GABRIELLE VINCENT

GABRIELLE VINCENT ERNEST AND CELESTINE Ernest and Célestine have lost Simeon, Éditions Duculot 1981 Promenade dans la neige, original cover. Watercolor on paper 30.9 × 23.6 cm (12.17 × 9.29 in.) At the end of the 1970s, Monique Martin took the plunge into illustration, becoming Gabrielle Vincent. She hesitated a lot, afraid that it would alienate her and take too much time away from her artistic practice. And yet, it's the very thing that will enable her fame to cross borders. This is the first official image of Ernest & Celestine. In this delicate landscape, where everything seems silent and tender, Ernest and Célestine make their entrance. And you immediately want to dive in and join them. It's the album of the beginning, the one of all the risks: publishing under a pseudonym and being unmasked, making a first album not followed by a second, missing or succeeding in the official transition to youth - everything was possible, but everything was risky. This was also the period when the artist agreed to claim an artistic lineage in illustration, one that was 100% British. Here and there, on pencils from the early days of Ernest et Célestine or in her diaries from the late 1970s, she wrote "Arthur Rackham English", in reference to the great illustrator of children's classics, fairy tales and stories, born in 1867 and died in 1939, who was for a long time the absolute reference for children's illustration; or she mentioned "Shepard", for Ernest H. Shepard (1879-1976), the creator of Winnie the Pooh.