Exhibited:
- London, Boundary Gallery, Jacob Epstein 1880-1959, Bronze Sculptures, Les Fleurs du Mal drawings and other works on paper, 28 June - 3 August 2002

Literature:
- Boundary Gallery, London, Jacob Epstein 1880-1959, Bronze Sculptures, Les Fleurs du Mal drawings and other works on paper, 2002, illustrated page 14

Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal is a collection of 125 poems published in 1857.

Epstein was commissioned in 1936 to illustrate these poems and he subsequently considered these drawings to be among his most accomplished works, 'I believe only six or seven drawings were wanted, but when I started reading the text with a view to illustrating it, I found the subject so absorbing I made sixty drawings. I believe Mr Macy, who originally asked me to make the drawings, was somewhat taken aback at this over measure ... In these drawings I had tried to represent the spiritual, religious and ecstatic sense of the poems with their tragic and sombre shades, avoiding for the most part those cheap sensual interpretations in illustrations so commonly found in volumes of the Fleurs du Mal.'

Baudelaire wrote Parisian dreams in 1860 and it was included in the second edition of Flowers of Evil in the section “ “Paris,” the loved and hated city to which Charles Baudelaire devoted much of his verse and in which he lived most of his creative life. The poet describes a fantastic dream:

...I savoured in my picture
the enchanting monotony
of metal, marble, water.
Babel of stairs and arcades,
it was an infinite palace
full of pools and cascades,
falling gold, burnt, or lustreless:
and heavy cataracts there
like curtains of crystal,
dazzling, hung in air
from walls of metal......