Babar's Kingdom, drawn by the author
Original watercolour for the famous "Babar" series.
304:495 mm. Signed at lower left: "Laur de Brunhoff".
€ 35,000.00
A charming, large-format watercolour showing Celesteville, the capital of "Le pays des Éléphants", Babar's Kingdom. The illustration was used as a double-page spread in "Babar à la fête de Célesteville" (1954) and thus bears a few pencilled marks by the printer in the blank margins.
The children’s classic, Babar, began as a bedtime story that Cécile de Brunhoff told her young sons, Laurent and Mathieu, in 1930, when they were five and four years old, respectively. They loved the story about the little elephant so much that they asked their father, who was an artist, to draw pictures for them of the elephant world their mother had described. He did and eventually created a book, Histoire de Babar: le petit éléphant (The Story of Babar), which was published by Jardin des Modes, a family-run publishing house. Jean de Brunhoff created six more Babar books.
De Brunhoff, who holds both French and American citizenship, was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur.
Perfectly preserved.
