Hardly a typical Thai princess, Marsi counts Dali among the influences in her paintings
This hefty volume is a monumental labour of love dedicated to an artist relatively little known outside the refined creative circles of Provence in France and Bangkok's Suan Pakkard Palace.
Princess Marsi, the only child of MR Pantip Paribatra and His Royal Highness Prince Chumbhotbongse Paribatra, lived most of her life abroad, first in Java, then in Europe, settling finally in the small village of Annot in the hills above Nice, to indulge in her passion of painting.
In French, English and Thai, this "catalogue raisonné" covers her life at different stages. It's a life of privilege, but Marsi didn't rely on privilege to carve out a niche in her highly individual paintings and an imaginary dream world reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch's.
Following a biography, the book offers essays by George Bloess ("The juxtaposition of love and magic: The fascinated visions of Princess Marsi"), Françoise Py ("The Lady of Annot") and Apinan Poshyananda ("Princess Marsi and the realm of fantasy").
The first two might be dismissed as high-flown twaddle, typical of rarefied Parisian art circles, but Dr Apinan has his feet on the ground and clearly covers the different periods of Marsi's art.
There are translations of press notices and an enlightening translation of a May 1997 interview in Dichan magazine, in which Marsi relates influences - including an encounter with Salvador Dali - in her vagabond life before she settled in the foothills of the Alps.
The bestiary she conjures up in her paintings, with its vaguely mediaeval overtones, barely conceals her inner thoughts and possible yearnings. In fact, by her work she may be trying to exorcise some demons.
But enough of that: We should avoid the high-art line and keep close to the ground, to this feline world of long-legged naked humans and imaginary animals.
This world demands an attention to detail that many modern painters shun - or quite simply are incapable of depicting - and Marsi avoids the currently vogue desire to shock. Her unclothed creatures are as natural as the landscape in which they're found.
That said, the titles of many pictures are interchangeable, and some impossible to render accurately, like "La Mort aux Dents", a pun on le mors aux dents, meaning "to take the bit between the teeth" and la mort (death).
Many, if not most, of these paintings are apparently still in France, but one suspects that a retrospective is likely to be organised around this unusual and individualistic artist.
