Les amies (Female Friends) and Filles (Young Girls) form the first two sections of Paul Verlaine’s poetry collection Parallèlement. Les amies – Sur le balcon, Pensionnaires, Per amica silentia, Printemps, Été and Sappho – were written in 1867 when Verlaine was twenty-three and still very much under the spell of Baudelaire’s condemned ‘femmes damnées’ pieces. The remaining six – À la princesse Roukine, Séguedille, Casta Piana, Auburn, À Mademoiselle ..., and À Madame ... – form the complete Filles section that follows immediately afterwards in Parallèlement, celebrating prostitutes and mistresses of the 1880s. Suppressed almost immediately after publication and condemned as obscene, the two collections remained for decades among the more furtively circulated items in Verlaine’s output, their rehabilitation coming only gradually as the poet's reputation settled.

Paul Colin’s 1947 portfolio illustrating Verlaine’s poems is unlike anything else in the artist’s career. Nothing in his documented bibliography, which runs from Le Tumulte Noir through decades of poster and exhibition work, prepares us for it, and the visual language bears almost no relation to the bold, flat-planed art deco graphics on which his reputation rests. Here we have loose, atmospheric crayon lithography, with figures built from a few looping contour lines set against dense backgrounds, shaded curtains, shuttered windows and dark screens standing in for interiors, the women’s faces dissolved into shading rather than carefully drawn. Their bodies emerge, briefly caught in light rather than posed, framed by screens and apertures that lend the prints a glimpsed, voyeuristic quality well suited to Verlaine’s very personal verses.

Coming in his mid-fifties, long after the jazz-age poster idiom that made his name, and produced alongside quite different public-facing commissions of the period, the Verlaine portfolio seems to be a private, one-off Colin excursion into erotica rather than any natural extension of his public work. It is not listed among his works in most of the usual sources like Wikipedia and the Colin archives, an odd omission given how thoroughly documented his other work is.

Les amies et filles was published by Manuel Bruker in Paris, in an edition of 150 numbered and boxed copies, ninety of which included an additional suite of eight plates signed on the first plate by Colin.