François-Philippe du BERCELLE (active in the early 18th century): Nous passons le Tems et le Tems nous passe.
SOLD
[We pass the Time and Time ferries us]
Etching, 320 x 215 mm (sheet).
Very fine impression printed on laid paper, trimmed on or just outside the borderline on three sides and under the letter bottom. In very good condition; tiny tear to right edge; small loss to tip of upper right corner.
Very rare. We have found no mention of this print.
In his boat, reminiscent of the ship of fools and Charon's boat, Time, scythe in hand and hourglass on his head, leads a group of young people who are carefree and going about their business: one couple is playing cards, another is flirting, one man is drinking, another is playing the flute. Standing at the stern, one man observes the stars through a telescope, another reads.
The letter develops the play on words in the title. Death is addressing the spectator, warning him and inviting him to think about his destiny:
Le Tems passe tout âge. Passant, pense tu pas Passer par ce passage ? Où passant j’ay passé // Si tu n’y pense pas Passant, tu n’es pas sage, Car en n’y pensant pas Tu te verras passé.
Little is known about François-Philippe Dubercelle or du Bercelle, an artist active in the first half of the 18th century.
The Inventaire du Fonds Français lists the illustrations he engraved for works by Lesage (Le Diable boiteux in 1726, Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane in 1735), by La Grange-Chancel and Gillet de Moyvre, as well as a view of Besançon. He also produced satirical works that earned him imprisonment, as François Courboin explains: ‘M. Funck-Brentano's publication, Les Lettres de Cachet à Paris, provides us, from 1721 onwards, with a whole series of names of printmakers imprisoned for making or selling Jansenist prints. There are honest people, such as Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas de Poilly, who spent a week in the Bastille (2-9 May 1741), obviously for the principle, but there are also people sentenced for a slightly more complicated Jansenism: François-Philippe du Bercelle, for example, who criticized not only ‘the Constitution’ but also ‘the System’ and who was imprisoned for a year after having represented Mgr. le Régent, le sieur Law et la France, dressed up in paper (17 October 1721 - 30 October 1722)’. François Moureau gives a few details: ‘François-Philippe du Bercelle was imprisoned on 17 October 1719’ for having engraved, among other things, a plate depicting the burial of the Pope's Constitution, and another depicting M. le Régent, le sieur Law, France dressed up in paper, and several other figures’. This political allegory of the Système affair enabled him to take advantage of the state fortress until 3 October 1722 (Frantz Funck-Brentano, Les Lettres de cachet à Paris, Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1903, no. 2578). He had engraved these plates after the painter Jean Hubert for Jean-Baptiste Lamesle, one of the booksellers of the Mercure: they accompanied him during his stay in the Bastille (ibid., no. 2579, 2584) (François Moureau ‘Marivaux: un hérésiarque en littérature?’ in Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, Vol. 112(3), 2012, pp. 517-531).