French illustrator Pierre Le-Tan's parents cultivated his interest in art from an early age, even taking their young son to the residence of a Monsieur Wu to view catalogues of the astonishing porcelain collection the man once owned. Le-Tan's fond memory of this visit is one of 20 illustrated reflections on private art collections, including his own. Translated from the French by Michael Z. Wise, A Few Collectors is, by turns, wry, serene and melancholy.
Each slim chapter features Le-Tan's distinctive illustrations, elegantly crosshatched and gingerly tinted, of work that he saw in art-bedecked spaces; objects that his reminiscences call to mind, such as the red scarf reliably worn by one collector; and the oft-eccentric art owners. Le-Tan doesn't love all the collections that he writes about ("Everything was impeccable," he writes about one, "but it all had the same tenor as elevator music"), nor does he limit himself to collections comprising art in the traditional sense. Collectors he features include an accumulator of dolls, crumpled paper and 19th-century wax replicas of the heads of criminals.
The sole criterion for a collection's inclusion in Le-Tan's book seems to be his fascination or bemusement with the collector; regarding his own attitude toward art collection, he explains that it's "both essential and completely useless." There's both humor and a wistfulness to Le-Tan's late-in-life remembrances--he died in 2019 at the age of 69--that will incline readers to consume A Few Collectors as both a work of art and an elegy for vanishing splendor. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer