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

Small 4to (230 × 165 mm), 21 leaves (doubled and folded at foredge, japanese style), comprising, half-title, title, 16 numbered 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 very occasional spotting and offsetting. Sewn with red thread in the original decorative white paper limp boards with decorative endpapers. An excellent copy, as issued.

One of 10 copies on chine signed by the artist (copy number 3). This is an exceptional copy of the most prized work by this important member of the Belgian avant-garde (1879-1957), published while he was a refugee in London during the Great War. For the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, the artist confines himself a small palette of the simplest colours in keeping with the symbolism of the text: red, yellow, pale tan, blue and green, each in single bold tones, only overlaid to form other tints in a few instances, notably for the fox with overlaid tan and yellow marking him out. The binding is completed with appropriate red cord stitching.

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 a simple 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 Fauvist’, 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 3 of 10 copies on chine, signed (there were also 40 unsigned copies). 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 present copy, complete with the original decorative wrapers and endpapers is just as the book appears in Tijtgat’s painting of 1922, Ma Chambre-atelier, where a copy is lying on a table, together with the artist’s pipe, a bowl of fruit and a vase of flowers (Milo, Tijtgat, 1930, plate 3). 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.