The Streets and Faces of Chas Laborde (1886–1941)
A few evening’s past, I received a frantic nocturnal call from museum founder, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. concerning a unique item by Chas Laborde being sold by the proprietors of Librairie Walden, Hervé and Eva Valentin, via a virtual book fair. The item in question is the artist’s earliest known travel notebook, entirely handwritten, and including sixty pencil sketches and a dozen pen drawings made during his first visit to England in 1905. As The Wolfsonian Library has a significant body of books, portfolios and ephemera illustrated by this important French artist, Mr. Wolfson was eager that we acquire the sketchbook and add it to our holdings.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with funds provided by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
At his boarding school at Pau, young Charles Laborde spent much of his extracurricular time drawing his schoolmates and making landscape painting excursions. In 1903, Laborde took up residence in Paris and pursued his love of art, enrolling in some courses at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Julian. Over the summer break of 1905, Laborde made his first trip to London with another artist friend, where he made many studies, sketches, and drawings of the persons, structures, and landscapes he encountered. The sketchbook contains portraits and illustrations of dwellings and pastoral scenes made during his visit to the capital city, the fishing village of Selsey, Bosham, and Sussex, and then to the Basque region on his return to France.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with funds provided by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Laborde was so impressed by his visit to England that he adopted the English abbreviated nickname, “Chas,” and made annual pilgrimages there until the outbreak of the First World War.
Before the war intervened, Laborde had begun associating with other artists, including the novelists Francis Carco (1886–1958) and Pierre Mac Orlan (1882–1970), and fellow illustrators Pierre Falké (1884–1947), and Gus Bofa (1883–1968). Laborde also began submitting illustrations to such important French social satire publications as Le Rire [The Laugh] and L’Assiette au Beurre [The Butter Plate]. His work was also frequently exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Humoristes as well as the Societe des Dessinateurs Humoristes. When the war began in 1914, Laborde volunteered and served as a machine-gunner, while continuing to make pen and ink drawings of life from the front lines and submitting satirical illustrations to Le Rire Rouge [The Red Laugh] and La Baïonnette [The Bayonet].
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Sickened in a poison gas attack in 1917, he was medically discharged from the army. Chas’ nephew, Guy Laborde, posthumously published École de Patience [School of patience], using his uncle’s pen and ink wartime sketchbook as illustrations of life during wartime, at and behind the front lines.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Returning to civilian life, Chas Laborde resumed his work as an illustrator, producing satirical views of café life, the promenade of the famous Folies Bergeres review, and the streets and faces of Paris at the war’s close.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
In the post-war period, Laborde studied and mastered the art of engraving and etching and earned a decent living in the 1920s as an illustrator of deluxe edition books published by his friends Carco and Mac Orlan, as well as by Colette, Paul Morand, Valery Larbaud, and Jean Giraudoux. Often these limited editions included an extra suite of progressive proofs of the illustrations suitable for mounting or framing.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Much of Laborde’s witty artwork in this period satirized bourgeois life, values, sexual mores, and class relations, and exposed the denizens who lived on the fringes of respectable society.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
But Laborde’s illustrations also captured the hectic tempo of modern city life with its bustling subways and airports, crowded streets and commercial boulevards, opera and theatre, restaurants and café culture, and the proliferation of leisure, entertainment, and nightlife venues.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Chas Laborde continued to frequent outdoor cafés with his coterie of Parisian artist friends, hiding his notebook on his knee under the table to furtively capture a scene or an oblivious subject’s face and gestures. Returning to his studio after an evening spent in this manner, he would transfer his fresh impressions and sketches to a larger piece of paper or canvas.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
Laborde’s portfolio of twenty etchings, titled Rues et Visages de Paris was published in 1926 to such considerable acclaim, that he decided to follow up that venture by similarly highlighting the streets and faces of other famous metropolises. After two trips to London in the spring and summer of 1927, Laborde published an album depicting the public parks and cityscapes of the British capital the following year.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
A portfolio of etchings focusing on the restaurants, cafés, and crowds strolling the boulevards of Berlin followed in 1930.
Invited by Condé Nast publishers to visit New York City, he published 15 plates in Vanity Fair before returning home laden with a dozen sketch books which supplied the inspiration for his final streets and faces series. In it he captured the class divisions and ethnic diversity of the city and documented the nightlife of the theatre district’s “Great White Way” on Broadway.
Although Laborde produced some of his best work in the 1930s, the onset of the Great Depression at the start of the decade dried up the market for the limited edition illustrated books that had been his bread and butter in the “roaring twenties.” Although he could still count on the income of his weekly drawing for the satirical Paris-Midi, he struggled to support himself. In the middle of the decade, Laborde traveled to Moscow to do some drawings for a modest periodical, La Chronique filme du mois, and then visited Madrid to record his impressions of very different street scenes playing out at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.
The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
When the Germans invaded France at the start of the Second World War, Laborde joined the editor of the Paris-Midi at the Maginot Line, publishing drawings of the short-lived French resistance in the spring of 1940. Plagued by poor finances, material want, and failing health under the German occupation, Chas Laborde died on December 30, 1941, though his keen wit and quick eye and hand remain with us in the wonderful sketches, etchings, and illustrations that endure.
Wolfsonian-FIU Library 