Lithograph in colors on Grand Vélin Blanc paper. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Paper size: 9.055 x 6.69 inches. Excellent condition. Notes: From the volume, de Goupil a Margot, Histoires De Bêtes et Lithographies Originales de Maurice Mourlot, 1948. Published by Henri Kaeser, Éditeur, Lausanne; printed by Mourlot Frères, Paris, March, 1948. Excerpted from the volume (translated from French), This edition of "de Goupil a Margot" by Louis Pergaud, produced under the direction of Henri Kaeser, was completed to be printed on the presses of l'imprimerie centrale de Lausanne, in March, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Forty-Eight. The lithographs are by Maurice Mourlot. They were shot on the presses of Mourlot Frères in Paris. Justification of the draw—this edition was drawn on Grand Vélin White, has MMM examples numbered from I to MMM. MAURICE MOURLOT (1906-1983) was a French painter, lithographer, engraver and draughtsman. His brother, Fernand Mourlot (1895-1988), was the director of the l’imprimerie lithographique Mourlot. Maurice is the youngest of a family of nine children. His father, Jules Mourlot, a printer-lithographer, noticed his youngest son's talent as a drawing very early on and reported several of his drawings on lithographic stone. Although admitted to the Estienne school in Paris, the young boy goes to the Turgot upper primary school, closer to the family home (1920-1923). In 1922, he began working at the family printing sty, no 18 rue de Chabrol in Paris, directed by Fernand, the older brother, after the disappearance of their father in 1920. Their brothers and sisters also work there: Georges, Berthe, Jeanne and Andrée. Between 1928 and 1958, Maurice made many exhibition posters for national museums[1]: the Louvre Museum, the Carnavalet and Marmottan museums, the National Library, and many provincial museums - illustrated by Pierre Bonnard's Le Petit déjeuner, Édouard Manet's Le Fifre, Jean Siméon Chardin's La Récureuse. By copying the works of the great painters in oil and then transferring them to the stone, he acquires a perfect mastery of pictorial and lithographic techniques. In 1934, his first exhibition took place at the Le Balcon gallery in Paris. Member of the Salon des indépendants from 1936 to 1946 (except during the war years), he received, in 1937, the painting prize of the city of Paris, which consists of a one-year stay in North Africa from which he brought back about a hundred works (oils, watercolors, drawings). On September 3, 1939, he was mobilized in the company of genius in charge of camouflage with other painters and sculptors - Maurice Brianchon, Marcel Damboise, etc. - and the actor Jean-Louis Barrault. He makes many drawing books. His best friend, the painter Richard Maguet (1896-1940) who had encouraged him to practice oil painting, died under the bombing of the Sully-sur-Loire bridge. Maurice Mourlot will be demobilized in Miramont-de-Quercy and resumes his work as a lithographer. In 1941, on the advice of a friend, the painter-engraver Pierre-Eugène Clairin (1897-1980), he acquired the former town hall-school of Saint-Loup-de-Naud near Provins (Seine-et-Marne) and settled there with Marcelline, his companion. From 1947 to 1959, he made short stays in Morocco, the Netherlands, Algeria, England, Switzerland. In 1960, he was appointed a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. A draughtsman-lithographer, Maurice Mourlot is the artistic eye of the Imprimerie Mourlot and he helps many painters to report their works on stone. In 1953, with his friend, Charles Sorlier - who would become Marc Chagall's official lithographer - he made the great lithography of La Fée Électricité for Raoul Dufy. In addition to his work in the service of painters and writers, Maurice Mourlot began, in the 1930s, a personal work of great diversity. He will not stop painting until three days before his death. He created oil paintings: landscapes and farm courtyards, still lifes, bouquets, market scenes, nudes, self-portraits, domestic animals, birds, animals of the Jardin des Plantes, as well as drawings and lithographs in black and white and color, wood engravings. Maurice Mourlot's lithographs and woodcuts were made with a very small print run: a maximum of five, eight, twenty-five copies. He signed his first paintings "Jean-Maurice Mourlot", then simply "Mourlot". He lived away from public life, little concerned about success and recognition. Until 1971, he worked for the publisher Pierre Bordas where he produced, among other things, the layout and iconography of the French literature textbooks Lagarde and Michard. Upon the death of his partner, he moved in 1968 to the small artist's studio on rue de la Tombe-Issoire in Paris, where he died in 1983. He rests in Paris at the Père-Lachaise cemetery.