French author and illustrator Laurent de Brunhoff, who successfully took up the torch of the adventures of the famous elephant Babar, adored by children around the world, died on Friday March 22 at the age of 98 in Florida, media reported Americans.
Laurent de Brunhoff “died Friday at his home in Key West, Florida,” reported the New York Times, citing his wife Phyllis Rose, who spoke of “complications after a stroke.”
Phyllis Rose posted on Instagram three days ago a painting created at the end of February representing Laurent de Brunhoff and his nurse. “Shortly after, Laurent had a mini-stroke” and his condition “rapidly deteriorated,” she wrote. “He is in hospice care, at home, sleeping almost all the time, as sweet and calm and adorable as he has been all his life,” she continued.
An elephant born almost a century ago
Created in 1931 by the parents of Laurent de Brunhoff, the Babar saga has sold millions of copies, particularly in the United States. The albums have been translated into dozens of languages. Twenty were made by Laurent and seven by his father, Jean.
It was in reality Jean's wife, Cécile, who gave birth to Babar, through a story that she told to her children, about the adventures of a little elephant who became king. Seduced by the story, her husband put it into images and made a book.
Published in 1931 by Editions du Jardin des Modes, before the collection joined Hachette Jeunesse in 1936, Babar's adventures immediately met with success.
“There were very few books for children then. My father’s imagination and poetry were [new] as was his way of drawing, neither stylized nor realistic,” Laurent de Brunhoff explained forty years later.
He was 12 when his father died of tuberculosis in 1937, 13 when his uncle Michel, who runs the French edition of Vogue, took over as interim director, and 21 when he took over in 1946 with Babar and that rascal Arthur. “Continuing Babar was prolonging my father’s life,” he said, emphasizing that he had an enchanted youth.
Born on August 30, 1925 in Paris, Laurent had studied painting. He had especially observed, in the family home in Chessy (Seine-et-Marne), his father's work on Babar. He will remain faithful to it by favoring explosions of color and maintaining the large format. Before Babar, children's albums were small.
Babar et ce coquin d'Arthur, La fête de Célesteville, Babar sur la planete soft or even Babar in Paris (2017)… so many albums signed by Laurent which marked the childhood of baby boomers and those of their children or grandchildren, all gathered around the “Song of the Mammoths” and its singular words: “Patali dirapata, cromda cromda ripalo, pata pata ko ko ko. »
500 derived objects
Babar and his family have been available in more than 500 objects, from school bags to bed sets, from wallpaper to perfume. He was the hero of several exhibitions, was set to music by Francis Poulenc in 1945, in board games, in images and on records. And the saga is not about to disappear: today's children can follow the adventures of Badou, Babar's grandson, on streaming platforms, in 3D.
Laurent de Brunhoff, who also worked for school editions at Hachette and Nathan, settled in the United States and married the American author Phyllis Rose. He donated original plates by Babar to the Morgan Library in New York as well as to the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
