“Sainte-Marie-des-Fleurs”
Spreading some beauty today…
“Sainte-Marie-des-Fleurs” is a lithograph poster by the French Art Nouveau artist, Paul Berthon, from 1897. This was a commissioned advertisement for the publication of the novel, Sainte-Marie-des-Fleurs by the French novelist, René Boylesve.
Boylesve’s book was named after a church in Florence, the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. It details a dramatic story about a forbidden love between members of different social classes in Parisian society who met when traveling abroad in Italy.
To advertiser this book, Berthon depicted a woman gently holding long stemmed white flowers. Her long red hair billows and flows. Her clothes are in the fashion of classic Art Nouveau style. She wears a delicate golden headband and a Grecian style green dress. Her golden belt, bracelet, and armlet compliment the headband. The large and generously petaled white flowers, which may be peonies, are sitting in an ornate golden vase in the foreground of the piece. Swirling fantastical beasts give the vase an almost Celtic feeling. Another golden beast is in the top left, neatly creating a cohesive image.
The texts in Berthon’s work, as in this piece here, are not within the main frame of the art piece. He purposefully excluded the advertising within the image from his posters so they could stand as works of art on their own.
This lithograph was part of the Les Maître de L’Affiches series, which translates as Masters of the Poster. This was an art series that was originally offered as a subscription for collectors. A different poster was mailed out monthly. At the end of the year, they could be bound together into a single book collection. These posters were greatly appealing due to their more manageable size and high printed quality. Larger posters usually had to be rolled up and used a lesser quality ink.
One of the original lithographs of “Sainte-Marie-des-Fleurs” is currently in the collections of the Museumsberg Flensburg, in Flensburg, Germany.
For more on Paul Berthon, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
