Jacques Stella - Les Jeux et Plaisirs de l'Enfance - 1657

JACQUES STELLA · CLAUDINE BOUZONNET-STELLA · PARIS, 1657 # The Games and Pleasures of Childhood An extraordinary testimony of the French engraving art of the seventeenth century, in which the innocence of childhood, the elegance of classicism, and the memory of popular amusements meet in one of the most fascinating iconographic collections of the reign of Louis XIV. ## The work and its historical context Published in Paris in 1657, Les Jeux et Plaisirs de l’Enfance constitutes one of the most singular and refined artistic testimonies dedicated to the world of infancy in seventeenth-century France. Conceived by the celebrated painter Jacques Stella (1596–1657) and largely translated into engraving by his niece Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella (1636–1697), the work gathers fifty compositions depicting games, pastimes, and childhood amusements, accompanied by short French poetic pieces. Its publication coincides with a notably significant moment in European history. France, governed by the young Louis XIV, was moving toward a season of artistic and cultural magnificence that would find its ultimate expression at the court of Versailles. The French monarchy, emerging from the Fronde, progressively consolidated its authority, while Paris asserted itself as one of the major European centers of artistic production and illustrated publishing. In this scenario, dominated by the celebration of power, religious painting, and grand mythological subjects, Jacques Stella turned his attention to a seemingly modest theme: the games of children. Yet the choice carried a deeper meaning. Through the language of classical beauty, the artist gave aesthetic dignity to daily gestures, transforming childish play into a universal representation of human nature. From this arose a work in which the lightness of the subject is accompanied by extraordinary compositional refinement, while at the same time offering a precious documentation of the customs and playful practices of seventeenth-century French society. ## Jacques Stella: an artist between Florence, Rome, and the French court Jacques Stella was born in Lyon in 1596, into a family deeply rooted in the artistic tradition. His training developed through a long stay in Italy, during which he came into contact with some of the most important protagonists of European visual culture. Particularly significant was his stay in Florence, where he had the opportunity to know the engraver Jacques Callot, famed for his extraordinary ability to depict popular scenes, minute figures, and everyday life events. The Italian experience continued in Rome, where Stella approached the classicist milieu and formed a friendship with Nicolas Poussin, destined to become one of the leading interpreters of seventeenth-century French painting. Poussin’s influence, together with study of antiquity and Renaissance masters, helped define Stella’s artistic language, characterized by balance, narrative clarity, and particular attention to the harmony of the figures. Returning to France, the painter received prestigious recognitions and enjoyed the protection of Cardinal Richelieu. His reputation allowed him to establish himself in the monarchic artistic circle, until in 1644 receiving the honor of the Order of Saint Michael. Despite the notoriety gained through religious and mythological painting, Stella maintained a constant interest in drawing and in depicting human activities. From this sensitivity sprang the compositions destined for Les Jeux et Plaisirs de l’Enfance, in which the artist managed to combine the classical idealization of the infant body with the observation of games actually practiced in his time. ## Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella and the extraordinary editorial story The material realization of the work is inextricably linked to the figure of Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella, the painter’s niece and the protagonist of one of the most interesting female artistic experiences of the seventeenth century. Trained in her uncle’s workshop together with her sisters Françoise and Antoinette, Claudine acquired remarkable mastery of engraving techniques, distinguishing herself for the precision of her line, interpretive sensitivity, and ability to render on the metal plate the qualities of the original drawings. Upon Jacques Stella’s death, which occurred in 1657, the young artist took on a decisive role in the preservation and dissemination of the family’s figurative heritage. It was in the same year that the collection dedicated to children’s games appeared, published in Paris at Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella, in the Louvre galleries, as indicated in the original title page. The reference to the Louvre is of particular interest. Before becoming the great public museum we know, the royal palace also housed spaces reserved for favored artists and craftsmen by the Crown, forming an important cultural production center. The publication occurred with royal privilege, a circumstance that testifies to official recognition of the editorial initiative. It is important to underline that Claudine did not merely perform the material role of executing her uncle’s drawings. Her activity also included editorial and organizational responsibilities, in an era in which access of women to artistic professions remained strongly limited. The collection thus represents not only a masterpiece of French engraving but also a testimony to the professional emergence of a woman in the Grand Siècle art world. ## The iconographic apparatus: fifty images of childhood The heart of the work consists of a sequence of fifty copper engravings, conceived according to a unitary iconographic project. Each composition presents a different childish pastime, interpreted through figures of children with harmonious proportions, often depicted nude according to a figurative convention derived from classical art and Renaissance traditions of putti. This choice lends the scenes an idealized, timeless character. The protagonists are not merely children belonging to seventeenth-century French society, but become symbolic images of childhood itself, represented as a season of spontaneity, movement, and discovery. The collection includes games of skill, physical exercises, collective entertainments, and pastimes practiced in both popular settings and well-off families. Among the most characteristic scenes are the spinning top game, blindman’s buff, the swing, the hoop, ball games, bowling, butterfly hunting, water games, and many other activities. Particularly evocative is the engraving titled La Balançoire, in which some children enjoy a teetering swing while others watch the scene. The movement of the figures, the alternation of positions, and the liveliness of the gestures transform a simple amusement into a composition of notable artistic balance. Equally fascinating is Les Petits Feux, dedicated to the tiny fires lit during childish games. Here the luminous element becomes the center of the scene, around which the children gather, showing enthusiasm, curiosity, and wonder. The images are distinguished by the precision of the engraving, the delicacy of the hatching, and the ability to suggest volume and movement through the mere contrast of black and white. Under each plate is a six-line poetic piece, often characterized by moral observations, wordplay, and allusions to human behavior. The relationship between image and text is one of the collection’s most refined aspects: the scene represents the game, while the verses suggest a possible allegorical interpretation. Childhood thus becomes a mirror of the human condition, in which the simplest amusements can evoke fortune, ambition, rivalry, courage, and the precariousness of existence. ## An illustrious dedication: the de Thou family One of the historically most interesting elements of the work is the dedication to the four sons of Jacques-Auguste II de Thou (1609–1677), belonging to one of the most illustrious French magistracy and cultural families. The de Thou family occupied a position of great prestige in Parisian society. The famous historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553–1617), grandfather of the recipients, had been one of France’s leading scholars between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, author of a monumental history of his own time and owner of an exceptionally important library. The dedication thus establishes a direct link between the collection and one of the capital’s most refined intellectual circles. This was not merely a matter of offering young recipients a pleasant set of images. The work fit into a concept of aristocratic education in which art, poetry, and knowledge of social customs contributed to cultural formation. Through play, young readers could recognize human behaviors, virtues, and weaknesses, according to a moral sensibility particularly widespread in seventeenth-century literature. ## Between the Fronde and Louis XIV: hidden allusions One of the most significant curiosities concerns the plate titled La Fronde, dedicated to the sling game. The title takes on a particularly evocative meaning when placed in the historical context of the publication. Between 1648 and 1653 France was shaken by the Fronde, a sequence of parliamentary and aristocratic uprisings against royal authority during Louis XIV’s minority. The term fronde precisely indicated the sling used by boys, but it also became the name of the political movement opposing the Crown. In the engraving, the childhood pastime thus takes on an allusive dimension: what a few years earlier had evoked upheaval and conflict is returned to the innocent world of play. The verses accompanying the plate explicitly refer to this transformation, presenting the Fronde as something that, finally, is nothing more than a child’s game. This is a particularly eloquent example of the work’s ability to weave together amusement, social observation, and memory of contemporary events. Behind the apparent simplicity of the images lies, therefore, a universe of cultural references that makes the collection far more complex than a commonplace repertoire of pastimes. ## A bibliographic curiosity: drawings preserved in Claudine’s legacy A particularly fascinating episode concerns the documentation that emerged from the inventory drawn up after Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella’s death in 1697. Among the artist’s possessions was a small volume containing fifty-two drawings attributed to Jacques Stella and dedicated to childhood games. The presence of this set of drawings, kept for decades within the family estate, constitutes valuable testimony to the genesis of the collection. It allows us to understand how the work was not the result of an improvised editorial initiative, but derived from a carefully elaborated figurative project. The existence of a corpus of preparatory drawings also underscores the importance of the relationship between Jacques Stella’s painterly invention and his niece’s engraving interpretation. The transition from drawing to copper plate required an extremely complex artistic translation process, in which the engraver’s sensitivity was decisive to preserve the vitality and balance of the original composition. This tale gives the collection an additional documentary value, turning it into concrete testimony of artistic collaboration within one of seventeenth-century France’s most interesting family workshops. ## The historical and cultural value of the work Beyond its indisputable artistic qualities, Les Jeux et Plaisirs de l’Enfance occupies a significant position in the history of representing childhood. In the seventeenth century, children frequently appeared in religious painting, dynastic portraits, and allegorical compositions. What was instead more unusual was the choice to dedicate an entire figurative collection to their everyday amusements. Jacques Stella transformed this subject into an autonomous theme, worthy of being observed, studied, and transmitted. From this point of view, the collection can be considered an important source for the history of play, material culture, and social practices in modern Europe. Numerous pastimes depicted in the plates have survived, with more or less significant transformations, up to the contemporary era. Others, however, are now forgotten or difficult to recognize, making the engravings precious testimonies of customs otherwise destined to disappear. The work thus allows us to observe an aspect of Grand Siècle society that rarely finds space in grand historical narratives: not wars, court ceremonies, or sovereign achievements, but moments of leisure and carefree pleasure that punctuated daily life. For this reason as well the collection has continued to attract interest among art historians, scholars of childhood, collectors of old prints, and museum institutions. ## The edition and its bibliographic importance The first edition appeared in Paris in 1657, in landscape format, with engraved title page, heraldic plate dedicated to the de Thou family, printer’s dedication, fifty numbered plates, and royal privilege. The engravings were mainly created by Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella on the basis of the uncle Jacques’s inventions, though bibliographic tradition attributes some interventions to engravers François de Poilly and Jean Couvay. The original title page, decorated with child figures and decorative garlands, presents the title within a classically styled architectural framework, accompanied by the artists’ names and the Paris editorial indication. The choice of such a refined presentation shows that the collection was conceived as a work of high artistic value, intended for a cultured audience sensitive to the quality of engraving. It is appropriate to distinguish the date of the original edition, 1657, from the dating of the binding of the copy and that of any later print runs. The presence of the original title page is not, by itself, sufficient to establish the state or the edition of all the plates preserved in the volume. ## Conclusion Les Jeux et Plaisirs de l’Enfance represents one of the most poetic testimonies of the meeting between art, culture, and daily life in seventeenth-century France. Through fifty compositions of extraordinary grace, Jacques Stella elevated simple childhood amusements to the dignity of classical art, while Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella ensured their transmission through a refined engraving interpretation. The work preserves the charm of a distant world, where play becomes an occasion for beauty, moral observation, and reflection on human nature. But above all it returns something that remains unaltered through the centuries: the spontaneity of childhood, the joy of discovery, and that freedom of gesture that precedes the conventions of adulthood. In these images, born in Louis XIV’s France and coming to us through time, not only the memory of the games of a vanished era survives. A universal feeling survives, capable of making the Seicento and the present surprisingly close. It is precisely in this rare union of artistic elegance, historical interest, and human immediacy that lies the most authentic and lasting value of the collection. Collazione and preservation state: 48 pp of plates in excellent condition with minor foxing to report Express shipping in only 24 working hours throughout Europe, while 48 hours working hours for non-EU countries

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