Graceful Art Deco pochoir plate by G.-P. Joumard. Chloe stands nude and in profile, ankle-deep in a shallow pool below a bank of ochre and rose rock, one arm raised to her hair, drawn almost entirely in a fine brown outline with the bare Japanese paper doing the work of the skin. A trailing branch of lilac-purple wisteria arches over her from the right, more of it hangs down the rock face, and beyond the bank a flat yellow meadow runs back to green hills and two violet peaks. White petals float on the water at her feet. Signed in the plate at the lower left and marked "Daphnis et Chloe h. t. 4," with the line it illustrates printed beneath the image: "Chloe se baignait dans les fontaines..." In English: Chloe was bathing in the springs.
Bathing is where the plot of this book actually starts. Daphnis falls into a wolf pit, is hauled out filthy, and Chloe takes him to the spring and washes him; he watches her, and afterwards cannot work out why he is unable to eat or sleep. Neither of them has any idea what has happened to them, and the comedy and the ache of the whole romance come from two people trying to reason their way toward something everyone reading already understands.
Of the six plates in the volume this is the one where Joumard's line does the most work. There is scarcely any colour on the figure at all, just the outline and a couple of pale washes, so the eye reads her against the heavy ochre rock as an area of light. The wisteria, by contrast, is laid on thickly in three purples with white flicked over the top in body colour. Setting a nearly uncoloured figure beside the most heavily painted passage on the sheet is a confident piece of design.
From the Collection Lotus edition of Longus's Daphnis et Chloe published by Editions Nilsson, Paris, about 1930, with six aquarelles by G.-P. Joumard. Collection Lotus was sold under the motto of the luxury book within everyone's reach, and the pochoir plates are what made that claim stick: every colour laid on by hand through its own cut stencil, on Japanese paper, in small workshops of colourists.
Original antique pochoir plate on Japanese paper, hand-stencilled in watercolour, not a reproduction. Sheet measures 6.5 x 9 in. Light age toning to the sheet as usual for this paper; the colour is unfaded and strong. Please note that the listing photographs have been lightly retouched to meet site image guidelines; the plate itself is unaltered and unmarked.
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