Inscribed l.l.: Derriere les decors de l’immense nature

Brush and Indian ink, 57 by 45 cm (22 ½ by 13 ¾ ins)

This early work by James Boswell from c.1927,  forms part of a series of unpublished illustrations for Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. The collection (comprising most of Baudelaire’s writing from 1840 until his death in 1867) was highly influential in Symbolist and Modernist art in the following five or six decades. Its themes of decadence and suffering are ones that clearly emerge in Boswell’s own art in the 1930s. The text here is apparently a mis-quote from Baudelaire’s text which reads: ” “Derriere les decors De l’existence immense” (Behind the backdrops of immense existence).