Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard was born in the northeastern French city of Nancy in 1803.
But his family and friends called him Adolphe, after his older brother who had died in childhood.
As an adult he used the professional pseudonym Jean-Jacques Grandville, and sometimes just
Grandville, a name he took from his grandparents' stage name when they had worked in cabaret
in the city.
He started drawing in childhood and was taught and encouraged by his father, who was a painter
of miniatures.
I can find no record of him attending art school, although that doesn't necessarily
mean he didn't, but in 1825 at the age of 21 he moved to Paris, and began working as
an illustrator.
At the age of 24 he was working and studying under the supervision of the artist Andre
Léon Larue.
And although it was Larue who took the credit for the design of a pack of hand coloured
playing cards titled La Sibylle des Salons, it was Grandville who had created them.
The work which first established him as a significant figure in French illustration
was the series Les Métamorphoses du Jour, published between 1828 and 1829.
This collection of lithographs comprised over 70 images featuring characters with human
bodies but animal heads, each of which satirised various less than desirable aspects of human
behaviour and personality traits.
Although strictly speaking no more anthropomorphised than Egyptian animal headed gods the facial
characteristics of each animal were exaggerated in order to express human character and emotion
. And the popular success of this series greatly enhanced his reputation for creating comical
and occasionally unsettling imagery.
He followed this with Voyage pour l'Éternité in 1829.
And this darkly comic series portraying the omnipresence of death was another which demonstrated
his facility for lithographic work.
Like many of Grandville's creations some editions were published in colour, applied by teams
of female colourists working to the illustrator's written instructions.
Naturally enough this increased their commercial value considerably.
The success of these volumes led rapidly to him becoming a regular contributor of satirical
illustrations to Paris's most respected and popular humorous publications including La
Caricature, and Le Charivari.
And the images he created for them further enhanced his reputation for visually unsettling
work.
La Carte Vivante du Restaurateur was a series of 12 satirical lithographs which was published
sequentially between 1831 and 1832 in La Caricature.
And also in 1832 he produced a collection titled Singeries Morales et Politiques, which
used monkeys to reflect human characteristics.
Along with many of his contemporaries Grandville used his talents to caricature and openly
make fun of those in authority, including the king Louis Phillipe, whose resemblance
to a pear became an immensely popular meme of the period which appeared regularly in
magazines.
But the king was far from amused and made all such disrespectful portrayals punishable
with heavy fines and even imprisonment.
La Caricature closed down completely and Le Charivari only survived by turning to broader
social satire.
In 1833 Grandville had married his cousin Marguerite Henriette Fischer and moved into
a new Parisian apartment.
Their first son, Ferdinand, was born in 1834.
And with family responsibilities Grandville quickly backed away from more contentious
and dangerous work in favour of the illustration of novels and his own less politically overt
material.
In 1837 he illustrated Le Livre des Enfants, a re-write of Perrault's fairy tales, and
although the book contained about 30 spot illustrations
by Grandville, the various wood engravers were credited but he was not.
And in the same year he produced about 100 more for a collection of the songs composed
by the highly popular songwriter and poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger.
This project gave him much greater opportunity to create some amusing social satire inspired
by the lyrics.
And this time Grandville was conspicuously credited on the cover and title pages.
In 1838 Grandville's edition of the Fables de La Fontaine was published, and the book
was an instant major success.
This was a verse re-telling of Aesop's fables originally written in 1668, and several others
had previously illustrated the work with varying degrees of success.
But Grandville's visualisation exhibited a truly revolutionary visual quality not seen
previously, which skilfully incorporated a range of varied anthropomorphic techniques
in his more than 250 drawings, which were once again reproduced as wood engravings.
In some cases he reverted to the animal head on a human body technique he had used earlier
on the Metamorphosis series, but there were others that were far more subtle, and created
plausible animal anatomy that was seemingly capable of human behaviour and movement.
And in other cases he depicted the animals as they really were, but gave them subtle
humanised expressions.
In the same year he also published a version of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which
although workmanlike could not begin to compete with the evident labour of love the La Fontaine
images had been.
Granville's wife gave birth to a second son Henri in 1838, but in the same year tragedy
struck the family when their first son Ferdinand died of meningitis.
In 1840 his illustrated edition of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was published, along
the same lines as his visualisation of Gulliver, with a large number of mostly vignetted but
a few full page monochrome engravings.
A year later, when Henriette was pregnant with their third child, young Henri also died
at the age of 3.
And although not long after she gave birth to yet another son Georges, tragedy struck
again when his wife, never the most robust young woman, died during childbirth.
And the grieving 37 year old Grandville was now bringing up his only surviving child as
a widower, although he was by now wealthy enough to employ a nanny.
The book Scènes de la Vie Privée et Publique des Animaux, Grandville's parody of an 1830
work by Balzac was published in 1842.
This book was Grandville's own idea and the publisher engaged the services of a number
of prominent French writers to create the text which he would illustrate and illuminate.
He produced over 300 pen and ink drawings which were remarkably sensitively engraved.
Like his Aesop's animals this book also played yo both his anthropomorphic and surreal imaginative
strengths.
Each of these images was compelling and visually articulate, and the book was undoubtedly one
of his most significant achievements.
In the same year he also published his illustrated edition of the Fables of Florian, written
a century earlier, a lesser known collection of stories, with just short of 100 more illustrations
of remarkable quality.
In 1843 he collaborated with the writer Paul Émile Daurand-Forgues, who worked under the
pseudonym Old Nick, to create the book Petites Misères de la Vie Humaine.
This satirical review of humanity's various failings contained more than 200 illustrations
which enhanced and illuminated the text with considerable comic effect.
In the same year he married again to Cetherine Marceline L'Huillier and she gave birth to
a son, Armand in 1845.
It's hard to imagine why, but 1844's Un Autre Monde was actually one of his least successful
projects in his lifetime.
But the quality and peculiar nature of the images he created for this book subsequently
came to be seen as seminal examples of what would later be called surrealism, and critically
acclaimed as such by quite a few of its 20th century exponents.
The book takes place in a parallel world and its spectacularly absurd narrative unfolds
primarily through the images, more like an early fantasy graphic novel than a conventional
piece of written fiction.
It had originally been Grandville's ambition to both write and illustrate the book, but
although he had previously contributed some short journalistic pieces to various magazines
and newspapers, he wasn;t comfortable with fiction, and handed the writing over to Taxile
Delord, the editor of the journal Le Charivari.
Grandville’s drawings, 36 full-page hand-coloured wood engravings and around 146 monochrome
vignettes, are an overwhelming triumph of the absurd, which somehow managed to make
a sort of logical sense in visual terms.
The various connections of meaning and visual similarity make every image as compelling
as the one before and at least since his death this book has come to be considered his greatest
creative achievement, and it's easy to see why.
In 1845 he collaborated again with the writer known as Old Nick and a few others on the
book Cent Proverbes.
This was a series of visual humorous interpretations of well known French proverbs, and Grandville's
images were telling social satires even if by his own standards less fanciful than other
successes.
in the same year his wife gave birth to a fourth son they named Armand and Grandville
was overjoyed at the addition to his family.
In 1846 the satitical book Jérôme Paturot à la Recherche d'une Position Sociale, written
by Louis Reybaud was published, and it contained a large number of highly imaginative and well
composed engravings of Grandville's illustrations.
One of the more distinctive aspects of these images was the wildly differing approaches
to human anatomy within the same piece, from the broadly exaggerated htrough to anatomically
correct.
In 1847 he published les Fleurs Animée, a series of personified flower illustrations,
printed as particularly subtle steel engravings and coloured by hand.
And this book was certainly among his most popular during his lifetime.
And in the same year he produced what would be his last published work, titled Les Étoiles.
In this volume he created humanised visualisations of heavenly bodies as a series of imaginative
female figures.
Like his flower illustrations this series demonstrated the enduring power of his visual
imagination, although both these projects were by his own standards quite restrained
and his usual satirical edge was nowhere to be seen.
And although the popularity of his illustrations had never been greater it was later in that
year that with a final tragic blow Grandville's world unravelled completely when Georges,
the third son from his first marriage died at the age of 4.
Grandville is quoted as observing "Death has taken time out only to sharpen his scythe."
He had become progressively disturbed by the apparently endless misery inflicted on him
and his family and the death of Georges was understandably just too much to bear.
Soon after He suffered a serious violent psychotic episide and was admitted to a clinic in the
town of Vanves.
While there he died, apparently from the disease diphtheria at the age of 43.
In the year following his death Grandville's illustrated edition of Cervantes' Don Quixote
was published, and in later years a large amount of the work
he had created during his lifetime was reprinted, and continued to be popular in France.
In 1853, more than 1000 of his drawings were put up for sale by his family, and many can
now be found in several museums.
And although his terrible misfortunes and his own subsequent early death can't and shouldn't
be ignored I hope that ultimately it's the quality of his work and remarkably imaginative
spirit for which he he will continue to be most remembered.