?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,000
De Flers, Robert; illus. Alphonse Mucha. Ilsée, Princesse de Tripoli.
Paris: Piazza, 1897.
First edition, limited, copy thirty-one of 252 signed by De Flers; small folio, illustrated by Mucha with 132 color lithographs and borders, head- and tail-pieces, initials, and vignettes; bound in full dark blue crushed levant by Bretault in 1903; boards and spine decorated with elaborate morocco onlays in red, brown and orange leather, all edges gilt; minor repairs to top portion of front and rear joints; wide turn ins, patterned silk doublures and pastedowns; with the original limp pictorial wrappers bound in; contents clean and bright; housed in morocco-edged slipcase and custom cloth clamshell box; 12 1/2 x 10 in.
"Based on Edmond Rostand's La Princesse Lointaine, written for Sarah Bernhardt in 1895, L'Ilsée, Princesse de Tripoli was commissioned from the author Robert de Flers by the Parisian publisher Henri Piazza.
By the time De Flers had completed his manuscript, Mucha had only three months to prepare 134 coloured lithographs before the edition was due to go to print.
Mucha later wrote of the experience: 'We worked on four stones simultaneously. I did some of the drawings straight onto the stone. Other things, particularly the decorative edgings, I drew on tracing paper which was then passed on to the draughtsmen who continued the work with the colours I specified. I hardly had time to sketch out the motif for an ornament when they came and took it from my hands and got down to work on it.'" (Quoted from the Mucha Foundation: http://www.muchafoundation.org/en/gallery/browse-works/object/293)
See: Carteret IV, 162; Alphonse Mucha: The Master of Art Nouveau, p. 103. Mucha / Bridges L11, Triumph des Jugendstils 110-112, Spirit of Art Nouveau, 69.
