Rimbaud and Boucher: "Fête d'hiver"

It is disappointing, for example, that there is no discussion of this structurally highly suggestive text in Nathaniel Wing's study, Present Appearances: Aspects of Poetic Structure in Rimbaud's "Illuminations" (Romance Monographs, University of Mississippi, 1974), though brief mention of this poem is made by Eileen Souffrin-Le Breton in her suggestive article, "Banville et la poétique du décor", in French Nineteenth Century Painting and Literature: with special reference to the relevance of literary subject-matter to French painting, ed. by U. Finke ( Manchester, 1972,) 65-98.

Cf. Wallace Fowlie, Rimbaud (London and Chicago, 1965), 182.

Cf. Nick Osmond in the introduction to his edition of the Illuminations (London, 1976), 17.

A. Rimbaud , Illuminations, ed. by A. Py (Geneva, 1967), 168.

All quotations taken from the Suzanne Bernard edition of Rimbaud's Oeuvres (Paris, 1960).

Suzanne Bernard remarks on the "colorisme" of Rimbaud in her article, "Rimbaud, Proust et les impressionistes", Revue des Sciences humaines (1955), 257-62, P. 261, and also, in more detail, in her article, "La Palette de Rimbaud", Cahiers de l'Association internationale d' Études françaises, 3 (1960), 105-19.

E.g. Osmond, op. cit., 139.

Seymour Simches, Le Romantisme et le goüt esthétique du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1964), 2-18.

See for example L'Artiste, 1ère série, x (1835), 37-38; xiii (1837), 372-3; 2e série, i (1839), 156-62.

According to P. Guiraud, "Fête d'hiver" was composed in 1874; cf. Py, op. cit., 167-8.

"Délires", 11, Une Saison en enfer; Oeuvres, ed. Bernard, 228.

Simches, op. cit., 3.

Reproductions of Boucher chinoiseries which may have a bearing on Rimbaud's poem appeared, for example, in L'Artiste, 7e (nouvelle) série, vii (185g), 14 and 200; x, 146—"Les Clochettes"; 8e série, 1863, vol. 2, 200—"Les Oiseaux"; 1864, vol. 1, 42—"Les Poissons", etc.

Full details of this painting may be found (listed as no. 228) in Alexandre Ananoff's François Boucher. Tableau chronologique et catalogue raisonné (2 vols, Paris, 1976), a work which, with its companion L'Oeuvre dessiné de François Boucher (1703-1770) (the first of four volumes of which was published in Paris in 1966), supersedes the earlier work by André Michel: François Boucher (1703-1770). Catalogue raisonné (Paris, 1906), in which the Boucher chinoiserie paintings are recorded in sections 2474-97, the Chinese drawings following in sections 2498-2516. A useful account of "La Pêche chinoise" is also given in the catalogue of the Royal Academy Winter Exhibition of 1968: France in the Eighteenth Century in which the Boucher in question is listed as item no. 40.

Taken in both senses, i.e., literally, as a meander and as a possible evocation of the actual River Meander in Phrygia.

The dance motif suggested by the image of the "Rondes Sibériennes", absent from "La Pêche chinoise", may derive from another Boucher chinoiserie in the same series of tableautins-"La Danse chinoise" (no. 227 in Ananoff's catalogue raisonné) in which a roundel danced by Chinese figures in the right foreground is complemented in the left of the picture by a group of Chinese women musicians who play before a small pavilion.

Cf. Osmond, op. cit., 139.

Cf. Catalogue of Royal Academy Winter Exhibition, 1968, already cited.

Cf. Catalogue (ed. by Pierrette Jean-Richard) of 1971 Louvre exhibition: François Boucher: gravures et dessins.

In our view, Simches (op. cit., 91) overestimates the achievement of Baudelaire in "Les Phares".

Which, respectively, draw on "Quien 10 creyera?" and "Hasta la muerte" from Goya's famous series of engravings, Los Caprichos.

Which has its parallel in another of the Illuminations, "Villes": "Des fêtes amoureuses sonnent sur les canaux pendus derrière les chalets". Cf. Py, op. cit., 168.

Les Trois Tivoli, cited by Pichois in his notes to the 2nd volume of Baudelaire's Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1976), 1429.

Cited in "Le Peintre de la vie moderne", ibid., 690.

Cf. photographs reproduced in Y. Bonnefoy's Rimbaud par lui-même (Paris, 1961).

Wallace Fowlie suggests more generally, in his note on "Fête d'hiver", that "The theatre in winter time can transcend any drab reality outside, as the Illuminations of Rimbaud can transform the literal countryside of the Ardennes or a European capital into a storybook scene" (Rimbaud, 183).