Strenae (Sep 2024)
Plusieurs séries d’illustrations pour les albums de fiction du Père Castor : les aléas de l’image au gré de l’évolution éditoriale
Abstract
Images play an essential role in the Père Castor project. Paul Faucher was as concerned about the quality of the texts as he was about the artistic dimension of the images, convinced that illustrated books encourage children to read and influence their sensibility, taste and judgement. Paul Faucher was one of the pioneers of the children’s book, developing publishing programmes that allowed text and image to interact in picturebooks, adapting formats, page layouts and illustrations to best serve the stories. Paul Faucher brought together artists who took part in the creation of an innovative iconographic collection: the image and the text were thus united in the success that the picturebooks enjoyed from the moment of their publication. Since the 1970s, Paul Faucher’s successors have been faced with the challenge of developing a publishing policy worthy of the Père Castor collection. Today, among the small selection of titles reissued by Flammarion jeunesse, some appear in restored editions but also with several illustrations. This raises questions about the iconographic transmission of the Père Castor collection, but also about the continuity of the publishing project, since a new illustration can lead to a different reading of the story. Some of the re-illustrations were intended by Paul Faucher, others by his son François Faucher, who created new collections. This article looks at the fate of images that have been read by generations, appearing and disappearing as iconography is modernised or children’s reading materials are improved. Two stories published by Paul Faucher and illustrated several times, La Vache Orange by Nathan Hale and Marlaguette by Marie Colmont, provide an opportunity to consider the context of the re-illustrations and the evolution of the images over the 90 years of Père Castor’s publication.
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