Le Petit Prince - Illustrations

Illustrations

All of the novella's simple but elegant watercolour illustrations, which were integral to the story, were painted by Saint-Exupéry. He had studied architecture as a young adult but nevertheless could not be considered an artist—which he self-mockingly referred to in the novella's introduction. Several of his paintings were done on the wrong side of the delicate onion skin paper that he used, his medium of choice. As with some of his draft manuscripts, he occasionally gave away preliminary sketches to close friends and colleagues; others were even recovered as crumpled balls from the floors in the cockpits of the P-38 Lightnings he later flew. Two or three original Little Prince drawings were reported in the collections of New York artist, sculptor and experimental filmmaker Joseph Cornell. One rare original Little Prince watercolour would be mysteriously sold at a second-hand book fair in Japan in 1994, and subsequently authenticated in 2007.

An unrepentant lifelong doodler, Saint-Exupéry had for numerous years sketched little people on his napkins, tablecloths, letters to paramours and friends, lined notebooks and other scraps of paper. Early figures took on a multitude of appearances, engaged in a variety of tasks. Some appeared as doll-like figures, baby puffins, angels with wings, and even a similar Keep On Truckin' figure later to be made famous by Robert Crumb. His characters were frequently seen chasing butterflies; when asked why they did so, Saint-Exupéry, who thought of the figures as his alter-ego, replied that they were actually pursuing a "realistic ideal". Saint-Exupéry eventually settled on the image of the young, precocious child with curly blond hair, an image which would become the subject of speculations as to its source.

To mark the 50th anniversary of The Little Prince's publication, the Pierpont Morgan Library mounted a major exhibit of Saint-Exupéry's draft manuscript, preparatory drawings and similar materials which it had earlier obtained from various sources plus an intimate friend of his in New York City, Silvia Hamilton Reinhardt, which he gave to her just before he returned to Algiers to resume his work as a Free French Air Force pilot. A museum representative stated that the novella's final drawings were lost.

The author had held back seven drawings from the book which were displayed at the library's exhibit, including fearsome looking baobab trees ready to destroy the prince's home asteroid, as well as a picture of the story's narrator, the forlorn pilot, sleeping next to his aircraft. That image was likely omitted to avoid giving the story a 'literalness' which would distract its readers, according to one of the Morgan Library's curators. Another reviewer noted that the author "...chose the best illustrations... to maintain the ethereal tone he wanted his story to exude. Choosing between ambiguity and literal text and illustrations, Saint-Exupéry chose in every case to obfuscate."

In 2001 Japanese researcher Yoshitsugu Kunugiyama surmised that the cover illustration Saint-Exupéry painted for Le Petit Prince deliberately depicted a stellar arrangement chosen to celebrate the author's own centennial of birth. According to Kunugiyama, the cover art Saint-Exupéry drew contained the planets Saturn and Jupiter, plus the star Aldebaran, arranged as an isosceles triangle, a celestial configuration which occurred in the early 1940s, and which he likely knew would next reoccur in 2000. Saint-Exupéry possessed superior mathematical skills and was a master celestial navigator, a vocation he had studied with the French Air Force.

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