Grandville, Jean-Ignace-Isidore

Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ iɲas izidɔʁ ʒeʁaʁ]; 13 September 1803 – 17 March 1847) was a prolific French illustrator and caricaturist who published under the pseudonym of Grandville ([ɡʁɑ̃vil] ), and numerous variations (e. g. Jean-Jacques Grandville, Jean Ignace Isidore Grandville) throughout his career. Art historians and critics have called him "the first star of French caricature's great age", and described his illustrations as featuring "elements of the symbolic, dreamlike, and incongruous" while retaining a sense of social commentary, and "the strangest and most pernicious transfigurement of the human shape ever produced by the Romantic imagination". The anthropomorphic vegetables and zoomorphic figures that populated his cartoons anticipated and influenced the work of generations of cartoonists and illustrators from John Tenniel, to Gustave Doré, to Félicien Rops, and Walt Disney. He has also been called a "proto-surrealist" and was greatly admired by André Breton and others in the movement. Grandville was born in 1803, in Nancy, France into a family of artist and actors and received his earliest instruction in drawing from his father. He moved to...