Artist: Sem (Georges Goursat) French (1863-1934)
Title: Eugène-Louis Doyen
Plate: sem.07
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 Eugène-Louis Doyen at bottom reads, "My dear Lev, Benedictine is an exquisite liquor and your album will make it more appreciated. Doyen"
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.
Sheet Size: 6 1/4 in x 9 1/2in 16 cm x 24.5 cm
Price: $175.00
Eugène-Louis Doyen (French 1859-1916) was internationally famous during his lifetime, as well as after his death: Boulgakov mentioned him in one of his novels, and in the 1940s, his name still appeared in an English book listing the 100 leading medical and surgical figures in the world. Yet . Doyen has been almost completely forgotten in France, where he is only vaguely remembered as a virtuoso surgeon and the namesake of a clamp used to hold back tissue in the surgical field. His meteoric and solitary journey, during which he opposed the academic institutions, could explain why very few people know of his important and versatile work. That work resulted on the one hand in widely used devices and techniques, even though their inventor has been forgotten (“Doyen’s bed” is the precursor of all modern operating tables ; Doyen was also the first to use blood aspiration in the surgical field) and on the other hand in research which was interrupted when he died and was in many cases only resumed decades later. (www.bium.univ-paris5.fr))
"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.