Nicolas Glaise’s Modèles de lettres, Album du peintre en bâtiment, 1882 and 1887.

We have not yet identified all the printed work of Nicolas Glaise (1825-1888), a renowned ”letter-painter” at the end of the 19th century. As he indicates in the preface to his Modèles de lettres published in 1882, he previously contributed to two other publications of the collection ”Album du peintre en bâtiment”, for which he delivered some creations. Which are included in his Modèles and completed to give a series of plates printed in chromolithography offering ”almost all the genres commonly used by painters of letters, for carry out the various works and tasks entrusted to them.” Each of these plates, in a different background tone, contains a complete alphabet –”This is an unprecedented innovation”, he underlines. Glaise divides into squares, the ”box which is at the head of the board, and to the left” so as to help ”to trace these different letters to the size or height that we will need.” The success of these albums continued for decades since the publisher Emile Thézard reissued the Models of N. Glaise almost identically, after 1900. Two plates of very ornamented letters are subtracted, and some additions are taken perhaps from another publication by Glaise. Still in his preface from 1882, Glaise pays homage to his art: ”The skill in distribution, the trace, the purity of the spinning of letters, the choice and variety of characters and colors, are always the result of experience and of a long practice of this profession, in which the Davignons, the Adriens, the Jules Leroux, the Beauchanges, to whom we can join MM. Descampas and E. Gautier.”

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