He was one of the first people to specialise in illustrated books for children, and a great number of these featured illustrated animals. Rabier’s work revolutionised the art of illustration. The titular character of this work bears more than a passing resemblance to Hergé’s iconic character, and Rabier’s influence was something that Hergé openly admitted.Ī page from Tintin-Lutin (1898) by Benjamin Rabier and Fred Isly Source: Wikipedia One of his first big successes came in 1898 when he collaborated with Fred Isly on an illustrated album called Tintin Lutin. During this time, he published thousands of illustrations in newspapers and periodicals. Yet, despite this dual existence, Rabier somehow managed to be an incredibly prolific illustrator while still maintaining a twenty-year-long career at Les Halles. Illustration from Le Buffon de Benjamin Rabier (1913) Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France “The adjective that might best characterise Benjamin Rabier,” he notes, “is paradoxical”. For Calon, these two worlds could not have been more different.
Yet, during the day, things were different: “He was an artist giving free rein to his imagination”.
In Marc Faye's terrific Rabier documentary The Man Who Made the Animals Laugh (2013), the illustrator's biographer, Olivier Calon, notes that “at night, worked in a highly structured world framed by a rigid hierarchy”. Only three years before receiving it, he had been balancing his passion with a full-time job at night where he works as an inspector at Paris’ Les Halles food market. Receiving this type of recognition must have felt like a great achievement for the illustrator. Indeed, in the same year that Le Buffon was released, the illustrator was awarded the prestigious Legion of Honour. Rabier’s skill for creating such work helped him significantly in attracting many fans during his lifetime. The illustrations seen in Le Buffon are both informative and entertaining he strikes a perfect balance that is ideally suited to educational illustration. Despite this ability, he also never allowed for his technical skills to overshadow his ability to produce work that was also warm and inviting. Rabier's talent lay in his ability to take an animal and capture it realistically. The work shown here demonstrates the illustrator's keen ability for creating images that are both clear and accessible.
Upon its release, Le Buffon received a warm and enthusiastic welcome, and it helped Rabier expand on his reputation as one of the world's most skilled animal illustrators. He approached everything with almost scientific rigour and, within its pages, we can find some of his finest work. Despite the size of the project, Rabier was no doubt in his element. Filled with over nine hundred illustrations, it took almost three years to complete. That said, the production of the book was certainly a mammoth undertaking. Rabier's adaptation was published under the name Le Buffon de Benjamin Rabier, and it provided him with the perfect opportunity to continue exploring and developing his passion for drawing animals. Featuring detailed descriptions of each species – it was richly illustrated, and included numerous accounts of each species' way of life.
At the time of its publication, it brought a more practical and secular approach to our understanding of the natural world. Buffon’s thirty-six-volume encyclopaedia had been published initially in the eighteenth century, and it had quickly become a hugely celebrated work. It is one of the happiest periods of the talented French illustrator's life.įor him, this project must have felt like the perfect fit. He's forty-eight years of age, and he has just completed work on one of his most impressive titles – an adaptation of Comte de Buffon's magnum opus Histoire Naturelle (1749–1804). It is here that we meet Benjamin Rabier (1864–1939). The year is 1913, and we find ourselves in France.