Pictorial initial (page 304) 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 edition of Les Petites Fleurs de St. François that pairs a hand-carved woodcut pictorial initial with typographic text to introduce a chapter and recall medieval illuminated pages.
Your eye is arrested by the warm brown, circular woodcut initial—a compact, stylized friar entwined with sinuous ornamental forms—set against crisp, classical French type and wide, cream margins that make the image feel like a deliberate, intimate interruption of the text.
The page represents the early 20th-century revival of artisanal bookmaking and woodcut illustration, where artists like Bernard drew on medieval manuscript traditions and Symbolist aesthetics to reassert the image’s power within modern printed books.
Medium
One from an illustrated book with 329 woodcuts
Dimensions
composition (irreg.): 3 1/4 × 2 15/16" (8.2 × 7.5 cm); page: 12 13/16 × 9 13/16" (32.5 × 25 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
The Louis E. Stern Collection
Accession
677.1964.246
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
