Jennifer Coates and the landscape’s afterglow

A few of the 33 ethereal illustrations by the Italian watercolourist Raffaele Mainella for Clotilde Briatte’s Nos Invisibles (1907), a book that charts the voices of Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, and other illustrious writers and thinkers from beyond the grave. ⁠ ⁠ Writing under the nom de plume Charles d’Orino, Briatte received a degree of recognition in her lifetime for the six volumes of spiritualist works she published under the same pseudonym between 1904 and 1908, but was above all reputed for hosting lavish Saturday dinners and Tuesday salons. Her books were not treated well by critics: she was considered a charlatan, dipping into her deep pockets (she was married to wealthy banker Frederic Pillet-Will) to finance the high production costs of her lavishly illustrated volumes destined for other wealthy readers – or, as another contemporary critic put it, “people naïve enough to take an interest in such claptrap”. ⁠ ⁠ The critical backlash against Briatte’s publications was clearly not an obstacle for Mainella. As the preface to Nos Invisibles suggests, Mainella was given the task of creating “astral images” that offer readers a glimpse of “as-yet unknown spheres” and reawaken “the dormant memory in [the reader’s] soul that is asking only to rediscover its intensity”. A tall order for a man more accustomed to painting gondolas on canals or Middle Eastern bazaars. But Mainella diligently set about finding a visual expression for Briatte’s oeuvre. It seems she chose her illustrator wisely: in a work permeated by an optimistic belief in the continuity of life after death, in a benevolent divine force that transcends individual religions and touches all things, Mainella’s paintings — beautiful, idyllic, and bathed in light — conjure exactly the right note.⁠ .⁠ .⁠ .⁠ .⁠ .⁠ #spiritualism #watercolor #watercolour #illustration #astral