Le cortège des vignerons

The scarf catalogued as Le cortège des vignerons carries a connection to Vevey, Switzerland, in its recorded title.^[1] Cornette de Saint Cyr attributes the 90-centimeter printed silk square to Hugo Grygkar and dates its creation to 1952.^[1] Its beige-ground example is compared with another color in Geneviève Fontan’s 2021 reference book, although that book page was not independently consulted.^[1] A specialist description also credits Grygkar and links the composition to an illustrated record of the 1833 Fête des Vignerons.^[2]

The festival’s own institutional history supplies the setting behind that reference.^[3] The Confrérie des Vignerons describes the 1833 celebration as centering on the crowning of winegrowers, followed by performance and a procession through the town with dances at designated stops.^[3] David Constantin directed the dancing, Samuel Glady provided music and Théophile Steinlen designed costumes and scenery.^[3] The organization records 780 participants, two performances and seating for 4,000 people.^[3] These facts describe the historical celebration rather than the later scarf.^[3]

Its visual record survives in public collections.^[4][5] The Swiss National Library’s archival catalogue identifies an approximately 1833 panorama by Christian Gottlieb Théophile Steinlen, published by Spengler & Cie in Lausanne.^[4] It associates the image with the festival held in Vevey on August 8 and 9 that year.^[4] The fuller artist name is useful because a bare reference to Steinlen can obscure which artist produced the nineteenth-century festival imagery.^[4] The catalogue dates this Steinlen’s life to 1779–1847.^[4]

The Institut national d’histoire de l’art documents additional surviving material: an official booklet with woodcut illustrations and two sets of thirty plates drawn by Steinlen.^[5] It identifies him as a painter, engraver and teacher in Vevey as well as the designer of the festival’s costumes and scenery.^[5] One surviving set was assembled as a roll, turning the moving procession into an image that could be unfolded over time.^[5] The roll extends for more than fourteen meters and contains hand-colored versions of the thirty plates.^[5] The other set is bound as numbered lithographs, preserving the same sequence in page form.^[5] Acquired in 2019, the roll eliminates the breaks between pages to reconstruct the parade as a continuous image.^[5] This supplies independent context for the illustrated festival tradition to which the scarf specialist relates Grygkar’s composition.^[2][5]

A particularly close point of comparison is Bacchus and his high priest.^[2][3] The specialist describes the scarf’s central procession in those terms, while the Confrérie reproduces a captioned detail from the 1833 foldout showing Bacchus preceded by his high priest.^[2][3] The historical image and the reported scarf motif therefore share a specific subject, although a complete plate-by-plate comparison has not been established.^[2][3] The auction supports the scarf’s artist, material and 1952 creation attribution; the institutional sources explain the older imagery without pretending to date the textile’s production.^[1][3][4][5]