Jules Habert Dys (1850-1930), Aquatic Fantasies, Watercolor, Ink And Golden Gouache, 1885

Jules Habert Dys (1850-1930)

Aquatic fantasies
Around 1885
Watercolor and ink on paper, heightened with "gold" gouache
27 x 20 cm
Signed lower left J. Habert-Dys
Bibliography: Decorative Fantasies, Paris, Librairie de l'Art J. Rouam, 1886-1887, reproduced


Jules Habert-Dys is an artist, painter, designer and ceramist, precursor of Art Nouveau. Born in 1850 in Fresnes, in Loir-et-Cher, he grew up in a modest environment before entering, at the age of thirteen, as an apprentice to a building painter. After four years of apprenticeship, he joined the workshop of Ulysse Besnard, a renowned ceramist from Blois. At twenty-four, Jules Habert-Dys arrived in Paris and enrolled in the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts. Alongside his studies, the young man found work with a potter and exhibited two slip plates for the first time at the 1876 Salon. The following year, he was employed in the famous porcelain factory of Charles Haviland where he met Félix Bracquemond, Edgar Degas and Eugène Carrière. From this period also dates his discovery of Japanese art which had an immediate and lasting influence on his work. After leaving Gérôme's studio at the Beaux-Arts, then his job at Haviland in 1880, Jules Habert-Dys collaborated with the magazine L'Art and received the support of the Baroness de Rothschild who bought several pieces from him. In 1885, when the magazine L'Art had ceased publication, its publisher, the bookseller Jules Rouam, proposed to Habert-Dys the publication of a collection of drawings reproduced in color according to his creations. The work, entitled Decorative Fantasies, is made up of forty-eight plates engraved by Charles Gillot and offers more than two hundred motifs to serve as models for the decoration of earthenware, furniture, fabrics or jewelry. Habert-Dys approaches each of these plates as an isolated work and creates a graphic ensemble that announces Art Nouveau. The artist actually draws his inspiration from the fauna and flora, on land, in the air and in the waters. He mixes inks with watercolors which he enhances with gold and silver in a clever alchemy. Strongly influenced by Japanese prints, our plate divided into three registers, details, with great graphic precision, carp swimming and jumping through algae (enhanced with golden gouache). If the background is stylized in the manner of a Japanese print, the representation of the carp is more naturalistic. This contrast fully illustrates the play of influence of Japanese aesthetics with a more Western conception of the representation of reality. A little-known artist today, Jules Habert-Dys mainly distinguished himself in the field of decorative arts. Some of his projects for porcelain are kept at the National Ceramic Museum in Sèvres and the Charles VII Museum in Mehun-sur-Yèvre exhibits part of one of his table services created for the Universal Exhibition of 1889.