Jacques Daniel’s illustrations for Pierre Louÿs’s Les chansons de Bilitis (The Songs of Bilitis), produced a year after his Roi Pausole portfolio and again for the Club Français du Livre of which he was art director, again highlight his artistic originality and inventiveness.

Fascinating, and very different from the Pausole series, the most immediately striking aspect of the Bilitis portfolio is that he has inverted his own Pausole technique without abandoning its logic. There the white line emerged from a black ground, while here a grey ink wash applied over what appears to be a resist drawing, so the ground appears light and the lines are visually transparent. The figures feel embedded in stone or shadow rather than emerging from darkness, which suits Les chansons de Bilitis perfectly, having like Louÿs’s text a quality of something half-glimpsed and fragmentary, as if recovered from antiquity rather than newly invented. Daniel’s illustrations can be read as rubbings from ancient relief sculptures, a clever choice for a text that presents itself as ‘archaeological’.

If the Pausole illustrations suggest carnival and firelight, the Bilitis portfolio suggests rediscovery and lament. That Daniel found such distinct visual languages for two Louÿs texts published just a year apart, both using the same fundamental principle but to utterly different effect, marks him out as an original illustrator rather than simply a stylish one.

Les chansons de Bilitis was published in a limited numbered edition of 7,000 copies.