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Jean-Ignace Gérard, known as Grandville, is acknowledged as one of the most inventive and prolific book-illustrators of the first half of the nineteenth century in France. Grandville illustrated dozens of works, produced literally thousands of drawings in his brief lifetime, and remains perhaps best -known for the three books most marked by his acute gift for fantastic design: The Animated Flowers; The Public and Private Lives of the Animals, and his incontestable masterpiece: Another World. All the images on these pages devoted to Grandville come from that work, the strange tale of an otherworldly voyage that takes place on Earth. Among the disquieting metamorphoses depicted here, the series of ballerina-marionettes, the war of the decks of cards (which Lewis Carroll apparently knew) and the men transformed by scoptophilic lust into phallic eyeballs, are among the most striking. |
