The Melancholy Marriage

Charles Martin designed The Melancholy Marriage for a French fashion magazine in February 1921. The magazine, called Gazette du Bon Ton, brought leading artists together with famous Paris fashion houses. Martin was a French artist who worked on illustrations, posters, clothing, and theater designs. The image was printed with pochoir, a careful process that used stencils to add color by hand. It was meant as a playful comment on fashionable life, not simply as an advertisement for clothing. Now in the Rijksmuseum, the print shows how closely art, magazines, and fashion worked together in the early Art Deco period.