1001 Nights Payne v10p010 - Public domain book illustration

Adolphe Lalauze was born in Rive-de-Gier, Loire, on 8 October 1838. His first job was a Contrôleur de l'Enregistrement. Lalauze worked in this civil service job in Toulouse for some time, then enrolled at the Toulouse École des Beaux-arts. He moved to Paris, where he became a student of Léon Gaucherel. Encouraged by Gaucherel, he took up etching, and first exhibited at the Salon in 1872. At the Salon in 1876 he exhibited twenty-one etchings. These included a series of nine called Le Petit Monde (The Small World) that depicted childhood scenes using his children as models, which won a 3rd class medal. He won a 2nd class medal at the Salon of 1878 for twelve plates illustrating the Histoires ou contes du temps passé by Charles Perrault. Lalauze illustrated many books. He drew the Frontispiece for Le Bric-à-brac de l'amour (1879) published by Octave Uzanne. This book used revolutionary new photo-mechanical reproduction techniques. He illustrated the Peter Anthony Motteux translation of Don Quixote, first published in 1879. Lalauze made 21 etchings for the 1881 edition of Galland's translation of the Arabian Nights, and these were reproduced in several other editions. He was one of the illustrators of Damase Jouaust's 1882 Petite Bibliothėque artistique (Small Art Library), along with Pierre Edmond Alexandre Hédouin and Émile Boilvin. He created illustrations for Walter Scott's Waverley Novels published in Boston in 1893–94. In 1898 his illustrations in the pure fin de siècle style appeared in Sophie Arnould, actress and wit by Robert B. Douglas. Adolphe Lalauze was a member of the Société des Artistes Français. He died in Milly-la-Forêt, Essonne in 1906. His son, Alphonse Lalauze, was also an artist.