Racine and Chauveau: a poetics of illustration

This article examines the original illustrations for Racine's plays, mostly drawn by François Chauveau, and attacks several perennial received ideas about them: that they mostly depict off-stage violent action; that they are aesthetically at odds with the plays themselves; that the illustrations owe more to the artist's fantasy than to Racine's text. The article demonstrates that most of the illustrations depict on-stage events, and, with particularly detailed analyses of the illustrations for La Thébaïde and Mithridate, argues that, whether the event depicted is on-stage or off-stage, the artist engages scrupulously with the text of the play, producing an illustration that is faithful to Racine's work and inviting the reader to engage in fruitful parallel readings of text and image. The illustrations respond to, and capitalize on, Racine's dramatic poetry.The full-text of this article is not currently available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page. Citation: Hawcroft, M. (2007). 'Racine and Chauveau: a poetics of illustration', French Studies 61(3), 280-297. [The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available at http://fs.oxfordjournals.org/]