Devotional and richly coloured Art Deco pochoir plate by Maurice Berty. Graziella stands barefoot on a rush stool in a violet skirt and grey shawl with a scarlet headcloth, reaching up on tiptoe to hang garlands of leaves and flowers around a small blue statue of the Madonna set in the beam of a wooden doorway. Roses and blue irises are already banked beneath the figure. At the right two women in long rust-coloured cloaks and red hoods with heavy tasselled cords stand watching her, one with her hand at her breast. A pot of red flowers and a green painted rail fill the corner at the left. Signed in the plate at the lower right and marked "Graziella h. t. 3," with the line it illustrates printed beneath the image: "Nous comprimes que c'etait une action de grace a sa divine protectrice." In English: we understood that it was an act of thanksgiving to her divine protectress.
Berty has done something clever with the wood here. The whole right half of the sheet is post-and-beam construction drawn in nothing but black graining over flat rust, and it turns a plain doorway into a frame that pushes every scrap of colour, the blue Madonna, the scarlet hood, the yellow wall behind, forward at the viewer. The scene itself is a small piece of ethnography: household shrines like this one, dressed with fresh flowers as a thanksgiving after a danger passed, were everywhere in the Bay of Naples, and Lamartine's narrator is a foreigner working out what he is looking at, which is exactly what the caption says.
From the Collection Lotus volume of Lamartine published by Editions Nilsson, Paris, about 1930, which gathers Graziella together with Le Tailleur de pierres de Saint-Point and carries six aquarelles by Maurice Berty. 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: each 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.
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