The work of French artist and designer George Barbier is no stranger to these pages but this is a book of his I hadn’t seen before. Richard Le Gallienne is a name familiar to anyone acquainted with the London literary scene of the 1890s—he was friends with Oscar Wilde and contributed to The Yellow Book—but unlike many of his less fortunate contemporaries he also had a life and career that lasted beyond the Mauve Decade. The Romance of Perfume (1928) is one of his last books, a short history of the perfumer’s art which could well have been written thirty years earlier. George Barbier’s illustrations aren’t as carefully designed as in some of his earlier works but the pair are well-matched.
