Escales d'Asie.

Paris: Laborey,, 1947. Vivacious watercolour impressions of Saudi Arabia First and limited edition, number 30 of 450 copies. Escales d'Asie describes a sailing voyage round the coast of Arabia: beginning at Suez, taking the Red Sea to Aden, then Muscat and the Persian Gulf to Basra. Fouqueray's watercolours - in which he employs a broad and subtle palette - are impressionistic but with a fine eye for detail. Author and artist started their expedition at Al Wajh on the Red Sea coast, which Fouqueray "found to be a thriving trading port: long caravans arriving from the desert sands; dhows laden with goods of every description from Egypt, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Yemen, the Sultanate of Zanzibar and the rest of East Africa, were tied up on the inlet" (Billecocq, p. 62). Next stop was Yanbu al-Bahr, the port serving Medina, before they moved on to their last port of call, Jeddah - through which pilgrims pass to Mecca. Billecocq notes that "prior to the end of the First World War, French artists had produced no major work depicting the country that was to become Saudi Arabia. But 1917 saw the appearance of Charles Fouqueray, who was to become one of the most eminent official French artists, an undisputed master of the Orientalist movement of the beginning of the century. He was in fact the very first to do what had never been attempted before". Dominique Charles Fouqueray (1869-1956) studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and specialized in marine painting, becoming, in 1908, Peintre de la Marine (Painter to the Fleet), an official title awarded by the French government entitling the holder to embark on French navy vessels. In 1914 he was the first recipient of the Prix de l'Indochine. Claude Farrère (1876-1957) was a prolific author of novels with an exotic setting. In 1905 he won the Prix Goncourt for Les civilisés (The Civilized), set in French Indochina. The preface is by the French naval officer Auguste Thomazi (1873-1959), who wrote a number of naval histories. Farrère and Fouqueray had previously collaborated on Jonques et sampans (1945), about their journey to China. Fouqueray's watercolour sketches for the present work date from between 1918 and 1922. Quarto (275 x 221 mm). Vignette title page printed in green and black, 45 colour illustrations (some full-page, one double page) by Fouqueray, coloured map. Contemporary three half dark blue morocco-grain skiver, spine gilt lettered within a decorative cartouche, gilt marbled sides, top edge gilt, with the original wrappers bound in. Spine sunned. A very good copy, handsomely bound. Xavier Beguin Billecocq, Impressions and Colours: Charles Fouqueray, a French Painter in Saudi Arabia, 1998.