Charles Martin pochoir "L'été" (Summer). Gazette du Bon Ton c1922

by Martin, Charles

Gazette du Bon Ton Charles Martin pochoir circa 1922. Summer haze with pensive lady in pretty summer dress, standing by the water, looking at a row boat.

Along with Pierre Mourgue, Charles Martin (1884-1934) excelled in the subtle scenes. Charles Martin used two distinctive styles in his pochoir fashion plates for the influential fashion periodical Gazette du Bon Ton. With clarity and imagination he portrayed fanciful vehicles (as in his Carriage Automobile for the Grand Gala), but this wistful scene for a fashion plate in Gazette du Bon Ton, is more akin to the style of his risque pochoir illustrations to the Fables of Jean de la Fontaine.

Gazette du Bon Ton (Journal of Good Style) showed the latest fashions of eminent Parisian designers. Gazette du Bon Ton was published in Paris by Lucien Vogel, between 1912 and 1925 (with a break during World War I). The latest elegant clothing shown in an appropriate setting provides a charming fashion narrative of the lifestyle of the wealthy at that time.

Pochoir (French for stencil) was a labour-intensive method of printing, with colouring by gouache, watercolour and ink, using a different zinc stencil for each colour to prevent them running together during the printing process, and building up the intensity of colour and nuance of the image by each successive application of stencil.

Currently in a conservation mount, the window size of this plate is approximately 23 x 18 cm (9 x 7 inches), and external measurement 37 x 32 cm (14.5 x 12.5 inches).