Suzanne Ballivet

Suzanne Ballivet was born in the 7th district in Paris, on Aug. 12, 1904. Her father was a photographer in Montpellier.

Ballivet attended the Beaux Arts de Montpellier in 1922, where she met the cartoonist, illustrator and poster artist Albert Dubout, Camille Descossy, Germaine Richier, and Renée Altier (Dubout's first wife).

In the early 1920s she was based in Saint Aunès, a small village near Montpellier. She married René Ferréol Descossy Camille in 1925, returned to to Paris in 1927 where she made drawings and fashion exhibits at the International Exposition Coloniale. Her son Michel was born in 1927.

She divorced Camille in 1941 and returned to Paris. Exhibits at "Humour 41". Beginning in the late 1940s, she worked with some of the greatest French illustrators and humourists: Ben, Peynet, Dubout, Bellus on the magazines "Le Rire" and "Fourire"... In 1942 she was living in Nice, working on animations with Dubout, and illustrated her first book, Pierre Louÿs's "Les chansons de Bilitis", followed in 1945 by "Les Aventures du Roi Pausole". She returned again to Paris after the War in 1946. Works from this period include Longus's "Daphnis et Chloe" (1946); Anatole France's "Thais" (1948), "Faisons un rêve" by Sacha Guitry (1952); "L'ingénue libertine" (1947), Colette's "Claudine à l'école" (1950), Rétif de la Bretonne's "Monsieur Nicolas ou le coeur humain dévoilé"(1956 - 1957) and "Oeuvres" (1962) by Marcel Pagnol.

On May 20 1968, Ballivet married Albert Dubout in St. Aunès and moved with him to Mézy-sur-Seine to the west of Paris. During the years before Dubout's death in 1976, they divided their time between Mézy-sur-Seine and Saint-Aunès. She spent the last decade of her own life suffering from articular rheumatism she retired in St. Aunès and largely stopped drawing and painting.

Suzanne Ballivet died at St. Aunès Herault, on June 15, 1985.

Suzanne Ballivet is often (and sometimes by us, too) confused with the Austrian illustrator Mariette Lydis. In fact, although they share common interests in subject matter and a sometimes strikingly similar style, they were two entirely different women.

More information
• http://adventuresintheprinttrade.blogspot.com/2007/11/mariette-lydis-and-suzanne-ballivet.html
• http://www.westimpact.com/book_ballivet.htm