Ruined
All Resolutions
Ruined! my poor friend... || You won't crush me with your luxury anymore.
Description:
Two women are sitting at a coffee table with a lavish vase of flowers, one looking dismayed, the other showing a mix of surprise and indifference.
This series relies, for its comic effect, on the fact that, sometimes, people do not quite mean what they say. The first part of the caption is what the characters actually say, the second is what they really think.
The caption reads in the original French: Ruinée ! pauvre amie… || Tu ne m’écraseras plus avec ton luxe.
The usual markers of regular book publishing are missing from this book: it has no title page, no author’s or artist’s name, no publication date, no colophon. It is made of a consistent series of thirty hand-colored and numbered lithographs sorted in ascending order, followed by the publisher’s catalog. It seems plausible that they were privately bound together on behalf of Caroline Janetta, Countess of Essex (whose bookplate can be found on the inside cover), but never publicly released in book form. The date we mention (which applies only to the lithographs: the catalog was printed at a later date) is informed by the publisher’s address, which changed during the course of 1841.
