Suzanne Espérance Theureau was a French illustrator and vignettiste who grew up in the north-eastern Parisian suburb of Livry-Gargan. Her work was closely bound up with the École Estienne, the prestigious Parisian school for the book arts, whose director from 1934 was the illustrator Sylvain Sauvage. Theureau studied and worked within Sauvage’s orbit, and the stylistic proximity between her compositions and those of her mentor is what has often led the book trade to misattribute her illustrations to him. The misattribution was corrected by Bernard Saugier in his 2014 biography Sylvain Sauvage, voyage au pays littéraire d’un illustrateur, which identifies Theureau as the true author of many of the illustrations in question, and notes that ‘the similarity of Espérance's line with that of Sylvain Sauvage indicates what the student owed the master.’ Theureau  worked professionally under the pseudonym Espérance, her own middle name, a practice that would later generate more confusion about her identity. She died at the age of 94, long outliving most of the artistic circle in which she had made her name.

Her principal bibliographic credit is as the ornamentist of Poèmes en bouquet (A Bouquet of Poems, 1945), published in the Au Jardin Français collection, the same series in which Sauvage himself contributed illustrations to an edition of Musset’s Contes choisis the following year. In 1948 Theureau illustrated Roger Pillet's Les oraisons amoureuses de Jeanne Aurélie Grivolin, Lyonnaise (The Love Petitions of Jeanne Aurélie Grivolin from Lyon), again working under the Espérance pseudonym, and produced by a team largely drawn from the École Estienne, with Gilbert Poilliot engraving the woodblocks and Edmond Vairel applying the pochoir colouring. That Sauvage had died in January 1948, months before the book went to press in December of that year, is itself proof that he was not the illustrator.

Outside the book illustration world, Theureau also worked as a writer, in 1953 co-authoring Les fêtes enfantines (Children’s Parties) with Marguerite Leopold and Hélène Sourgen. Around 1950 she married the architect and decorator Éric Bagge (1890–1978), a prominent figure of the art deco movement and professor at the École des Arts Décoratifs from 1927 to 1960, integrating her further into the broader Parisian decorative arts world of the mid-twentieth century.

Similar artists

Suzanne Ballivet – French lithographer of refined erotic editions.
Paul-Émile Bécat – French illustrator of refined erotic fine editions.
Jean Berque – French interwar bibliophile illustrator of a similar sensual tone.
André Collot – French illustrator of refined erotic editions.
Amandine Doré – French mid-century illustrator of fine literary editions.
Jean Dulac – French interwar bibliophile illustrator for the fine-press market.
Sylvain Sauvage – French art deco illustrator of refined livre d'artiste editions.