Isabel Downs Speaker (1 results)

Condition: Good. Broadside.on rag paper. 46 x 28cm, Isabel Foster Downs is associated with the 1949 edition of Six études pour Le bestiaire ou le cortège d'Orphée by Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire's Le Bestiaire is a collection of poems linked to animal motifs, published in 1911 with woodcuts by Raoul Dufy. .Biography:"After grad school, we relocated to Panama where he worked at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. There was no staff illustrator so I happily fell into that role and worked with scientists in wildly differing disciplines such as botany, anthropology, and ethnomusicology. The "doctor" part of my name, which I never use, was earned in French literature. My Ph.D. was on a peculiar phenomenon of the 20th century, the illustrated modern French bestiary. A bestiary in the Middle Ages was a book which used animals to teach moral lessons. Many centuries later, French poets and painters revamped that idea by collaborating on making a beautiful limited edition book, which again used animals to teach us about human nature. Some of the great names of 20th century French literature and art were involved. There are about 100 such books, some small fraction of which I own and all of which I studied in private and public libraries the world around.".