- Uruguayan illustrator for a top French Sunday supplement
- Eugène Damblans
- 1865 - 1945
Illustrator of the 'Grande Geste'
Eugène Damblans
Apparently born in Montevideo Uruguay in 1865, Eugène Damblans worked in France as an illustrator of dramatically colorful illustrations as were used in the cheaper type of working class publications. His style was recognizeably old-fashioned for the times and and is somewhat similar to that of Gustave Doré's 19th century engravings. Since Damblans mainly illustrated newsevents and happenings, his illustrations needed to tell a story in a single frame. He used stock poses and postures taken from the theatrical tradition, in which it is very easy to tell what emotions the characters are experiencing by their stance on the stage. The forearm held to the lowered head, a woman clinging to the ankles of an agressor, a mother sheltering an infant in her arms, the haughty cigar-smoking, monocled Prussian officer looking away from his victim's supplications and heart-rending pleas, women dragged along by the clothes to a fate worse than death, the heroic and defiant stance in the face of death, all of these standards of the performing arts found their way into Damblans' illustrations.
Now they appear to be hopelessly outdated and over-contrived, but they were very popular at the time of the Great War, even though by then newer artforms and conventions were becoming accepted as the norm throughout society.
Damblans illustrated numerous covers of the hugely successful Sunday color supplement of the Parisian newspaper 'Le Petit Journal'. He started a career with this publication before the Great War and thus had a huge amount of illustrating experience to fall back on. His subject matter was invariably very patriotically inspired, with flags and uniforms abounding. Since his illustrating of 'dastardly Germans' had started many years before 1914, his German uniforms, and French soldier's uniforms as well, often tended to seem old-fashioned and more suited to the 1870-71 Franco-Prussion war. An otherwise highly realistic illustrator, taking painstaking care to illustrate backgrounds and foliage to an intricate degree, Damblans did not hesitate adding an extra bit of color, say a red lining on a German or French uniform or headgear, to give his images an added dramatic and eye-catching flair or to balance the color tones of his work. He also tended to color German Great War uniforms in the long discarded Prussian blue, instead of depicting them more accurately in feld-grau.
Asides from patriotic subjects and heroic French soldiers and civilians, Damblans' other main stock in trade during the Great War was illustrating German atrocities, preferably those involving French women, in which lurid and lewd actions were often suggested and hinted at, but never shown. Mass executions of French or Belgian hostages or priests and nuns were also a staple along with scenes of unrealistic combat, often as close range and involving unrealistically large masses of troops. It is apparent that Damblans did not visit any war-time battlefields, or if he had, they did not impress him as being artistically worthwhile. Nor did he often make the effort to use photographs as reference for accuracy, unless they were of an unusual nature - see page 30. When illustrating combat on the Verdun battlefields for instance, it was very easy to find suitable visual documentation. But even so, Damblans preferred composing a dramatic looking, but unrealistic depiction of events and landscape or of weaponry and machines. His tanks and U-boats often appear to have emerged from the pages of a Jules Verne novel - huge, heavy, menacing and over-proportioned.
Besides producing an incredible amount of imagery for 'Le Petit Journal' as front and back coverpages, Damblans also produced a series of strikingly colorful and dramatic illustrations that were published as coverpages of an unlikely magazine called 'la Mode' - normally a fashion publication that showed the latest fashion designs and gave hints on sewing and other womanly arts. Here it seemed that patriotic enthusiasm reached a peak with colorful illustrations of ravished nurses and nuns, executed priests and innocent villagers placed before the firing squad along with their children, as well as portraits of Entente royalty and Entente soldiers in action. Some of the illustrations were inspired by actual events and persons, though in our present day and age, the composition, the postures and poses of the characters and the general dramatic content alone, would tend to lend the illustrations an air of historical unreality. Many others were depictions of pure fabrication, if not outrights lies and fantastical exaggerations, often embellishing actual events, reports and rumours to melodramatic and emotionally rending proportions. The same can generally be said of the illustrations he made for a French catholic magazine called 'le Pelerin'.
Nevertheless, because of the wide impact this type of illustrating had on the general public in Entente countries, even nowadays, the imagery has found a place in the collective unconscious and has become a subliminal part of how we 'remember' history. Just as Fortunino Matania performed that function in the Anglo-Saxon world, but in a somewhat more realistic, or at least in a more staid and detached British manner, Damblans depicted the Great War as seen through the emotionally patriotic eyes of the French populace, horrified and outraged at reports of German atrocities and killings of civilians and women.
Damblans' illustrations in 'le Petit Journal', were mainly printed in color in a tabloid newspaper format, large in size and bright of color, but sadly on low-grade quality printing stock done with cheap printing processes. This often resulted in non-aligned, flat coloring, that needed strong color contrasts to give pleasing results. In Great War battle scenes for instance, the depiction of camouflaged uniforms was often unclear and blurred, the uniforms blending into the earthen backgrounds. Nevertheless these issues were so inspiring and so obviously worth saving in the eyes of many people at the time, that even now they can readily be found at flea markets and secondhand bookstores, though at much higher prices than they were sold for in Great War days. They have become true collector's items, and rightly so.
see also - Charles Louis Blombléd - Coverpages for the Tabloid Press
French war-time humor by Damblans - watching a German caught in a hunting trap in No-Man's land
- a Collection of Great War Illustrations by Eugène Damblans
- Le Petit Journal
