Charles TICHON. Photogravure of a drawing signed and dated 88 of the poet in 3/4 bust to the right. Published in [January 1889] in Caprice Revue, an artistic and literary weekly from Liège edited by storyteller and writer Maurice Siville [see 58]. Liège, imp. Bénard, 2nd year, no. 60, newspaper format (fragile), double f. in-folio. Mailing folds with postmark and stamp. Drawing after a youthful photo by Van Bosch, of which we know a front print from the same session (Mallarmé. Lanzac, Le Point, Feb.-Apr. 1944, xxix-xxx p. 15, and Portraits de M., on title page). Study by the poet Albert Mockel, signed M. in two issues: "ni recommencer une des fréquentes biographies d'ici. Do me as I may appear to you from afar and literarily, that's the point", warned Mallarmé on December 7, 1888 (Marchal Corr. 1046). - Part One no. 60: "I have never seen Stéphane Mallarmé. I only know his physique from a portrait published in Écrits pour l'Art, and, recently, from a photograph from which the drawing opposite was taken. [...] Those who want the essence of an artist, and the perfume of ideality that emanates from genius, will look for Mallarmé in his work and will not bother with an analysis. / For whom, then, am I going to write this article, if not for myself?"... See below (n°57) Mallarmé's appreciation, February 9: "You have put your finger singularly on this point that all or the little that I have delivered is a thing of transition. The rest, what needs to be done, what I'm stubborn about, even if it means losing my soul, is centuries away"... - Delayed second part appearing in no. 62, with portrait of Octave Maus by the same Tichon, dated 1889. [The end of Mockel's study accompanies in the same issue the famous lawyer, founder and director of Les XX and La Libre Esthétique, which welcomed all avant-garde painters banned from the official Salons (Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh....). The study on Maus is by William Picard, son of Edmond Picard, an eminent Belgian figure in the arts]. Mockel concludes: "As for the Master's philosophy, as for his Work, there is a danger in analyzing them here, since the Poet has so far only wanted to give bits and pieces of himself". Copies of his poems circulated. Charles TICHON. Identified portrait of the anonymous copy of Mallarmé's Poésies sent by Huysmans to Jules Destrée. Beautifully bound in white brocaded silk, it is described in the J. Destrée sale by bookseller Raoul Simonson (6/6/1936 no. 439). At the Ortiz-Patiño sale (Sotheby's, London, 2/12/1998 no. 60), the cat. reproduced one of the 2 anonymous watercolors, which are in fact by [Louise Danse], Destrée's sister-in-law. The portrait is by Charles Tichon. Destrée asked him for a replica of the one published in Caprice Revue, where he had already done a study of Rops portrayed by the same Tichon (no. 53). In Brussels, Tichon illustrated L'Almanach universitaire des Apaches pour de bon, which contains V. Campion's pastiche of Mallarmé [see 69]. George Garnir mentions another collaboration. Together with Henri Disière, he launched the Journal des Étudiants bruxellois on November 5, 1888 (the same year as the portrait in Caprice Revue). The new journal," he writes, "published lithographed portraits of teachers on the front page [with fewer resources than the Liège publisher-printer Auguste Bénard (quoted above), who owned chromolithography, clicherie, galvanoplasty and photogravure workshops], portraits that Charles Tichon, who had a photographic eye and miniaturist's fingers, made for us at a hundred cents a piece: some of them are little masterpieces of craftsmanship. The fourth page featured anecdotal drawings, by the good giant Gustave Dreypondt, Carl Meunier, Émile-Antoine Coulon, Amédée Lynen, Rocher, Marius Renard, etc."... (G. Garnir, op.cit. n° 69, p. 24). Note that the portrait of the copy was reproduced without attribution for the 1st time in 1952 on the dust jacket of the Mallarmé issue of Empreintes (Bruxelles, L'Écran du Monde, no. 10-11), edited by Dr. Benoît Dujardin, a great Mallarméen, and prefaced by H. Mondor.