Jean de Bosschère, Illustrator

Poet, painter, illustrator, novelist, essayist, art historian /critic: this lengthy and far from exhaustive list of labels for the creative identities of Jean de Bosschère tells of multiple interests, marshaled in a lifelong pursuit of evocative emotion. One facet of Bosschère’s particular genius stands out for anyone who studies this strange and affecting figure closely: his lifelong quest to marry word and image.

That quest took several forms, one of which gives rise to the materials brought together in these pages. Jean de Bosschère was a brillant book illustrator whose prolific career spanned his entire life. His early works of art criticism sometimes contained some of his own sketches. His first major work, the prose-poem Béale-Grylne, was accompanied by a series of illustrations that already suggested a high stylist. As a refugee in London he came into contact with the publishers of illustrated books for whom he would work continuously throughout the twenties and thirties.

Bosschère did not value all his illustrations equally. Indeed, he had a very ambivalent relationship to his commercial work. Without entering into a discussion of the differences in Bosschère’s output, it remains nonetheless a fact that it was when he illustrated his own works that Bosschère came the closest to his own ideal of "poète graphique," in the apt expression of Claudie Barral.

The first edition of this site, then, is devoted to Bosschère as illustrator of his own works. With the exception of the naturalist illustration that occupied much of his later life, this site catalogues the works Bosschère both wrote and illustrated. Each work will have a separate page with a brief introductory commentary to accompany a generous selection of images each title; indeed, in many instances, the complete set of images is reproduced. We hope that in time more pages will be added devoted to Bosschere’s commercial illustration.