DE MUSSET Alfret - MERSON Olivier - GIRALDON Adolphe. Les Nuits

Les Nuits. La Nuit de mai – La Nuit de décembre – La Nuit d’Août – La nuit d’octobre.

Musset’s Nights… For half a century, lovers have delighted in them, little girls whose bread is cut into slices have savored them in secret, young brides have nourished their recent freedom with them, all the heartaches of both sexes have sought their echo here: they found it.
Excerpt from the preface by Edmond Haraucourt.

Paris, J. Meynial, 1911

Large In-8 of [79]pp. Full dark blue morocco. Covers with gilt frames composed of 3 fillets. Spine with 5 raised bands with gilt fillet box, gilt title piece. Double gilt fillets on the edge of the covers and on the edge of the crown. Gilt edge. Pasting covers with Moroccan frame, fillets, gilt stars. Blue cloth on glued guard and on the flying guard.

5 plates outside the text by Luc-Olivier Merson, including 4 compositions in grayscale/blue and a color illustration in a medallion framed by a floral composition and an extract from a poem.
Adolphe Giraldon executed the frontispiece, the illustrated half-titles in medallion, the headers representing scenes from the poems as well as the text frames made of ribbons, stars and flowers.

Edition of 180 copies. Here N°96 on Arches Vellum paper.

Luc-Olivier Merson and Adolphe Giraldon, it took no less to pay homage to the Nights. The painter of the Academic movement, with his disturbing realist work, mastering draperies, antique bodies in strange scenes, brings hypnotizing visual ruptures with regard to Giraldon's dreamlike work with soft, pastel colors of flower compositions and bucolic scenes.

Rare are the books that coherently associate two very different artistic styles. Giraldon with his stylized compositions and Merson with his "hyper-realism pompier".
And rare are the artists who master both subjects, Alfonse Mucha brilliantly succeeded in this exercise in Le Pater.
(https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k10656206/f7.planchecontact) Paris, Piazza, 1899. An exceptional illustration of the Our Father.

For more information:
The work of Luc-Olvier Merson: https://www.wikiart.org/fr/luc-olivier-merson
Biography of Luc-Olivier Merson: https://museedartsdenantes.nantesmetropole.fr/expositions/luc-olivier-merson/
Biography of Adolphe Giraldon: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolphe_Giraldon

The book is fully digitized on the BNF website :
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1524801b/f15.planchecontact.r=nuits%20giraldon

Condition: the bookmark has left marks between pages 42 and 43. Rubbing on the cut of the headpiece. Stains on several page edges.