The physician, writer and Orientalist Joseph Charles Mardrus (1868-1949) translated The One Thousand and One Nights from Arabic into French (also known as Arabian Nights in English). His translation, comprising 116 stories in 16 volumes, was published between 1899 and 1904.
One of them, La Reine de Saba (The Queen of Sheba), was published as an individual story in 1918, then republished in 1922 in a luxurious version illustrated with 50 watercolours by Antoine Bourdelle. It tells the story of the meeting between Balkis, a 16-year-old queen living in the “land of Sheba, in the country of Yemen” and King Solomon.
Using a few lines from the story, Bourdelle freely composed colourful, poetic scenes in watercolour. He called on the printmaker Jean Saudé to reproduce them using the watercolour pochoir (stencil) technique.
The museum has a copy (MB 2624 R) of the work involved in this close collaboration, including the coloured proofs that Saudé submitted to Bourdelle. The sculptor has annotated each of them in a very graphic and precise way for the colourist.
La Reine de Saba is one of the most remarkable illustrated works to which Bourdelle contributed.
Claire Boisserolles
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