Chas (Charles) Laborde Landscape Prints

Chas Laborde - Paris - Capucine's Boulevard - Original Etching Dimensions : 13 x 10". Paper : Rives vellum. Edition : 225 copies. 1927 From Tableaux de Paris, Emile-Paul Freres, Paris Chas LABORDE Charles Laborde was born in Buenos Aires on August 8, 1886. He was the youngest of the five sons of Adolphe-Sylvestre Laborde-Pinou, a Basque-Bearne millionaire who had made a fortune selling spirits to the Indians and luxury goods imported from France to wealthy Argentines. The family returned to France when Charles was six months old. His mother died when he was two. He spent his childhood at their family château d’Escout outside Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the Pyrenees. His brothers went to a boarding-school, his father was often in Paris on business, and little Charles was left to his devices. Though it was a lonely childhood, he was a darling of his generous and magnanimous father. Charles got his early drawing skills from a village artist and found support in his brother Jean-Felix. Charles frequently accompanied his father visiting artisans and helped him choose de luxe objects to be sold in Argentine. He first attended the Rollin college in Paris, then a lyceum in Pau, where he lived with full board and lodging after his father’s death in 1901. From childhood Charles wanted to be an artist and tried several pseudonyms for himself: Ch. Laborde, Carlos Laborde,Carlos Edrobal and Carl Lab. He started wearing a velvet suit and a large hat. At 17, the timid shortsighted teenager wearing big glasses was expelled from college for smoking and drinking alcohol and went to Paris into the custody of his elder brother Jean-Felix, who carried on his father’s business. Charles enrolled in the prestigious l’Académie Julian, studying under Henri Royer and Marcel Baschet. Simultaneously he was a pupil of William Bouguereau and Luc-Olivier Merson at l’École des Beaux-Arts. The latter was famous for being the designer of the 50 and 100 franc banknotes, and he believed that he was teaching a “little Daumier”. In England, where he went every year from 1905 to 1914 with the family of his friend Cooper, a classmate at l’Académie Julian, he found not only his pseudonym Chas (short for Charley), but also the land of his dreams. Peculiarities of London and its inhabitants were reflected in drawings of William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson, whose album The Microcosm of London (1808) prompted Charles to make his London Streets Scenes (1928). Owing to those trips Charles took a liking to the atmosphere of England and its reserved and terse humor. In 1905 the château d’Escout and the Buenos Aires Commercial Fund were sold. After coming into inheritance, Laborde became financially independent and obtained an atelier in Montmartre at 11 bis Rue des Saules. His neighbors were de la Butte, Francis Carco and Pierre Mac Orlan, who sympathized with the easy-going young man with a positive attitude to life. His friend Pierre Falke...