LYDIS, Mariette - Dessins de Mariette Lydis pour illustrer les Fleurs du Mal. (PL II. L'Albatros)

L'Albatros - Etching enhanced with watercolors and signed in pencil by Mariette Lydis, to illustrate Baudelaire's poems of "Les Fleurs du Mal".

Govone printed 353 copies of his large-format Baudelaire in 1928, together with just 125 copies of an accompanying suite of etched plates by Lydis. This left over 200 copies of the text un-illustrated, many of which were unsold by 1935, when Lydis prepared a new suite of plates for them.

Mariette Lydis (Vienna 1887-Buenos Aires 1970) was an Austrian painter who had success in Paris in the 1930s, then in Argentina where she emigrated in 1940. She is particularly known for her color prints and illustrations ( The Flowers of Evil, among others).
She was an engraver with a delicate touch, curiously close to that of the Japanese artist Foujita.

Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857, it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. The poems deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism.