This remarkable collection of works by French illustrator Edouard Theodore Vieux (1831/2–1907), dating from between 1886 and 1892, showcases the artist's captivating graphic style and incisive satirical eye. Vieux's wiry linear sketches, filled out with simple blocks of colour, have a vigorous and wholly visual quality, more commonly seen in Continental work than British illustration. His aesthetic is particularly modern for its time—his work showing certain parallels with the sinuous black and white drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, and that of the later British illustrators Henry Mayo Bateman, Max Beerbohm and, most recently, Quentin Blake.
Vieux represents socio-political subjects and events relevant to French society at the end of the 19th century, including the stately visits of President Carnot, celebrations of the centenary of the French Revolution, and—most pointedly—the pomp and opulence of the British Queen Victoria. A self-declared admirer of Whist, who was political editor for newspaper 'Le Figaro', Vieux sometimes attached newspaper cuttings to his drawings, affirming their journalistic topicality.
Vieux appears to have particularly favoured crowd scenes, and is at his dazzling best when employing his exuberance of line to represent the unthinking behaviours of the masses. His art captures the tensions of the 'fin de siècle', a time when modernity in Paris was progressing apace—modernity being both a threat and a source of opportunity. The urban 'masses' were feared as irrational and dangerous by a dying, hypocritical elite; conventional political, moral and cultural authorities were coming under attack from artistic rebels, anarchists, socialists, champions of democracy and advocates of women's rights.
It is Queen Victoria, however, who receives the sharpest end of Vieux's pen, his witty and hyperbolic drawings repeatedly satirising the aging regina as over-indulgent and alcoholic, unfailingly attended by her Scottish and Indian servants. More broadly, Vieux's art deflates the inescapable dominance of the British Empire, and indeed the pomp of those in power, whether in France, Britain, Germany, Denmark or Norway.
Vieux's subjects also encompass scenes from the wider Belle Epoque world of popular entertainment and hedonism of the night, with absinthe drinking, circus performers and smoking monocled dandies—redolent of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Visually, the tricolor colours of red, white and blue dominate his work, and of course black—noir, the colour of the night, so readily reproducible in print. Vieux sometimes couples this darkness with the slanting black lines of intense rain, introducing a phantasmagorical quality shared by Odilon Redon's 1880 charcoal 'Apparition'.
These works attest to Vieux's prolific, committed and anarchic hand. His work is a fascinating bridge between the golden age of satirical art of the 19th century and the increasing visual experimentation of Modernism.
