Description

Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard (1803-1847) was a French caricaturist, generally known by the pseudonym of J. J. Grandville. At the age of twenty-one he moved to Paris, where he published a collection of lithographs entitled Les Tribulations de la Petite Proprieté. He followed this with Les Plaisirs de Toutdge and La Sibylle des Salons; but the work which first established his fame was Les Métamorphoses du Jour (1828-29), a series of seventy scenes in which individuals with the bodies of men and faces of animals are made to play a human comedy. He contributed to various periodicals, such as Le Silhouette, L'Artiste, La Caricature and Le Charivari. Thereafter his political caricatures which were characterized by marvelous fertility of satirical humour became very popular. After the reinstitution of prior censorship of caricature in 1835, he turned almost exclusively to book illustration, supplying illustrations for various standard works, such as The Songs of Béranger, The Fables of la Fontaine, Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe. He also continued to issue various lithographic collections, among which may be mentioned La Vie Privée et Publique des Animaux, Les Cent Proverbes, L'Autre Monde and Les Fleurs Animées.