A jolly collection which came into inventory here in Blogsytown is about one fifth of a set of Corsaires. These are colorful portraits of freebooters and privateers (I don’t see ANYOE using the word “pirates”) from Dominique Leroy here–a captain also known as the Pistol Corsair, who was captain of the Foudroyant (Lightning)—to ship’s carpenters, sail specialists, and even onshore support staff.
There were eighty-six portraits in the full set, each with a name, a nickname (essential for a pi…corsair), and the role they played aboard whatever ship each served. It’s a maritime malefactor trading card set–I was half expecting a table of statistics on the back, with voyages, battles, and loot recorded there. They are individual, colorful, and completely the product of the imagination of artist Etienne Blandin.
Born into a sailing family in 1903, Etienne was determined to follow the family trade. But he was expected to do things the right way: one didn’t just run away to sea. His school had what we would call Sailor Prep courses. Standards were high, and Etienne simply couldn’t manage the right grades in math, of all things. (Essential for navigation, I suppose.) Disappointed, he took the advice of his father, who felt the boy had artistic ability. (Wait a minute: don’t these stories usually work the other way round?)
He became a painter and an art teacher, but experienced a sort of midlife crisis when only 28. He’d been painting landscapes and still lives and Biblical scenes, but he looked at his work and decided something was missing. He gave up painting and turned to studying maritime history.
When he took up his brush again, he was painting portraits of ships, a genre of paintings which occasionally turns up on postcards as well as in galleries. These were received very well by the public and by the French Navy, and he was appointed one of the Painters of the Navy, which meant that he could go on missions as a crew member on military vessels (but only during school holidays, since he was also still teaching.)
The government had made no plans for including the painters of the Navy in any sort of wartime role, and World War II found Blandin working with an infantry regiment before the course of the war lost him that job. He went back to teaching and painting, which he continued until failing eyesight led to his retirement from both those jobs at the age of eighty. (In the meantime, he also compiled, and painted over a thousand illustrations for, a reference guide to all known maritime flags.) He died in 1991, leaving behind a catalogue of paintings unrivalled by other specialist artists.
Somewhere in the vast world of fans and collectors, there MUST be a guide to his 86 Corsaires which explains when he did these paintings, who decided to make them into postcards, and to what degree each is based on someone he knew personally, or whether all these characters and their wild world sprang straight from his imagination. Nowadays there’d be a graphic novel series, animated cartoons, live action movies and who knows what-all else. (Maybe there were, and nobody on the Interwebs wants us landlubbers getting involved.)
According to a website which shows some 75 of the 86, there are 83 men and 3 women in the set. They have many things in common—the red bandana, the clay pipe, the eyepatch—but each is an individual with a backstory we are left to imagine. Because of this, they also do not have birthdates, death dates, or anything else to take them out of a seventeenth-eighteenth century pirate Neverland filled with seaside inns, disreputable hijinx, and high seas adventure. Yar-har, fiddle-dee-dee indeed.
Blogsy Babbles 