Le Corbeau (The Raven)

Le Corbeau (The Raven) is a significant illustrated book created by Édouard Manet in 1875. This highly influential piece of French book arts contains six precise transfer lithographs, including a dedicated ex libris plate, signifying a crucial intersection of literary and visual modernism. The work was published to accompany the first French translation of Edgar Allan Poe's iconic 1845 poem, "The Raven," rendered by the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. This profound collaboration between the leading figure of Impressionism and one of France's foremost poets resulted in one of the most celebrated early examples of the livre d’artiste tradition.

Manet turned frequently to the graphic arts in the mid-1870s, seeking methods to disseminate his work and engage with a broader public outside the traditional salon system of oil painting. The choice of transfer lithography allowed Manet to translate the spontaneous, gestural quality of his drawing directly onto the stone without losing immediacy, resulting in prints that retained the essence of his hand. The six illustrations deliberately avoid literal narrative depiction, focusing instead on capturing the shadowed psychological atmosphere of Poe’s text, marked by deep blacks and dramatic contrasts characteristic of the lithographic process.

Though primarily recognized for his canonical canvases, Manet’s contributions to printmaking are vital to understanding his career and his engagement with literary figures of his time. The publication of Le Corbeau in 1875 solidified his role in developing modern illustration and ensured that his influential visual interpretations of Poe’s haunting text reached a wide, international audience, promoting the new aesthetics of the period. This complete illustrated book is classified as an illustrated volume and is preserved in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, underscoring its historical importance within the history of both printmaking and modern French publishing.