page_title: Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel
section_title: Illustrations
hierarchical_section_title: Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel / Illustrations
caption_attribution_description: English: Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel dans son atelier
context_page_description: Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel was a French painter and illustrator best known for his watercolours for children's books. He was a major figure in nineteenth-century children's book illustration.
context_section_description: In 1876, he married Jeanne Labaigue of Orléans, and their first child was born three years later. Their son Roger would become a writer, and their son Bernard would become a painter. The need to support his family pushed him into commercial illustration. In 1881, he illustrated a children's reader, and this opened further commissions to illustrate children's books. He also began contributing illustrations to the children's magazine  St. Nicholas, continuing until 1890.
  In 1895 he published an illustrated children's history of Joan of Arc that has been regarded as his masterpiece. The epic scenes for Joan of Arc show the influence of two late-medieval painters: Fra Angelico in the use of modeling and Paolo Uccello in the composition of battle scenes. Drawn with a strong line and clear, harmonious colors, his illustrations drew critical praise even though he himself was disappointed in the quality of the reproductions, which had been done by zincotype, a then-new photoengraving process. As one critic put it:
  Boutet de Monvel's full-page illustrations have a nobility and grandeur akin to the great church frescoes of the Renaissance. Their pleasingly flat rendering combined with a sophisticated use of design elements...owe a debt to the Japanese prints so popular in the artist's day.
  Joan of Arc was a huge success and brought him international recognition. In 1899, he participated in an exhibition organized by members of the Viennese Secession that focused on graphic art. That same year his work was shown in the United States at venues such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He went to Chicago for that exhibition but fell ill with a recurrence of a bronchial ailment contracted during the Franco-Prussian war.
  At the World's Fair of 1900, he received a gold medal for a panel entitled Joan at the Court of Chinon that was part of a commission for a new basilica in Donrémy. It was one of a set of five panels, but the other four were never finished, though a smaller-scale version was completed for senator William A. Clark, who donated it to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington.
  He died in Nemours in 1913. Not long afterwards, the Manzi et Joyant Gallery organised a retrospective of his work in Paris. Further retrospectives have followed, and a large traveling show was organized in the United States in 1987-88.  Some of his work is held by museums.
  Boutet de Monvel is still considered a master of the children's illustration genre for the originality of his work. His style has been praised for its lack of unnecessary detail, and it has been noted that his images provide "a revelation of a subject which the writer has treated only in a fragmentary and superficial manner." He has been ranked alongside Kate Greenaway and Randolph Caldecott as a leading figure of the 19th century's golden era of children's book illustration.
caption: Boutet de Monvel at work
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