by Jean C. Fisher

Created on: December 10, 2010

J. J. GRANDVILLE: PROTO-SURREALIST AND POLITICAL SATIRIST

Born Jean Ignace Julien Gerard in Nancy, northeastern France in 1803,  J. J. (Jean-Jacques) Grandville's 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".

One of Grandville's best-known solo works is "Les Fleurs Animees" or "The Personification of Flowers" (originally published in Paris in 1847) in which he depicts different species of flowers as beautiful women and children in colorful, bold renderings but, 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) along with his works depicting bizarre, “mixed-up” animals - many of which appeared in his work "Les Animaux" (1829).

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

When Napoleon III censored 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. 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 and it is mostly due to his work in these two

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