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Auguste Jean Baptiste Roubille
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Born December 15, 1872 - Paris; died 1955.
Roubille was an engraver, painter , muralist, book illustrator, and a designer of posters and dioramas.
In 1897 Roubille began submitting work to the French satirical journals, in the years that follwed his illustrations appeared in: Le Courrier francais, Le Rire, Le Sourire, Le Cri de Paris, L’ Assiette au Beurre, La Revue Blanche, Cocorico, Fantasio, La Canard Sauvage, L’ Aube, Les Temps Nouveaux, and others.
Roubille's importance to the development of new techniques in illustration can not be overstated; and even today, his style remains strikingly modern. As first explored on the covers of Le Cri de Paris, Roubille’s later series of animal caricatures for Fantasio are stunning for the amazing variety of forms he was able to extract from his well honed and pointedly minimal style which emphasized the line while actively engaging the complex task of conveying the joyous animal personalities of swans, horses, cockerels, turkeys etc. The work stands pioneered new ground for generations of later artists and stands as a high mark of early 20th Century cartooning which substantially reinforced the idiomatic underpinnings of what we would now label "a classic silhouette treatment".
Still, despite the friendly accessiblity of his Fantasio work, Roubille was fully capable of putting bite into his images and his 1900 series of 13 political posters drew too much attention and were subsequently restricted for their scathing critique of the church and govt. No doubt Roubille’s peers saw such censorship as a triumph and celebrated them as an aesthetic accomplishment. It is not surprising then that as a testament to his success as an illustrator in April 1901 Roubille was honored with the task of illustrating for the 1st issue of L'Assiette au Beurre alongside his compatriot Steinlen.
Regardless of the venue, Roubille’s style was characteristically eclectic and arresting, and he was adept at producing drawings as the needs of the work dictated. Roubille could illustrate in the simplified flat-toned "Nabi" approach, the more traditional satirist’s style of Daumier and Gavarni, or in a his own uniquely pre-Expressionist manner which was both bold in composition and rendering and prefigured Brassai's ingenious photographs of the 1930s.
Roubille executed a number of posters, including: Le Smart Carman (1899, printed by Appel), Le Brillant Géolin, Les Appareils photographiques Démaria frères, and several posters for La Scala or L'Eldorado (1904), and Mam'zelle Chichi, Revue à Poivre, En bombe, Cassons du sucre (all printed by Verneau). Roubille’s lithographs printed at Tailliardat and Désabusée were displayed at the Société des Peintres et Lithographes in 1909 and 1910.
Recognized as a successful interior decorator, Roubille is noted as having painted the frieze for the Maison du Rire which displayed at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair and for his series of panels for the Café d'Harcourt. In later years achieved note as a designer of furniture and for the ‘Écho et Narcisse’ series of P. Feuil-latre.
Bibliography:
-Appelbaum: French Satirical Drawings from L'Assiette au Beurre. Dover, 1978.
-E. Benezit : Dictionnaire des Peintres, Grund, Paris, 1999.
-Bailly-Herzberg « Dictionnaire De L'estampe En France 1830 – 1950 » Paris, 1985.
-Du Chasnet, « Auguste Roubiïle », Art et Décoration, 1910.
-Bachollet R., « Le Musée de Sires », Le Collectionneur français, janvier-février 1980.
-Dardel A., Catalogue des illustrations des Temps nouveaux, Ms, Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1980.
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