?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
EUGENE GRASSET (1841-1917) THE CENTURY MAGAZINE / THE NEW LIFE OF NAPOLEON. 1894. 84 1/4x35 1/4 inches. A. S. Seer's, New York. Condition B-: paper loss in margins; stains in margins and text; vertical and horizontal folds; three-sheets. Framed. With the poster craze gaining momentum at the end of the 19th century in America, publishers travelled to Europe to recruit famous French posterists to ply their craft in the New World. Grasset's first American commission, in 1882, was for Frank Leslie's illustrated Newspaper, and in 1892 Theodore Child, Harper's representative in Paris, asked him to design the Christmas issue cover for the magazine. This was his first truly large, color illustration for a US publication. In 1894 Grasset was recruited by the Century magazine to help advertise their serialized biography of Napoleon. The result, known as both "The Wooly Horse" and "The Sun of Austerlitz" was truly a monumental work. Writing for The Poster<> magazine in November 1900, Scotson-Clark declared that "this was the best poster Grasset ever did." The "Wooly Horse" became so famous it was even reproduced in stained glass by Tiffany! This poster also exists in a smaller, more humble format, but this is the extremely rare three-sheet, the most spectacular (and largest) of Grasset's work in America. The following year he created another poster of Napoleon for the magazine, showing the diminutive General in front of the Pyramids. He ultimately declined to design a third poster, which led to an open competition won by Lucien Metivet. Toulouse-Lautrec finished third, and was so angry that he decided to publish his Napoleon print at his own expense (Delteil 135). Etrangères, p. 143, Grasset, p. 208, Margolin, p. 35.
