RIVIERA ROSEBUD

Dazzled by a Saint-Tropez pageant, film legend Orson Welles painted a series of sweeping, cinematic watercolors for his daughter; now a facsimile of his sketchbook is being published

MATT TYRNAUER

Flashback

In 1956, 15 years after Citizen Kane and 22 years before Paul Masson, Orson Welles passed the spring in SaintTropez. There he was witness to the annual pageant called the "Bravade": a saturnalia of cannon fire, regimented marches, and magnificent costumes that honors the patron saint of the town. "I've seen a lot of 'fetes,' 'fiestas' and festivals, every sort and variety of saints-day high-jinks all over the world," Welles wrote. "But never anything to equal the 'Bravades' of St. Tropez." The great man was so thoroughly moved that he broke out his watercolors, India ink—even a ballpoint pen—and whipped up a sort of storyboard memoir of the Riviera resort's florid, smoke-infused rite of spring. The loose-leaf picture book—68 pages of bright-hued images and shards of text—was presented as a Christmas gift to his 12-year-old daughter, Rebecca (the offspring of his marriage to Rita Hayworth), and remained in her possession until 1990, when Rebecca, then 45 years old and in need of cash, sold it at auction for $30,000.

Now, 40 Christmases later, Workman Publishing is releasing a facsimile edition of what Welles admirers will surely conclude is a significant bit of Orsonia. Titled Les Bravades: A Gift for His Daughter by Orson Welles, the series of paintings forms a sweeping, cinematic pictorial—a quickly drawn kaleidoscopic reverie that contains more ideas in its few pages than the average $100 million, 110-minute feature film does these days.