Pictorial initial (page 224) from Les Petites Fleurs de St. François (The Little Flowers of St. Francis)
Émile Bernard
French, 1868–1941
1928
A printed page from Émile Bernard’s 1928 illustrated edition of Les Petites Fleurs de Saint François that uses a carved woodcut pictorial initial to bring a medieval devotional image into a modern book.
Your eye is immediately caught by a warm-brown, blocky initial that also reads as a stylized friar—its bold, simplified lines and curling flourish forming a striking counterpoint to the calm, closely set French text on the page.
Bernard’s woodcut fuses medieval iconography with modernist simplification and is part of an early-20th-century revival of handcrafted book arts that reclaimed the expressive, tactile power of the woodcut in contemporary illustration.
Medium
One from an illustrated book with 329 woodcuts
Dimensions
composition (irreg.): 3 1/4 × 2 3/4" (8.2 × 7 cm); page: 12 13/16 × 9 13/16" (32.5 × 25 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
The Louis E. Stern Collection
Accession
677.1964.181
Palette
Exhibitions
