The Davida Deutsch Collection of Louis Legrand

On the front page of La Nation on April 15, 1896, Siegfried Bing (1838–1905), the famous Parisian dealer in Japanese fine and decorative arts, was described by an anonymous critic as a man with foresight—a man driven by the desire to demonstrate the value of the overlooked and undiscovered. This remark appeared in a syndicated review of Bing’s second presentation of a contemporary artist in his new gallery l’Art nouveau: an exhibition purportedly featuring more than 180 works—chiefly etchings, with a modicum of pastel and watercolor drawings—by the thirty-two-year-old artist Louis Legrand (1863–1951). It was the printmaker’s first formal solo exhibition, though he was far from unknown. Indeed, the Nation critic’s association of Legrand with the overlooked and underappreciated is a remark more accurate today.

Legrand’s career ascended at a pivotal moment in Paris that saw the merging of rarified book production and the market for collecting contemporary artists’ prints. It was an auspicious time for printmakers. Telling evidence of the mediums’ confluence is the privileging of original graphic art in deluxe illustrated books issued by societies such as the Bibliophiles Contemporains and Les Cents Bibliophiles. It was customary to issue these livres de luxe with plates in multiple states, sometimes printed in different colors, on different papers, and with remarques (added illustrations, often subversive, etched in the plates’ margins); if one was lucky, the book was further enhanced with a preliminary drawing bound in or inset drawings on pages of the text.

Louis Legrand’s singular contributions to this moment in French book culture are the focus of a unique collection currently on deposit at the Morgan. This material has the potential to be one of the most significant additions to the museum’s French illustrated book collections since Gordon N. Ray’s bequest almost forty years ago. Comprising more than ninety books, fine bindings, magazines, drawings, prints, and ephemera, the Legrand collection affords a wealth of research opportunities. It touches not only on fin-de-siècle printmaking, book production, and bibliophilia but also, by virtue of Legrand’s career trajectory, issues related to the satiric press, censorship, and the visual and cultural history of ballet and popular dance.

The Legrand trove is a promised gift of Davida Deutsch, in memory of her husband Alvin Deutsch (1932–2021). Trained as a scholar of classical Greek, Davida Deutsch’s diverse intellectual pursuits have informed her collecting interests, which have included miniature portraits on ivory as well as prints and publications associated with women’s education from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries: genres such as needlework pattern books, women’s magazines, courtesy books, and drawing and calligraphy manuals. Several decades ago, she walked out of the Madison Avenue premises of the legendary dealer Lucien Goldschmidt with a copy of Legrand’s Cours de danse fin de siècle (1892)—a lavish illustrated book with an accompanying text by Erastène Ramiro (the pseudonym for Eugène Rodrigues). It was one of the first substantial considerations in book form of Parisian cabaret culture, documenting the world associated with venues such as the Moulin de la Galette and the strenuous physicality of cancan stars then at the height of celebrity: Grille-d'Egout and la Goulue (the stage names for Lucienne Beuze and Louise Weber respectively).

Cours de danse ignited Deutsch’s interest in Legrand, and it became the nucleus of her collection. Over subsequent years, Deutsch accumulated four additional copies, each more unique than the previous, as well as separate proofs for the plates and an album of the original pastel, charcoal, and watercolor drawings that became the basis of Legrand’s etchings. Also in the collection are two illustrated supplements to the journal Gil Blas in which up to 90,000 subscribers (most of whom could not have afforded the book) were treated to the first iteration of Cours de danse under the title Les excentricités de la danse. The scholarly benefits of being able to examine one work of art at so many stages of creation and production are inestimable. It is an approach particularly illuminating with Legrand, who, as Victor Arwas observed, “never abandoned an image he liked. He would paint it, draw it in pencil, in crayons, in pastel, etch it, lithograph it, shrink it, enlarge it, color it, [and] turn it into a remarque or a marginal sketch.”

The album of original artwork for Cours de danse, cited above, and an accompanying copy of the book with drawings and added suites of prints are one of the inarguable treasures of Deutsch’s collection. This pair of items was presented in 1892 to Henri Beraldi (1849–1931), the collector and print scholar dubbed the “Prince of bibliophiles.” Beraldi is just one of the leading figures of French book culture featured in the collection. Others include Louis Barthou (1862–1934), the politician and so-called “Minister of poets,” who stewarded the bibliophile society Le Livre contemporain; many fine printers and publishers of the era, such as Floury and Monnier, and the quintessential cuir-ciselé (incised leather) binders Charles Meunier (1865–1940) and Marius Michel (1846–1925).

The two most important figures in Legrand’s professional life pervade the entire collection: Gustave Pellet (1859–1919), a pioneering print dealer whose intrepid devotion to promoting and publishing Legrand’s works earned his gallery on the Quai Voltaire the nickname “Musée Legrand”; and the author of Cours de danse: the lawyer, collector, and cofounder of the society of the Cent Bibliophiles, Eugène Rodrigues (1853–1928). In addition to collaborating with Legrand over the years, Rodrigues was responsible for the lavish catalogue raisonnée of Legrand’s prints published on the occasion of the 1896 exhibition at Bing’s L’Art nouveau. The close relationship between Rodrigues and Legrand actually began as a relationship of attorney and client. As a young illustrator working for the humor magazine Le Courrier français (also in Deutsch’s collection), Legrand found himself at the center of obscenity cases in 1888 and 1890 for two satiric illustrations, entitled Prostitution and Naturalisme—subjects for another blog.

As indicated above, Deutsch has generously placed the entire promised gift on deposit to ensure that scholars have unfettered access to the collection in the Morgan’s Sherman Fairchild Reading Room now. Every item has been fully described in the Morgan’s Corsair catalog by the museum’s expert graphic arts cataloger, Sandra Carpenter. Researchers can discover these records with a simple keyword search using the terms: Deutsch Legrand.

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S. Bevan
Andrew W. Mellon Associate Curator
Printed Books & Bindings
The Morgan Library & Museum

Further Reading:

• Arwas, Victor, Louis Legrand: Catalogue raisonné (London: Papadakis, 2006)
• Beraldi, Henri, La Reliure du XIXe siècle (Paris: Conquet, 1895–7)
• Kahn, Gustave, Louis Legrand et son œuvre (Paris: Librairie artistique et littéraire, 1907)
• Ramiro, Erastène, Louis Legrand peintre-engraveur. Catalogue des œuvres gravé et lithographié (Paris: Floury, 1896)
• Ray, Gordon N., The Art of the French Illustrated Book, 1700 to 1914 (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library in association with Dover Publications, 1986)
• Silverman, Willa Z., The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008)