X. The World of Grandville

 

X. The World of Grandville
From the Métamorphoses du jour and the Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux to Un autre monde

Métamorphoses du jour

"Mylord, I offer you my duty and my daughter." With these words, the disgusting fish head of a parvenu introduces the Duke of Orléans, portrayed with the elegant face of an eagle owl, to a blushing turkey hen - a bold parody of a scandalous-amorous adventure between the son of the emergent "Citizen King" Louis-Philippe and a low-ranking girl. It did not take long until the illustration and the book it appeared in, Les Métamorphoses du jour, by Parisian caricaturist Jean Grandville, were the talk of the town. In 73 pen lithographs he parodied the representatives of society by depicting them with animal heads, thereby exposing the abysmal irrationalities of the condition humaine. Grandville thus not only introduced the animal-human caricature to book illustration, but in the context of the 1830 July Revolution, some of the plates were also politically explosive: Charles Philipon immediately contracted him for the magazine La Caricature (see case IX in this display). Here you can see an uncut, hand-coloured copy in a contemporary binding by Thouvenin [no. 279].

Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux

In his magnum opus, the Public and Private Life of Animals (Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, 1842), Grandville drew on a similar principle of representation, combining individual portraits with the story of a revolution that culminated in the bitter realization of failure. The work was initiated by the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, whose model was Curmé's collection Les français peints par eux-mêmes (see case XI), which is also alluded to in the poster advertisement shown here [no. 290]. To this day, the work is celebrated as "one of the most successful books of the time", which raised Grandville "to the zenith of his glory" according to Annie Renonciat.

Here we see the collector René Descamps-Scrive’s copy in its publisher’s binding of dark red morocco [no. 286]. The coloured copy shown [no. 287] is "of the greatest rarity", according to Léopold Carteret: it includes two additional sets of plates, one of which is on China paper, as well as all original wrappers, and the history of provenance is extraordinary, ranging from Jules Brivois and Carteret himself to Alexandre Roudinesco (who had it bound after his own design by Maylander), and Henri Bonnasse.

Another specimen in the collection offers us a glimpse into Grandville’s working process: it includes 35 pen drawings, 13 of which were done for Scènes de la vie, with the artist’s pencil traces still visible, as well as his instructions to the engravers. The pen drawing by Grandville [no. 284] was evidently never printed. A work of art in and of itself, it belonged to his sister-in-law Louise Fischer: the physiognomies of conversing passers-by are just as captivating as Grandville’s playing with the distorted proportions.

Un autre monde

The maturation of Grandville’s compositional capabilities is clearly evident in his most disturbing book, Another World (Un autre monde). In a departure from the earlier Scènes de la vie, which featured illustrations based on articles and short stories by an assemblage of famous writers, the illustrations for Another World are based solely on the artist’s imagination. Even the book’s lyricist is completely subordinate to Grandville’s fanciful imagery of an alien planet full of chimeras, technical devices, cosmic wonders, and shifted perspectives.

 
Heribert Tenschert