Title: [Quatres Proverbes or Four Proverbs].'Les ...
Publication Date: 1927
Mounting: Mounted, glazed & framed
Print Condition: Near Fine
Edition: 1st
Complete set of four hand-coloured pochoir prints published in 1927 for a French magazine & called the four proverbs: 'Les paroles s'envolent les ecrits restent'; 'On a souvent besoin d'un plus petit que soi'; 'Qui trop embrasse.'; 'Aide-toi le ciel t'aidera'. 23 x 29.5 cm. Mounted and framed. Pochoir technique uses a stencil to create the black outline, the images are then hand coloured with watercolour. These are Art Deco illustrations illustrating emancipated women looking after themselves. One of them, "Heaven Helps Those Who Help Themselves" is held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The others roughly translate as Sometimes we all need a little help from someone not so great as ourselves , "Promises are cheap, what's written down counts" & "Over-affectionate with kisses". Ettore Tito (1859-1941) is a very well regarded and well exhibited painter from Italy. Tito trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice and later became a professor there, known for his landscapes and scenes of traditional life in the Veneto region, as well as producing several larger mythological murals notably for the Villa Berlinghieri in Rome and the Chiesa degli Scalzi in Venice. He associated with an expatriate artistic milieu in Venice, which had its hub at Palazzo Barbaro and was a friend of John Singer Sargent and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Over the years, the family properties, Villa Tito in the Brenta Riviera and the Palazzotto Tito in Venice, were also meeting places for artists such as Anders Zorn, Ludwig Passini, Luigi Nono and Mariano Fortuny , as well as musicians and writers. Tito won a large number of prizes and medals for his paintings that have always been highly prized and sit in many national collections. However, in 1927 he also produced these pochoir prints of emancipated women for a French publishers which were considered rather risqué at the time! These images bore testament to the ongoing struggle for female equality: only 30 years before publication, the world's first female members of parliament were elected in Finland and in 1927 in Norway the Law on Spouses awarded equal legal weight to the verbal testimony of the housewife in parity with their husbands. But as late as 1943, in France, Marie-Louise Giraud was executed for performing abortions and universal suffrage was not granted until 1945 there. Bookseller Inventory # 4393