Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville

-

Known as J. J., Grandville was an artist specializing in fantastic pictures and skewering the current mores.  Here is a strutting rooster.


 I love the rabbit on kettledrums.  This seems to be just whimsy.


The ragman.  This has no political significance that I can find.


Family of Beetles.  This is not a ringing endorsement of the church.


Going to the banquet.  Upper class mockery.


Misery, Hypocrisy, Greed.  The aristocratic cat mourns the approaching death of his natural prey, the rat, who is dying in poverty.  A priest, a judge, and a policeman are shown as ravens waiting their turn for the spoils.  Had this not been drawn as a 'funny animal' picture the censors would have blocked the publication.  
 It is against the backdrop of press censorship and royal repression that Daumier created his searing indictment of an incident that occurred in Paris, April 15 1834, where a group of soldiers were allegedly fired upon from the upper story of number 12 Rue Transonian, and who then killed or wounded 36 civilians in retaliation.  12 dead.


Most of the copies of this and the litho stone were seized and destroyed.  Daumier had already done 6 months for insulting the king by showing him as Gargantua eating his subjects
France was in turmoil. 


Everyone is pretending to be something else.  Social satire.


Wolves don't eat wolves.  The legal profession.


A cat with pretensions of gallantry ignores his obligations.  Anti - government cartoon.


The bourgeoisie.


Illustration for a La Fontaine story.  The dog looks suspiciously like John Bull.


John Bull.


Title page, The Metamorphoses of the Day.  1829, Paris.  And here is the entire book -



My master, obstinately called.  I don't know how this idiom exactly translates, although I imagine 'My so-called master' works just fine.   Louis Phillipe as a fat peacock.


I was introduced to Grandville by that excellent artist, Andrew the Bee.  One of the founders of Hybrid! Anthro On-line, he really knows his onions.



 Au revoir.

Comments

  1. AndibiMarch 20, 2020 at 3:40 PM

    I love that toad -- Never seen it before! Great post -- Grandville was the man!

    (Thanks for the plug, too!)

    ReplyDelete
  2. chaosfive55March 20, 2020 at 6:54 PM

    What's new, Bunny? I miss our chats, have you re-considered joining DA simply for the conversation? I am sure we would all love to hear from you again.
    Hope you're thriving and surviving in these challenging days.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Father's Last Escape

-
Image
It happened in the late and forlorn period of complete disruption, at the time of the liquidation of our business. The signboard had been removed from over our shop, the shutters were halfway down, and inside the shop my mother was conducting and unauthorized trade in remnants. Adela had gone to America, and it was said that the boat on which she had sailed had sunk and that all the passengers had lost their lives. We were unable to verify this rumour, but all trace of the girl was lost and we never heard of her again.  A new age began - empty, sober and joyless, like a sheet of white paper. A new servant girl, Genya, anaemic, pale, and boneless, mooned about the rooms. When one patted her on the back, she wriggled, stretched like a snake, or purred like a cat. She had a dull white complexion, and even the insides of her eyelids were white. She was so absent-minded that she sometimes made a white sauce from old letters and invoices: it was sickly and inedible.  At that t
Read more

Two Bad Men, Said Their Murderers

-
Image
John Choate, 25 August 1818 - 3 August 1869 Crokett Choate, 1842 -3 August 1869 This tells of a grave by the dashing wave A fond friends lip that did quiver Of an eye that's hid by a leaden lid And a voice now stilled forever. John on the left.  They were originally buried where they were killed but October of that year the Refugio Masons moved the bodies to Rockport.  This was all part of the Sutton-Taylor feud, the Suttons were backed by the U. S. Government and of no particular righteousness, they were badge wearing murderers and bullies.  The two story house with the porch running around the second floor in the left background belongs to my sister.  A lovely house and the best behaved neighbors possible! Photos by Steve Davis. The man who killed them.  Sheriff.  Regulator. Murderer. https://books.google.com/books?id=PUvanZiwzdUC&pg=PA64&lpg=PA64&dq=john+and+crockett+choate+death+jack+helm+gunfight&source=bl&
Read more

Roller Ball Murder

-
Image
The game, the game: here we go again. All glory to it, all things I am and own because of Roller Ball Murder. Our team stands in a row, twenty of us in salute as the corporation hymn is played by the band. We view the hardwood oval track which offers us the bumps and rewards of mayhem: fifty yards long, thirty yards across the ends, high banked, and at the top of the walls the cannons which fire those frenzied twenty-pound balls-similar to bowling balls, made of ebonite-at velocities over three hundred miles an hour. The balls careen around the track, eventually slowing and falling with diminishing centrifugal force, and as they go to ground or strike a player another volley fires. Here we are, our team: ten roller skaters, five motorbike riders, five runners (or clubbers). As the hymn plays, we stand erect and tough; eighty thousand sit watching in the stands and another two billion viewers around the world inspect the set of our jaws on .multivision. The runners, those bastards
Read more