Manuel Orazi Italian, 1860 - 1934

All of the sheets are sound with no signs of any tears or damages. In the work titled 'The Feast' some of the thicker areas of gouache have cracked slightly, notably to the red flowers around the boy's head, otherwise all the works are in very good original condition and the colours remain strong. Each held under glass in simple plaster moulded gilt wood frames with clean white mounts.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

The present group of watercolours bears witness to Orazi's fascination with magic and sorcery, and combine the esoteric with the aesthetic.

A native of Rome, Orazi moved to Paris in 1892, and soon gained a reputation as a highly talented Art Nouveau illustrator and poster designer. He designed posters for various Parisian theatres, illustrated the books of Edgar Alan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Pierre Louis, Lorrain and Ovid, and was a regular contributor to Le Figaro Illustré and L'Assiette au beurre.

Orazi was fascinated by magic, witchcraft, alchemy and the occult, which found expression in many of his works in the 1890s. When Siegfried Bing opened his famous gallery L'Art Nouveau in Paris in 1895, he commissioned Orazi to illustrate Austin De Croze's Calendrier Magique, an occult calendar on magic and witchcraft that commemorated magic for the coming year. Printed in a limited edition of 777, and based on the mythical and astrological motifs that had become recurrent themes in the artist's oeuvre, its surviving interest resides in the extravagant and compelling illustrations by Orazi.

Like many symbolist painters of his time, Orazi's work was both inspired by literature and produced to embellish works of literature. He became friends with many contemporary authors who were connected to the Aesthetic movement, such as Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde and Maurice Maeterlinck. An illustration by Orazi for L'Assiette au beurre's issue on black magic shows a humorous depiction of a black mass in which a group of well-known dandies, including Maeterlinck, Proust, Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, incredulously ogle a very bored, blasé nude spread out on an improvised altar in front of them (fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Manuel Orazi, Black Mass - Deception, cover for L'Assiette au beurre's special issue on Black Magic, 13 December 1903
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