Albert Robida Encre Aquarelle The Painters' Beach

Watercolor and ink, original work signed Albert Robida lower left, titled and captioned in pencil by the artist "The painters' beach" "You know, there are still new arrivals at the hotel! It's starting to get too crowded here, next year I'll bring bedbugs! ". On the back, a label and a stamp tell us that this work from the collection of Mr Wellingham, 25 rue de la Paix, had been presented at the Salon des Artistes Humoristes held at the Palais de Glace Champs Elysées Paris. Under mat, under glass, in a gilt wood chopsticks frame. Dimensions at sight of the watercolor 26.5x16.5 cm Total dimensions, with frame, 41x32.5 cm Albert Robida, born May 14, 1848 in Compiègne and died October 11, 1926 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, is an illustrator, French caricaturist, engraver, journalist and novelist. His son is the architect Camille Robida (1880-1938). Son of a carpenter, Albert Robida studies to become a notary, but in the boredom of such studies, he devotes himself to caricature. In 1866, he drew in the Journal Amusing then in various magazines. In 1879, he imagines a character raised by monkeys, Saturnin Farandoul. In 1880, with the publisher George Decaux, he founded his own review, La Caricature, which he directed for twelve years and in which Caran d'Ache, Louis Morin, Ferdinand Bac, Job, Maurice Radiguet made their debut. It illustrates tourist guides, popular historical works, literary classics: Villon, Rabelais, Cervantès, Swift, Shakespeare, Les Hundred Contes drolatiques by Honoré de Balzac, the Thousand and One Nights. He also works in a lighter register with a history of brothels. In 1885, he participated in the first international exhibition of white and black and obtained a bronze medal. Between 1891 and 1905, he supplied some sixty plates to the review La Nature by Gaston Tissandier. For the Universal Exhibition of 1900, downstream from the Alma bridge, he designed a reconstruction of a district of “Old Paris”. His fame disappeared shortly after the First World War. Albert Robida has been rediscovered thanks to his anticipatory trilogy: Le Vingtième Siècle, 1883; War in the Twentieth Century, 1887; The twentieth century. Electric Life, 1891-1892. In Electric Life, he imagines the telephonoscope, a flat wall-mounted screen that broadcasts the latest information at all hours of the day and night, the latest plays, lessons and teleconferences. Aircraft are also well established as a means of personal transport and he even mentions an "electro-pneumatic train-tube" reminiscent of the hyperloop of Elon Musk. The story takes place in 1953. In addition to his visionary qualities, his work The Clock of the Centuries (1902), with the paradigm shifts it presents, already announced, according to some of his critics, the Philip Kindred Dick of the novel À back in time. Albert Robida is buried in the cemetery of Croissy-sur-Seine, in the family tomb designed by one of his sons, the architect Camille Robida.