Spaightwood Galleries

Stein is knwn primarily for his two livres de peintre, A Common Botany (Boston, 1956) and Jules Renard's Natural History, which was also illustrated by Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard. This later work was commissioned by the Harvard University College Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts in 1960 and was included in the ground-breaking exhibition and accompanying book of the same title, The Artist and the Book 1860-1960 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1960), which said of it, "This new project has offered a serious challenge to the artist, who has met it very successfully." Stein's illustrations to the Natural History led, in 1966, to the publication of Jules Renard Natural Histories, translated by Richard Howard (NY: Horizon Press), which included all three sets of illustrations, uniting Stein's with those of his illustrious predecessors. In the introduction to this work, Edgar Munhill, Curator of the Frick Collection in New York City, noted that Stein's "illustrations are certainly the gentlest and most immaterial of the three. . . . He uses cropped compositions somewhat in the manner of Lautrec but more to suggest intimacy with the animal . . . than to create a scale larger than life."