Le Petit Chaperon rouge. by TIJYGAT [or TYTGAT], Edgard, illustrator.…

Small 4to (252 × 185 mm), 21 leaves (doubled and folded at foredge, japanese style), comprising, half-title, title, 16 text pages each with facing illustration in bistre, vignette and colophon leaf, plus 16 colour printed versions of the illustrations on papier chine interleaved. The text entirely in woodcut, the illustrations (both bistre and colour) in linocut. Some typical spotting and offsetting. Bound without the printed boards in modern quarter red morocco with slipcase.

This is one of the most prized works by this important member of the Belgian avant-garde (1879-1957), published while he was a refugee in London during the Great War

Tijtgat, apprenticed in his father’s lithographic studio, had long been an expert printmaker, but was without a press in London and developed his immediately recognisable style by printing from both woodcuts and linocuts using simply a handroller (his woodcut colophon here shows him at work, pulling a print on a simple table top). The prints of Le Petit Chaperon rouge, painstakingly produced under difficult circumstances, exemplify an invention born of necessity, aptly combined with the apparent naivety of Tijtgat’s art and his artistic interest in the pleasures and fears of childhood. Cyril Beaumont’s support for this refugee artist exemplifies the wider British patronage of exile artists among the tens of thousands of Belgians who fled to Britain between 1914 and 1918, who made a significant impact on British modernism. Besides Le Petit Chaperon rouge, Beaumont published the illustrated poetry collection New Paths with contributions by Tijtgat (1918) as well as the artist’s Carrousels et baraques in 1919. After the war Tijtgat remained for some time in London, before returning to Belgium in the twenties. He is rightly considered an important member of the group later called the ‘Brabant Fauvists’, which had included Tijtgat’s great friend and collaborator, Rik Wouters, who died in 1916 following his internment by the Germans.

The limitation states this is one of 50 copies only: number 23 of 40 copies on papier antique (after 10 copies on chine, signed). This is Tijtgat’s definitive edition (after the very few copies of a large paper trial edition of 1917 and before the Brussels reprint of 1921). The book appears in Tijtgat’s painting of 1922, Ma chambre-atelier, lying on a table, together with the artist’s pipe, a bowl of fruit and a vase of flowers (Milo, Tijtgat, 1930, plate 3). The present copy copy from the collection of Tijtgat’s bibliographer, Pascal Taillaert. Pascal Taillaert, Edgard Tytgat (1999), 38 (noting variations between copies and unbound copies, as well as the 10 additional copies on chine, not listed in the limitation, made for the Ministère des Sciences et des Arts de Belgique). Ridley, Beaumont 10.