Le monde doux et joli - illustrations by Pierre Brissaud

*

Pierre Brissaud (23 December 1885, Paris - 17 October 1964, Paris), French illustrator, painter, and engraver. The son of a doctor, he trained at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Atelier Fernand Cormon. Students of the atelier drew, painted and designed wallpaper, furniture and posters; earlier, Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh, and Matisse had studied and worked there. Among his fellow students there was his older brother Jacques who would go on to become a portrait and genre painter. Their  uncle Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel was a well-known illustrator whose son, their first cousin, was the celebrated artist and celebrity portrait painter Bernard Boutet de Monvel.

Brissaud is known for his pochoir prints for the fashion magazine Gazette du Bon Ton. His best-known illustrations are veritable genre scenes illustrating the designs of Paris fashion houses such as Lanvin, Chéruit, Worth, and Doucet. His illustrations would also appear in Vogue, House & Garden, and Fortune, and in books like Madame Bovary, Manon Lescaut, the memoirs of Saint-Simon, the autobiographical novels of Anatole France, and many others. In 1907 he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne.

A chocolate king in the avenue du Bois - portraits of Georges Menier by Boutet de Monvel, 1922-23

Georges Menier (19 April 1880, Paris - 1 January 1933, Paris), was the great-grandson of Jean Antoine Brutus Menier, who founded the celebrated chocolate company in 1816. In the following decades, mainly due to the wise implementation of the newest manufacturing technologies, with factories located at Noisiel, twenty miles outside of Paris, they became the premier chocolatiers in France, a position that lasted for more than one hundred years.

A preparatory study for the full portrait. Notice that the composition is wider and that the buildings in the background are different. 

The great wealth accumulated by the family business permitted its members many expensive opportunities, such as yachting and horse racing, politics and extravagant real estate; Georges' uncle, Henri Menier, bought the chateau de Chenonceau in 1913. (That same year, Henri died and the estate was inherited by his brother, Georges' father. The following year, with war begun, a military hospital was set up in the château, administered by Georges and his wife, Simonne.)

Boutet de Monvel's portrait - for which there survive several sketches and oil studies - shows the elegantly dressed Menier seated under the chestnut trees in the avenue du Bois de Boulogne. (Only a few years later, the street was renamed avenue Foch, after the French marshal, a hero of WWI.) The final portrait was shown at the Salon d’Automne of 1923.

Three landscape studies. 

Another preparatory sketch of the subject.