Les Portes du Ciel - Dragon spitting snakes.

Les Portes du Ciel - Dragon spitting snakes. Mariette LYDIS, Illuminated lithograph. Paris, 1934. Sheet size: 27.9 x 22.4 cm. Image size: 16.5 x 14.1 cm. Very fine impression without foxing and with large margins. Signed in the plate. This dragon spitting snakes illustrates Les Portes du Ciel. The blue background evokes the Virgin Mary, of whom Janua Coeli is one of her titles in the Litany of Loreto. Mariette Lydis (Vienna, 1887 – Buenos Aires, 1970), born into a Viennese Jewish family under the name Marietta Ronsperger, was a major painter, engraver, and lithographer of the École de Paris. She settled in Paris in the 1920s, developing alongside the artistic and literary circles of the interwar period. She was a sought-after illustrator, notably creating lithographs for works by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Sappho, Pierre Louÿs, or Jose Maria de Heredia. Forced into exile in 1940 due to anti-Semitic persecution, she continued her career in Argentina, where her work achieved lasting recognition.