New Discoveries

François Flameng, Grolier in the House of Aldus, 1889, Grolier Club, New York

Fig. 1, François Flameng, Grolier in the House of Aldus, 1889. Oil on canvas. The Grolier Club, New York. Artwork in the public domain; image courtesy of The Grolier Club, New York.

François Flameng’s painting Grolier in the House of Aldus (fig. 1) is not, strictly speaking, a new discovery. Since around 1890, it has been steadily on view at the Grolier Club in Manhattan. A preliminary sketch for the painting, also in the Grolier Club’s collection, appears on the Wikipedia article about Jean Grolier de Servières (ca. 1489–1565), the Renaissance bibliophile after whom the New York institution is named.‍[1] Yet the work is little known beyond the small circle of the club’s members and until recently has received little scholarly attention. In the last year, however, in-depth research about the painting has led to interesting discoveries related to its commission and its one-time popularity, expressed in reproductions made in diverse media for various purposes.

Fig. 2, Maurice Leloir, Samuel P. Avery, 1893. Watercolor on half-title page of Avery’s copy of Charles Nodier, Le Bibliomane (Paris: Imprimerie Générale Lahure for L. Conquet, 1893). The Grolier Club Bookbinding Collection, New York. Photograph by the author.

Painted in 1889 by Flameng (1856–1923), a French artist, Grolier in the House of Aldus depicts a meeting of the French collector Jean Grolier and the Italian printer Aldus Manutius (1449–1515) in Venice in the early 1510s. The painting was commissioned for the Grolier Club, founded in 1884 (North America’s oldest surviving bibliophile society), by one of its early members, the art dealer and philanthropist Samuel Putnam Avery (1822–1904). He ran a gallery at 366 Fifth Avenue at East Thirty-Fifth Street and lived with his wife, Mary Ann Ogden Avery (1825–1911), at 4 East Thirty-Eighth Street (building no longer extant). Near his home (fig. 2) and office, the Grolier Club opened its first headquarters, a Romanesque building designed by Charles W. Romeyn (1853–1942), extant at 29 East Thirty-Second Street. Grolier in the House of Aldus was commissioned for a large wall recess in the new building’s main exhibition hall.‍[2]

Among the Averys’ other gifts to the club were scores of fine bookbindings. One highlight is an exhibition checklist for a Grolier Club show of editions of the seventeenth-century author Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler from 1893. Its binding, by Tiffany & Co., is made of Javanese sharkskin and Florida garpike skin, with blue silk doublures patterned with gilded fish and a silk bookmark ribbon looped through a carved jade fish.‍[3] Avery also commissioned the Grolier Club’s medal with reliefs depicting Aldus in profile and his dolphin-and-anchor insignia; it was a facsimile of a medal that the printer commissioned in Venice around 1500, based on ancient Roman coins.‍[4] Other institutions also benefited from the Averys’ generosity. They gave varied objects and artworks, including a spoon collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ching dynasty cloisonné vessels to the Brooklyn Museum, and prints by the thousands to the New York Public Library.‍[5] And they financed Columbia University’s architecture library, in memory of their son, architect Henry Ogden Avery, who died of tuberculosis in 1890—one of four of the couple’s six children to predecease them.

Fig. 3, Unknown photographer, François Flameng, ca. 1894. Published in Fernand Bourgeat, Salon de 1894 (Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 1894), 33. Book and image in the public domain; available from: Internet Archive, archive.org.

Avery likely knew François Flameng (fig. 3), age thirty-five at the time of the club commission, through the latter’s father, Léopold Flameng (1831–1911), a Paris-based etcher and engraver born in Belgium.‍[6] Working with a US agent in Paris, George A. Lucas, Avery avidly collected Léopold Flameng’s prints.‍[7] François Flameng had studied with his father, as well as with the Belgian painter and sculptor Constantin Meunier and the Parisian artist Jean-Paul Laurens. At the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, François Flameng trained briefly with Alexandre Cabanel. While still in his teens, François Flameng began exhibiting artworks to acclaim at the Paris Salon. In 1881, he made a strategic marriage to Henriette Turquet (1863–1919), the daughter of the French arts patron and politician Edmond Turquet. Over François Flameng’s long career, he painted French Revolutionary and Napoleonic scenes, allegorical murals for institutional and commercial buildings, and portraits of society figures as well as of his wife and three children. He designed French banknotes and illustrated books, including Victor Hugo’s collected works. He also depicted World War I’s devastation, as documented in a book by the French scholar Alexandre Page published in 2019.‍[8] (François Flameng occasionally sat for portraits as well; in 1880, John Singer Sargent painted him alongside fellow artist Paul Helleu.)‍[9]

Fig. 4, François Flameng, Le Prieur Jean HEYNLIN et le bibliothécaire Guillaume FICHET installent dans les caves de la SORBONNE la première imprimerie qui ait été établie en FRANCE (Prior Jean HEYNLIN and librarian Guillaume FICHET install in the cellars of the SORBONNE the first printing press to be established in FRANCE), 1887. Oil on canvas. Sorbonne University, Paris. Photo: Les2Miches.

Avery’s hiring of his friend Léopold Flameng’s son for a tableau of Grolier and Aldus may have been partly due to François Flameng’s experience with related subject matter. Avery, a frequent traveler to Paris, was no doubt familiar with François Flameng’s mural in a Sorbonne stairwell depicting a fifteenth-century printing workshop (1887; fig. 4). Set in 1469, the scene shows Jean (Johann) Heynlin and Guillaume Fichet, two Sorbonne professors who were the founders of France’s first printing press, located in the university’s cellars. In the mural, the two men are proofing some newly printed pages under the watchful gaze of a figure in striped clothing, possibly representing one of the Swiss workmen they had brought in to operate the press.‍[10] Avery would have realized that François Flameng, a printmaker’s son who illustrated books, had expertise in conveying the importance of book patrons and artisans collaborating in major capitals at turning points in publishing history. Page notes that the Grolier Club commission also served as a crucial steppingstone for François’s career: “He wanted to extend his fame to America, where his father was already known.”‍[11]

On December 29, 1889, François wrote to Avery, explaining the nearly finished painting’s inspirations and source material.‍[12] What follows is an annotated translation by the author and a team of consultants led by scholar Henry Raine:‍[13]

Sir,

Permit me first of all to thank you. I am very much flattered to have been chosen to execute the panel for the Grolier Club, and although pecuniarily the affair was remarkably bad, I only regret that the work is not more important.

As you wished I have represented Aldus the elder in his printing house at Venice, receiving the visit of Grolier and showing him some bindings.

I first researched the location of the Aldus printing house, but regrettably I found no historical information that shed light on the matter. I imagined the establishment at the end of the quai des Esclavons; this scene is visible through the windows (the palace of the Doges, the Salute, S. Giorgio Maggiore, and the quai degli Schiavone). [Flameng wrote “quai des Esclavons” for the first reference to the Riva degli Schiavoni and “quai degli Schiavone” for the second.]

There is no likeness of Grolier in existence, the only known one having been on his tomb in the crypt of the church of St. Germain des Prés, Paris, and that stone carving no longer exists. [The church was badly damaged during the French Revolution, and no other verified likeness of Grolier has yet been found.] But happily there is one of Aldus, made about thirty years after his death, and we have those which ornamented the frontispieces of his books. I made use of all these portraits.

I have represented Grolier in the Milanese fashion of the beginning of the sixteenth century in costume half-French, half-Italian. As he was then very young and had always lived near his father in Italy, it is plausible that he wore the costume of the young Lombards with certain French customary pieces, such as the small hat, the shoes, doublet, and breeches. The coat is of Venetian cut; I copied it from a sixteenth-century coat that I purchased at the Baron Davillier sale. [Grolier is portrayed wearing a crimson-and-gold cape, modeled after a sixteenth-century Venetian cape that Flameng had acquired from the writer and art collector Baron Charles Davillier (1823–83).‍[14]]

As for Aldus, elderly at that time, his costume is of the fifteenth century, with the long black robe worn by old men of his day. I have only followed the portraits’ indications.

For the printing press I have used information from the library of San Marco, at Venice, and from a small press from the early sixteenth century, which survives in the Plantin printing house at Antwerp [now the Museum Plantin-Moretus].

The stained-glass panes that ornament the window represent the arms of Aldus [with dolphins and anchors].

I have placed on the printer’s stand the first page of your edition of the Philobiblon—it is an anachronism, but I thought later it will become a souvenir of one of the first publications of your interesting society (very worthy, because of its interest, of having been published by Aldus). [Flameng represented the title page of the Grolier Club’s 1889 edition of the English bibliophile Richard de Bury’s fourteenth-century essay collection.]‍[15]

Here, sir, is all the necessary information. I have gilded certain parts of this painting executed in wax, to give it an amusing touch of archaism and a little more sparkle. The painting should remain absolutely matte and not be varnished.

Please, sir, accept assurances of my best regards.

Despite Flameng’s in-depth research, the painting has many features that would now be considered inaccuracies. Firstly, it depicts a scene that almost undoubtedly never happened. According to the scholars G. Scott Clemons and H. George Fletcher, “the evidence shows that Aldus Manutius and Jean Grolier met precisely once, in 1511, in the Treasurer’s house in Milan.”‍[16] Aldus operated chaotic, crowded workplaces in rather humble Venetian buildings (two addresses are known, on side streets near modern-day Campo Sant’Agostin and Campo Manin). His quarters almost definitely had no sweeping piazza and waterfront views, nor high ceilings, immaculately glossy floors, loose pages somehow unaffected by Venetian breezes, and marble Corinthian colonettes dividing arched windows. There would likely not have been any stained-glass panes, let alone colorful rondels depicting saints and surrounded by clear rectilinear panes—that Northern European Renaissance fenestration tradition can be seen, for instance, in Vermeer paintings.‍[17] (Flameng’s view of the cellar-printshop at the Sorbonne is similarly generously fenestrated, particularly improbable for a Parisian school basement.) The Museum Plantin-Moretus’s antique presses, which Flameng used as precedents for Aldus’s machine, were actually made a century after the printer’s death. Flameng’s preliminary sketch for the Grolier Club painting (fig. 5), which remained in Avery descendants’ hands, surfaced at a Bonhams auction in New York in 2010 (philanthropist Anne Hoy purchased it for the club).‍[18] Its waterfront-facing wall, an ethereal scrim of clear and tinted panes, is even more historically improbable than the version in the final painting. Grolier is portrayed husky, bearded, and approaching middle age—although he was barely twenty-five years old when Aldus died.

Fig. 5, François Flameng, Study for Grolier in the House of Aldus, 1889. Oil on canvas. The Grolier Club, New York. Artwork in the public domain; image courtesy of The Grolier Club, New York.

Fig. 6, Léopold Flameng (after François Flameng), Grolier in the House of Aldus, 1890. Etching on paper. The Grolier Club, New York. Artwork in the public domain; image courtesy of The Grolier Club, New York.

When the canvas was first displayed in New York, the art dealer Frederick Keppel deemed it “probably the most precious possession of the Grolier Club.”‍[19] The Collector’s editor, Alfred Trumble, praised the artist’s “close research and archaeological knowledge.”‍[20] Avery even paid Léopold Flameng to turn the painting into etchings (fig. 6). “I have very faithfully translated it,” the engraver told his patron.‍[21] The club published and marketed signed proofs on vellum and paper. (François Flameng’s Sorbonne mural was also adapted by his father into a widely published black-and-white print [fig. 7].)‍[22] The original copper plate remains in the club’s collection, along with multiple states of the etching and Léopold Flameng’s portraits of Shakespeare, Thomas Bewick, and the explorer Richard Burton.

Fig. 7, Léopold Flameng (after François Flameng), Le Prieur Jean Heynlin et le bibliothécaire Guillaume Fichet INSTALLENT dans les caves de la Sorbonne la première IMPRIMERIE QUI AIT ÉTÉ ÉTABLIE EN FRANCE (Prior Jean Heynlin and librarian Guillaume Fichet INSTALL in the cellars of the Sorbonne the first PRINTING PRESS TO BE ESTABLISHED IN FRANCE), ca. 1888. Etching on paper. The Grolier Club, New York. Artwork in the public domain; image courtesy of The Grolier Club, New York.

Fig. 8, Jacques-Joseph Techener, Histoire de la bibliophilie. Reliures. Recherches sur les bibliothèques des plus célèbres amateurs. Armorial des bibliophiles (History of bibliophilism. Bindings. Research on the libraries of the most famous amateurs. Armorial of bibliophiles) (Paris: Librairie de J. Techener, 1861), with binding by Charles Meunier, 1890s. The Grolier Club, New York. Image courtesy of The Grolier Club, New York.

Avery also had the Flameng tableau adapted for a bookbinding (fig. 8) by the Parisian artisan Charles Meunier (1865–1940)—the son of François Flameng’s early teacher. Meunier rebound a history of bibliophiles, written and published by Jacques-Joseph Techener, a French antiquarian book dealer and bibliophile, from 1861.‍[23] According to Grolier Club staff members Eric Holzenberg and Fernando Peña, the binding gaudily combines Meunier’s repertoire of “inlay, onlay, paint, gilding, marbling, tooling, cuir ciselé—no technique is unrepresented.”‍[24] Meunier made minor changes to the original painting’s composition and palette. He closed the casement windows, rendered the panes in creamy lichen and metallic gold, lightened the chair cushion and Aldus’s robe, and added polychrome to Grolier’s tights.

In 1894, the engraver Edwin Davis French miniaturized the painting for the club’s bookplate (fig. 9).‍[25] Around this time, Frederick Wilson (1858–1932), a longtime staffer at Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glassworks, created a window (fig. 10) depicting Aldus in opulent Venetian quarters on commission for the main public library in Troy, New York. Glass historian Diane C. Wright has posited that the Grolier Club scene inspired Wilson’s opalescent view of a waterfront workplace, where a coed, bejeweled, multigenerational crowd ogles the printed word and papers spill floorward.‍[26]

Fig. 9, Edwin Davis French, Bookplate for the Grolier Club, 1894. Engraving on paper. The Grolier Club, New York. Engraving in the public domain; image courtesy of The Grolier Club, New York.

Fig. 10, Frederick Wilson, The House of Aldus, ca. 1896. Stained glass. Troy Public Library, Troy. Photograph by Wayne Boucher.

Léopold Flameng’s etching of his son’s canvas traveled widely. Examples appeared at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1892, the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and the Rowfant Club in Cleveland in 1897.‍[27] François Flameng’s sketch was shown at the Architectural League of New York in 1900.‍[28] Avery donated Léopold Flameng’s prints to institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the British Museum.‍[29] His gift to the New York Public Library includes multiple states of the etching, similar to the Grolier Club’s set.‍[30] Grolier in the House of Aldus was reproduced on book frontispieces and in publications, including the Art Journal, Art Interchange, and Printing Art.‍[31]

Fig. 11, After François Flameng, Copper halftone block for reproductions of François Flameng, Grolier in the House of Aldus, n.d. The Grolier Club, New York. Photograph by the author.

Into the early twentieth century, the painting attracted public and media attention; the club owns a copper halftone block (fig. 11) used for its reproductions in various publications. In 1910, the literary critic Vance Thompson wrote a cover story on François Flameng for The Cosmopolitan, lauding the Grolier Club canvas “with its grave and delicate understanding of the men of the sixteenth century.” Thompson praised the Sorbonne printery scene as well, deeming it “an admirable decor, dignified, strong, rare in its sobriety.” He noted that although Flameng’s portrait subjects included European royals and American plutocrats, his historical scenes showed clear respect for workmen.‍[32] In 1917, the club put the canvas on view in a new neo-Georgian brick headquarters at 47 East Sixtieth Street (which remains the organization’s home), designed by club member Bertram Goodhue.

By the 1920s, however, skepticism surfaced about the painting, as its academic style went out of fashion and the estates of the Grolier Club’s founding generation were sold off—including their Flameng prints. In 1922, Edmund G. Gress, editor of the American Printer, roamed Venice seeking the marble-columned aerie where Grolier supposedly met Aldus. Gress realized that the workshop’s actual locations were unprepossessing, although Flameng “paid no attention to these traditional sites.”‍[33] The club’s seventy-fifth anniversary book from 1959 called the Meunier leather extravaganza “a treasured sentimental possession,”‍[34] implying perhaps that it was not to be taken seriously. In 1975, bookbinding scholar Anthony Hobson dismissed Flameng’s “fanciful” canvas as “once famous.”‍[35] In the 1990s, the fine press publisher Luke Pontifell used Léopold Flameng’s original plate for the Grolier Club’s restrike of one hundred numbered copies of the print. In the club’s show Aldus Manutius: A Legacy More Lasting than Bronze in 2015, an exhibition label described the Flameng painting as “artistic license run wild.”‍[36]

Today, the canvas still hangs prominently in the main gallery (albeit with some varnish that obscures the artist’s “amusing touch of archaism”). Meunier’s book is tucked into a glass-topped table in an upstairs corridor. François Flameng’s sketch adorns a stairwell, not far from the 1894 bookplate and some of Léopold Flameng’s etchings.‍[37] And so Avery’s gift of a portrait of his Renaissance role model in bibliophilism, swathed in crimson and gold, and starting to buy books from a venerable innovative printer about to retire, remains a linchpin of a Midtown Manhattan museum devoted to storytelling on the page.