My BasketLA FONTAINE - LE PETIT POISSON ET LE PÊCHEUR - THE LITTLE FISH & THE FISHERMAN 1755 - 59
This rare and very attractive folio engraving of "Le petit poisson et le pêcheur" - "The the little fish and the fisherman" - is by Pierre-Alexandre Aveline after a drawing by Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686-1755), and appeared in the complete edition of La Fontaine's fables, published in four volumes by the publisher Desaint & Saillant, rue Saint Jean de Beauvais in Paris, 1755-1759.
"This is one of the most ambitious and successful of all illustrated books" Ray
Oudrey drew sketches based on the fables of La Fontaine beginning in 1729. The publisher describes in the preface how Oudry composed the drawings "for his own pleasure, and in those chosen moments of imagination when an Artist grasps the idea of his subject and gives free reign to his genius" (Ray's translation). "
La Fontaine, a fabulist - author of fables - collected and adapted nearly 240 fables from Aesop, Phaedrus, and Eastern, Oriental, and Continental works, which today are regarded amongst the greatest of French masterpieces.
