Fouqueray

51828 — Paris: Laborey 1947. FIRST EDITION. LIMITED EDITION 450. This being no. 246 of 430 on "velin du Marais". 4to. 28 x 23 cm. pp.135ll.4. As issued loose in original pictorial wrappers contained within original marbled paper covered solander box. Full page map and 45 illustrations in colour by Fouqueray including 6 full page and 1 double page. Escales d'Asie describes a sailing voyage round the coast of Arabia: beginning at Suez taking the Red Sea to Aden then Muscat and the Persian Gulf to Basra. Fouqueray's watercolours - in which he employs a broad and subtle palette - are impressionistic but with a fine eye for detail. Author and artist started their expedition at Al Wajh on the Red Sea coast which Fouqueray "found to be a thriving trading port: long caravans arriving from the desert sands; dhows laden with goods of every description from Egypt Ethiopia Djibouti Yemen the Sultanate of Zanzibar and the rest of East Africa were tied up on the inlet" Billecocq p. 62. Next stop was Yanbu al-Bahr the port serving Medina before they moved on to their last port of call Jeddah - through which pilgrims pass to Mecca. Billecocq notes that "prior to the end of the First World War French artists had produced no major work depicting the country that was to become Saudi Arabia. But 1917 saw the appearance of Charles Fouqueray who was to become one of the most eminent official French artists an undisputed master of the Orientalist movement of the beginning of the century. He was in fact the very first to do what had never been attempted before". Dominique Charles Fouqueray 1869-1956 studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and specialised in marine painting becoming in 1908 Peintre de la Marine Painter to the Fleet an official title awarded by the French government entitling the holder to embark on French navy vessels. In 1914 he was the first recipient of the Prix de l'Indochine. Claude Farrère 1876-1957 was a prolific author of novels with an exotic setting. In 1905 he won the Prix Goncourt for Les civilisés The Civilized set in French Indochina. The preface is by the French naval officer Auguste Thomazi 1873-1959 who wrote a number of naval histories. Farrère and Fouqueray had previously collaborated on Jonques et sampans 1945 about their journey to China. Fouqueray's watercolour sketches for the present work date from between 1918 and 1922. During the First World War Fouqueray was sent by the French combined forces to the Middle East and particularly Saudi-Arabia. Bahrein Kuwait and Oman followed soon after. Stopping off in each country he made hundreds of watercolour sketches of local life and colour some of which were later worked up into oil paintings in his studio in Paris. Escales d'Asie Asian Stopovers his book has a strange publishing history. Originally published in a limited edition of 450 copies in France in 1947 the colour lithographed illustrations come from these earlier trips to illustrate the text of Claude Farrere also an account of a yacht voyage round the coasts of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf coast. Fouqueray's wonderfully evocative sketches had been waiting some twenty five years to find a home. His pictures of dhows Arab falconers of Muscat Matra of Kuwait bazaar have never been bettered and are a unique portrait of life once lived today a distant memory. Paris: Laborey, 1947. unknown