Le Bonheur du Jour

The sixteen plates of Le Bonheur du Jour are amongst the largest and most carefully meditated of Barbier's designs. So ambitious was this album that it took him from 1920 to 1924 to complete it to his satisfaction. A study of manners and fashion, it was designed to appeal both to those who like to link the present to the past, and to observers of the current scene.

Barbier begins his introduction with a summary of fashion illustration from the XVI century onwards, finding a specific predecessor for his own work in that of Horace Vernet's record of First Empire costume, Incroyables et merveilleuses, published around a hundred years earlier. Barbier saw similarities between the period after the Napoleonic Wars and his own post-Great War era, with dandies and their ladies free at last to enjoy frivolities and sensuality.