#provance

[amongfloweringmeadows]

Lunch in Provance 🍽

[londonberrylane]

[shapinginvisible]

Provencial life

France

[veronicaleafless]

~my lavender garden ~

Instagram @veronica_is_leafless

[lovelybyana]

[fashioninpaper]

Fripounet and Marisette

I came across some nicely designed national and ethnic costumes from a French children’s magazine. Unfortunately I could not find the paper dolls themselves. I did find a small illustration of a boy figure but it had a water mark. From that I created new boy and girl figures - Fripounet and Marisette.

Fripounet and Marisette were created in 1943 and by René Bonnet (Herboné). As comic strip characters they regularly got involved with mysteries, gangsters or spies (like Herge’s Tintin). Fripounet is described as a blond haired boy and Marisette is his cousin. They appeared in their own magazine for 24 years (1945-1969).

Checkout the other characters and costumes:

https://fashioninpaper.tumblr.com/post/670667753196224512/fripounet-and-marisettes-new-friends-there-were

https://fashioninpaper.tumblr.com/post/670758295021273088/more-fripounet-and-marisette-the-boy-figure-on-the

As far as I can tell, a new costume page was included with each issue.

[othmeralia]

A Princess's Book

These splendid little volumes have so many interesting things going on. I was initially attracted to the heraldry stamped on the binding (more on that below) then utterly blown away by the beautiful block-printed 18th century endpapers. Finally, the provenance is simply fascinating as this was a book from a woman's library.

The leather binding is contemporary to about the time that book was published in 1781. There is a small bookplate on the top corner of the front pastedown that says: "De la Bibliotheque de Madame la Comtesse Constance Rzewuska née Princesse Lubomirska." The armorial crest gilt on the front boards hints at two families. On the left is a horseshoe with a cross inside and a partial cross on top, this is part of the crest of the Rzewuski family. On the right is an exaggerated curve, which is part of the crest of the Lubomirski family and represents the bends of the Szreniawa River in Poland. With both her maiden family name and her married name, it appears that the Comtesse Constance Rzewuska had this book bound and added to her library. Who was this Countess? As far as I can find, there is quite a bit on her Lubomirski family (Polish nobility), but not a lot of information on her. Her full name is Maria Constantia Isabella Lubomirska or Konstancja Małgorzata Lubomirska, she lived from about 1763-1840. She obviously had a library, which I'd love to know more about. She married Seweryn Rzewuski and had three children.

The other, much larger bookplate on the front pastedowns belonged to Heinrich Johann Baptist Ghislain Freiherr von Gudenus (1839-1915). The date 1891 at the bottom refers to the date that the bookplate was made, which was by the Viennese engraver Heinrich Jauner. It's interesting to see how the style of bookplates changed over 100 years.

Dictionnaire des merveilles de la nature, 1781.

[lotoseaters]

It was clear to gardener @katecoulson and her husband Nicholas that the exposed hilltop position of their Provençal garden ‘ruled out the sort of polite lavender and clipped olive gardening’ that Kate could see was so dominant in this part of France. She had seen Iris pallida ‘growing like a weed on verges’, but never celebrated as the star of the show. She planted over 2,000 ‘to flood the garden with blue' in the spring.

📸 @eva_nemeth