Prints and Authors in the Time of Manet

A Midnight Mass (Une messe de minuit)

Lithography and letterpress, 1890
Published by Charles Vos, Brussels, 1888
Gift of Molly and Walter Bareiss, 1984.693

Amédée Lynen was a painter, engraver, and illustrator, as well as an author. For this book, however, his illustrations accompany a text of the ghastly and supernatural by the Belgian Symbolist author Theodore Hannon. Hannon’s verses describe a macabre scene in which the tolling of the midnight hour arouses the creatures of the night. As the bells sound, the bats take flight, ghouls and vampires shriek, and the wind rattles the foundations of the building.