, Edward Penfield, try a poster in the fashionable French manner, and the American poster craze followed: demand for Penfield's posters was so great that more copies of them were often printed than of the magazine they advertised.
Key works
- Histoire des quatre fils Aymon (illustrated book) (1883)
- Jeanne d'Arc / Sarah Bernhardt (poster) (c. 1889-1890) - V&A, London
- La Plante et ses applications ornementales (1896)
- Frontispiece for the Nouveau Larousse illustre (1897) - Musee cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne
In museum collections
- Encre L. Marquet (1892)
Rijksmuseum ↗ · Find a print ↗
See the work
Prints
Books
Originals
See also
Browse all 2,101 artists · Open in the directory · Where the work hangs: 13 museums on a map