J. J. Grandville: Proto-Surrealist and Political Satirist

I first became acquainted with J.-J. (Jean-Jacques) Grandville's work through a book lent to me by a friend who is a horticultural historian and serves with me on the Advisory Committee for Luther Burbank's Farm (a historical and horticultural site in Northern California registered on the National Register of Historic Places) entitled Les Fleurs Animees or The Personification of Flowers, originally published in Paris in 1847.

 

  

 "Pensee" ("Pansy"): Illustration from Grandville's

book "Les Fleurs Animees" ("The Personification

of Flowers").

 

"Camelia": Illustration from Grandville's book

"Les Fleurs Animees" ("The Personification

of Flowers").

As colleagues, my friend and I share a love of all things botanical. As friends, we share a love of all things strange, fantastic and beautiful. To my delight and surprise, I found Grandville's illustrations more than fulfilled both of these classifications...

The sheer beauty of the illustrations that I saw in Les Fleurs Animees, combined with a nagging sense that there was something strangely "familiar" about them, led me to investigate Grandville's background more extensively and this is what I found:

Born Jean Ignace Julien Gerard in Nancy, northeastern France in 1803, his father was a miniatures artist who most probably gave him his first art instruction. His grandparents were actor-comedians whose stage-act was called "Gerard de Grandville" -- from which he obtained his pseudonym. In fact, some of his first employers were theaters such as Hippolyte Lecomte and Opéra-Comique where he worked as a costume designer.

Influenced early in his career by the political cartoonists of the time such as John Leech and George du Maurier of the English magazine Punch and artists of the French magazine Nain Jaune, Grandville was a contemporary of the French satirists Honore Daumier (1808–1879) and Edouard Traviès (1809–1865) whose works, along with Grandville's, were featured often in the popular art/political/illustrative magazines of their day such as Le Silhouette, L'Artiste, La Caricature and Le Charivari.

 

 

"Grande Croisade contre la Liberte" ("The Grand Crusade Against Liberty") Grandville lithograph from the political satire periodical "La Caricature", 1834 .

 

 

 Perhaps even more well-known than Grandville’s artistic personification of “Fleurs” were his personifications of animals such as Les Métamorphoses du Jour (1839), Scenes de la Vie Privee et Publique des Animaux (1842) and Petites Miseres de la Vie Humaine (1843) and his works depicting bizaare, “mixed-up” animals -- many of which appeared in his work Les Animaux (1829).

 

 

"School" & "Pleased to Meet You" -- Grandville lithographs from his book "Les Metamorphoses du Jour", 1839.

 

Dadaists and Surrealists hail Grandville as one of their principle progenitors as can plainly be discerned from his works such as Un Autre Monde [1844] where, among other fantastic images, he depicts planets suspended in outer space with fanciful bridges leading from one to another.

 

A lithograph from Grandville's bizaare, futuristic book "Un Autre Monde" ("Another World").

 

When Napoleon III censured the French Press as a counter-measure against dissident reaction to France’s involvement in the Franco-Prussian War in 1835, Grandville turned from political satire to book illustration to make his living and it was through his illustrations in such classic works as Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift that he gained almost overnight universal popularity.

 

One of Grandville's illustrations from "Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift.

His influence is strongly represented by later artists such as Nast, Dore, Hugo, Kafka, Escher, Heinrich Kley, Jan Faust, Max Ernst and Sir John Tenniel -- who illustrated Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In fact, there are those who fall just short of accusing Tenniel of plagiarism and some even go so far as to claim that Carroll’s inspiration for writing the book actually came directly from viewing Grandville’s art.

Grandville’s influence, then, can also be readily identified in the much, much later works of Walt Disney and Peter Max (to name but two) and every political cartoonist that has come after -- right down to the rock band Queen’s use of a portion of one of Grandville’s images on their 1991 album Innuendo and as recently as 2006 with the publishing of The Fantastic Menagerie Tarot by Magic Realist Press in which each card of the deck reflects one of his illustrations. In addition, The New York Review of Books recognizes Grandville, along with David Levine, as their two major illustrative contributors in the 20^th Century.

 

"Dans de Ciel" ("Sky Dance"): A Grandville work that clearly shows his link to Escher & other surrealists.

 

Jean-Jacques Granville died on March 17, 1847 in France at the age of 44.   

 

Bronze bust of Jean-Jacques Grandville.

 

Sources: 

“Political Protest - Nineteenth Century” Science Encyclopedia -- http://science.jrank.org/pages/10888/Protest-Political-Nineteenth-Century.html