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Artist: Sem
(Georges Goursat)
French (1863-1934) |
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Plate: sem.03
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| Title: Santos-Dumont |
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Description: Condition
A
Original Pochoir (Hand
coloured) lithograph from "Celebrites Contemporaines
et la Benedictine", by Sem.
Printed by Devambez, Paris ca.1900.
Signed in the plate lower left.
French Text by Santos-Dumont at bottom reads, "Had one
needed to get up to the clouds to drink Benedictine, the mysteries
of powered flight would be long solved. A. Santos-Dumont "
Presented in 16 x 20 in. acid free, archival museum mat, with framing
labels. Ready to frame. Shipped boxed flat via Fedex.
Certificate of Authenticity.
See our Terms of Sale
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| Sheet Size: |
6 1/4 in x 9 1/2 in |
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16 cm x 24.5 cm |
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| Price: $250.00 USD |
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Alberto Santos-Dumont Brazil (1873 - 1932)
The Brazilian aviation pioneer, deemed the Father of Aviation by his
countrymen.
"Alberto Santos-Dumont was a wealthy Brazilian aviation pioneer
who came to Paris, France, at the age of 18 to live and study. He
attempted his first balloon ascent in 1897 and had his first successful
ascent in 1898. He began to construct dirigible airships powered with
gasoline-powered engines in 1898 and built and flew fourteen of the
small dirigibles. In 1901, he flew his hydrogen-filled airship from
St. Cloud, around the Eiffel Tower, and back to St. Cloud. It was
the first such flight and won him the Deutsch Prize and a prize from
the Brazilian government. In 1902, he attempted to cross the Mediterranean
in an airship but crashed into the sea. After the Wright brothers'
flights in 1903, Santos-Dumont began to experiment with heavier-than-air
machines. He constructed a vertical-propeller model, and, in 1906,
built a machine, the 14-bis, on the principle of the box kite. In
October 1906, he won the Deutsch-Archdeacon Prize for the first officially
observed heavier-than-air powered flight in Europe, flying his canvas
and bamboo biplane. In November 1906, he flew 725 feet (220 meters)
in 21 seconds. In 1909, he produced his "Demoiselle" or "Grasshopper"
monoplane, the precursor to the modern light plane. He returned to
Brazil in 1928. (www.centennialofflight.gov)
"I would like . . . to group in a series of albums all the celebrities
of the day, only the most illustrious and famous names. But to bring
together so many important people, so occupied and not easily mobilized,
I feared that my modest talent was not a sufficient enough attraction
. . . So, to convince them, I had the idea to offer to them a glass
of famous Benedictine . . . And, indeed, all answered my invitation
with a unified eagerness as if I was flattering them." Sem
"So begins the introduction to Sem's eight-lithograph collection
of celebrities praising the virtues of the liqueur, including famed
aviator, Santos-Dumont, composer Massenet and actor Albert Brasseur.
The career of caricaturist Sem started modestly enough in his home
town of Perigueux where he published his first collection of local
celebrities' portraits in 1895. Only after doing the same for Bordeaux
in 1897 and Marseilles in 1898 did he venture to Paris where he charmed
the city folk with his talent. Hardly anyone of note escaped being
captured for posterity." (Rennert,
PAI-XXVI, 557)
Benedictine
"In 1863, Alexandre Le Grand, a distant relation of the Fécamp
notable, came across the book of spells by chance and discovered the
secret recipe. Straight away, he decided to decipher it in order to
re-create this mysterious liqueur. His tenacity enabled him eventually
to do so. He modernised the recipe and called it "Benedictine". The
liqueur soon became extremely popular: by 1873, production had reached
almost 150,000 bottles a year. In light of this success, Alexandre
Le Grand decided to set up the Benedictine SA company in June 1876,
with capital of 2,200,000 francs. In 1882, Alexandre Le Grand decided
to have a unique building built in Fécamp to house the distillery:
a Palace-Museum. It is here, in this extraordinary place, that the
famous liqueur is still made today." (Benedictine.fr)
Pochoir, French for stencil, defines a technique of print making
popular in France in the early 1900s. It is a labor intensive process
of applying brilliant color by hand using a series of cutout stencils.
Each plate is an original print using up to thirty stencils in one
image. All are hand colored and most are signed in the plate by the
illustrator.
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