Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville

Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard was a prolific 19th century French illustrator and caricaturist who published under the pseudonym of Grandville. He has been called "the first star of French caricature's great age", and Grandville's book illustrations described as featuring "elements of the symbolic, dreamlike, and incongruous, and they retain a sense of social commentary." "His perverse vision sought the monster in everyone and took delight in the strangest and most pernicious transfigurement of the human shape ever produced by the Romantic imagination." The anthropomorphic vegetables and zoomorphic figures that populated his cartoons anticipated and influenced the work of generations of cartoonists and illustrators from John Tenniel, to Gustave Doré, to Félicien Rops, and Walt Disney. He has also been called a "proto-surrealist" and was greatly admired by André Breton and others in the movement.

Grandville was born in 1803, in Nancy, France into a family of artist and actors and received his earliest instruction in drawing from his father. He moved to Paris about 1823-1825 and began designing illustrations. His reputation was established in 1829 when he published a set of 70 lithographs titled Les Métamorphoses du jour. During the July Revolution of 1830 and the turbulent years that followed, he worked with Honoré Daumier and others producing provocative political cartoons for periodicals that were highly critical of the new monarchy of Louis Philippe I. After strict censorship laws were passed and threats from the police in 1835, Grandville turned to book illustration. He illustrated several classics such as La Fontaine's Fables, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Cervantes's Don Quixote. In later years his books where increasingly centered around his illustrations, with the text written for his images e.g. Un autre monde (1844), Cent proverbes: têxte par trois Tetes dans un bonnet (1845), and Les fleurs animées (1846). Grandville typically made drawings for publishers that were later copied into lithographs and woodcuts by others, and only occasionally did he make his own prints.

He married his cousin Marguerite Henriette Fischer in 1833 and they had three sons, but tragically Marguerite and all three sons died on separate occasions before him. He remarried in 1843 to Catherine Marceline "Céline" Lhuillier and they had one son, Armand in 1845. Traditional accounts say that he went mad and died in an insane asylum, however recent authors say that although the hospital where he died in Paris, Maison de Santé in Vanves, did treat the mentally ill among other illnesses, he was not "mad" and likely died of a throat infection, possibly diphtheria.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023