T HE phrase “Vie de Bohème” is one in very frequent use, but few of its users recognize its implication. At the time when the term originated in French literature it had a very special meaning. That time was the Romantic period, one of the most brilliant in all the history of French artistic achievement, and the phrase denoted the life of an important section of Parisian Society between the years of 1830 and 1848. It was called into being by special circumstances and conditions in 1830; reached its golden age in 1835, and slowly declined till the revolution of 1848 reduced it to a mere excrescence on the life of art students, as it now is. “La Bohème” was strictly Parisian, as Henri Murger said it must be; it arose through the literary and social revolution of 1830; it flourished because of the universality of the Romantic spirit of which it was a flower; it declined because its second generation had neither the enthusiasm nor the talent of its first. Mr. Orlo Williams surveys the period very thoroughly, and his book is illustrated in colour and half-tone, from contemporary pictures and prints.
Demy Octavo (9 in. by 5½ in.)
Fully Illustrated. Price 15s. net.
The
Art of Silhouette
By DESMOND COKE
I N the popular belief a silhouette is something snipped from black paper on a pier for sixpence. Mr. Desmond Coke, as a fourteen-year collector of the fine eighteenth century profiles painted upon chalk, glass or paper, has set himself to correct this fallacy. The reproductions of miniature likenesses in silhouette by Miers, Charles, Rosenberg, Mrs. Beetham, and the other profilists who set Bath beaux and belles in black outline for ever, will probably surprise most readers by their delicate craftsmanship and life-like quality. The book is lightly planned: more an essay than a history or treatise. The joys of collecting—the charm of silhouette—the men who practised this short-lived art, including the tragi-comic Edouart, a man whom Dickens would have loved—the humours of their labels—the horrors of Victorian decadence—groups—some famous silhouette collections—fancy subjects cut in paper—Cupid and this set of shadows—a plea for austerity, addressed to modern artists—such are a few points covered by a book which (to quote the author’s foreword) is intended for “collectors, artists, lovers of the past, and all such as think nothing human or curious alien from themselves.”
Demy Octavo (9 in. by 5½ in.)
Fully Illustrated. Price 10s. 6d. net.
Personality in Literature
By R. A. SCOTT-JAMES