Entrée de Clownesse – E. Charle Lucas, 1897

LULU, THE CLOWNESS OF FÉLICIEN CHAMPSAUR, CA. 1897/1900

“Entrée de Clownesse”, French Belle Époque poster designed by E. Charle Lucas, ca. 1897. Colour lithograph, here issued in reduced format by Imprimerie Chaix in Paris in 1900 as part of the celebrated series Les Maîtres de l’Affiche. With the embossed Les Maîtres de l’Affiche – Imprimerie Chaix blind stamp at lower right. Size: image 12.8 × 35 cm; sheet approx. 40 × 29 cm.

Lulu was a creation of the writer and journalist Félicien Champsaur, who was deeply fascinated by the Parisian circus, pantomime and café-concert. He introduced her as early as 1888 in his one-act play Lulu, performed at the Nouveau Cirque. There she appeared as a clownesse danseuse, alongside a dandified Arlequin and a comic caricature of the philosopher Schopenhauer. Champsaur continued to develop the character, eventually making her the heroine of his lavishly illustrated Lulu, roman clownesque, completed in 1900 and published in 1901.

The female clown was a strikingly modern figure in fin-de-siècle Paris. Women in the circus had traditionally appeared primarily as dancers, acrobats or equestriennes, but during the 1880s and 1890s female clowns also began to appear in the ring and on the variety stage. Champsaur’s Lulu combines these worlds: she is at once clown, dancer and seductive woman of fashion. E. Charle Lucas (1866–1925) accordingly presents her not as a grotesque comic figure, but as a self-assured star who literally displays her name to the audience.

The design was particularly well suited to Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, the series directed by Jules Chéret in which Imprimerie Chaix issued reduced-format versions of the finest contemporary posters for collectors between 1895 and 1900. Entrée de Clownesse appeared in the fifty-third instalment, in April 1900.

Price: Euro 275,-