12 sonnets de Ronsard

Michel Laurent Simon Béret, a Parisian graphic artist who has now been almost forgotten, must have had a great passion for the illustration of books. Not only did he illustrate nearly ten of them, he also published a number of them himself, although he was not a professional publisher/printer. Such labours of love therefore usually depended on sponsors for their financing: Béret's works were regularly printed 'aux dépens d'un groupe d'amateurs'. One of the better-known bibliophile books to which Béret contributed was Mistriss Henley by the eighteenth-century Dutch author Belle van Zuylen. This work was published in 1952 by the foundation De Roos in Utrecht. Other special editions for which Béret supplied the illustrations are for instance Le monde comme il va (1944) by Voltaire, and Venise masques et façades (1953) by André Fraigneau. The latter book was published by the artist himself. The printing costs of Le monde comme il va were paid for by the bibliophile society 'Cent femmes amies des livres', just like Contes de Voltaire (1965).

A future as a book illustrator

In the early 1950s, Béret's artistic career seemed to be looking up. He had three exhibitions in Paris between 1945 and 1953, and The French Culture Centre in New York also showed his work. Books he had illustrated were part of the collections of both the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. Béret came to the Netherlands in the autumn of 1951, where the Amsterdam art dealer Santée Landweer N.V. organised an exhibition of his illustrated books and graphic artwork. The reviews of these exhibitions were generally favourable; Béret's work was characterised as gracious, precious, airy, refined, imaginative and humorous. J.M Prange, who was a graphic artist himself, as well as being an art critic for newspaper Het parool, found that Béret's playful and confident working methods and his illustrative, 'generally acceptable'style 'guarantee him a future as a book illustrator'. Unfortunately, he was wrong. In 1953 The Paris review published a modest portfolio of the artist, and in 1958 Les fastes de la Seine by Charles-Joseph prince de Ligne appeared- printed independently. An announcement in le Figaro in 1965 about the edition of Contes de Voltaire was the last sign of life from this artist. Things grew quiet directly afterwards.