Early life: 1803–1830 Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard, "Grandville", was born on September 15, 1803, in
Nancy, Meurthe-et-Moselle, in northeastern France. His parents called him Adolphe, a name that originated from an older brother who had died three months before Grandville was born, and a name that followed him through the rest of his life. His father, Jean-Baptiste Gérard, was a noted painter of miniatures. He inherited his father's talent and exhibited an aptitude for drawing at an early age. He received his earliest education in art from his father and several authors have noted his father's influence on his draftsmanship and dense compositions, even in his mature work. Another painter of miniatures and lithographer, Léon-André Larue, called Mansion, was a relative who encouraged Grandville to go to Paris and learn lithography.
Lithography had only recently been invented in Germany in the 1790s and was rapidly gaining popularity in Paris as a fast and cheap alternative to engraving and etching, for mass-producing prints and illustrated publications. In a period of social and political turmoil, inexpensive illustrated newspapers were coming into vogue, and opportunities for draftsmen and illustrators were also on the rise among the publishers and lithography studios in Paris at that time. Grandville was drawn to and influenced by the satirical prints, caricatures, and illustrations (often political) that were growing in popularity in France. Sources differ on the exact year and age, but after completing school, c. 1823–1825, Grandville moved to Paris and began pursuing a career in illustration and lithography. One account states his first lithograph titled
La Marchande de cerises (
The Cherry Seller), was published in Nancy 1824 or 1825. Grandville's parents had friends and family in Paris working in the theater who provided work and connections early on, including a relative, Frédéric Lemétheyer, who was a stage manager in the
Opéra-Comique. He began using his pseudonym, "Grandville" in Paris. It was derived from "Gérard de Grandville", his paternal grandparents stage name when they were actors and worked in the court of Lorraine. The pseudonym Grandville appeared in numerous variations throughout his career, including Grandville, Jean-Jacques Granville, J. J. Grandville, Jean Ignace Isidore Grandville, J. I. I. Grandville, Jean de Granville, and other variants. He designed illustrations for decks of playing cards and worked with
Hippolyte Lecomte, a painter and ballet set designer in Paris, for whom he produced a set of color lithographs ''
in 1826. That set was followed by additional series including 12 lithographs created for the printer Langlumé titled (Sundays of a Paris Bourgeois
or The Tribulations of Small Property
), in 1826. Subsequent collections included 53 prints in La Sibylle des salons
(The Sibyl of the Salons
) in 1827 and 12 prints in (Titles for Musical Pieces'') in 1828. The success of Grandville's previous lithographic series led to invitations to design cartoons for these papers. The first of these was the satirical paper La Silhouette where his friend
Charles Philipon was working as an editor. Grandville's lithograph ''Let's Put Out the Light and Rekindle the Fire!'' ("the light" of
the Enlightenment and "the fire" of book-burning), criticizing censorship of the press, was published in June 1830 and quickly proscribed by the government. La Silhouette had a short run (December 1829 – January 1831), folding after the administration's fines and pressure.
Political lithographs (1830–1835) File:Grandville, Auferstehung, 1832, K138.jpg|
Resurrection of Censorship (1832), La Caricature, No. 62, 21.7 x 26.5 cm File:Digestion du budget (cropped).jpg|
Digestion of the Budget: Administrative, Political, Moral and above all Economic Work (1832), La Caricature, No. 82, 16.7 x 31 cm File:The People Delivered to the Vampire Taxes MET DP818656 (cropped).jpg|
The People Delivered to the Vampire Taxes (1833), L'Association Mensuelle No. 10, 23.4 x 33.7 cm File:Aanval van de Franse overheid op de vrijheid van drukpers Descente dans les ateliers de la liberté de la presse (titel op object), RP-P-2015-26-1607 (cropped).jpg|
French Government Attack on the Freedom of the Printing Press (1833), La Caricature, 35.4 x 53.3 cm File:Etrennes au peuple (cropped).jpg|
Gifts to the People (1833), La Caricature, No. 113, 23.4 x 20.4
Later career: 1836–1847 At the outbreak of the July Revolution of 1830, Grandville was a 26-year-old bachelor living a bohemian life. By the time the
September Laws were passed in 1835, he was a 31-year-old husband, and a father. He quit producing political cartoons after the September Laws and turned to illustrating books. It has been postulated that he was relieved and even happy to leave the politics and police harassment behind at this point in his life. In July 1833 he married a cousin from Nancy, Marguerite Henriette Fischer and the couple maintained an apartment close to his studio, and rented a house near the outskirts of town. In 1834 their first son Ferdinand was born. A second son, Henri, was born in fall of 1838, but tragedy soon struck the family. Marguerite's health is said to have declined with each birth and Ferdinand died of
meningitis about the time Henri was born. In 1841 Henri choked to death on a piece of bread while his parents helplessly watched. A third son, Georges, was born in July 1842 but, Marguerite died of
peritonitis later that month. Grandville remarried in October 1843 to Catherine Marceline Lhuillier (1819–1888) who was the mother of his fourth son Armand, born in 1845. One source states that from her deathbed, his first wife Marguerite, had a hand in selecting Catherine as a second wife and stepmother for her husband and son. The first major undertaking in book illustration that Grandville undertook was a volume of song lyrics by the popular French songwriter
Pierre-Jean de Béranger, first published with 38 wood engravings in 1835, and an expanded edition with 100 engravings in 1837. This was followed by several volumes of classic literature, including as ''
La Fontaine's Fables'', Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe, Swift's ''
Gulliver's Travels'', Boccaccio's
The Decameron, and Cervantes's
Don Quixote. While his illustrations for classic prose include some fine, if conventional illustrations, they did not provide him with the opportunity to give free range to his imagination. He had a greater affinity for children's literature, that shows in his illustration for La Fontaine Fables, and later the Fables of Lavalette and
Florian, collectively ranking among his finest work. He made a series of drawings for
Perrault's
Little Red Riding Hood but these were not published. Grandville adapted and refined his style in switching from cartoons to book illustrations, which coincided with the evolving printing technology and a shift from lithography to wood engraving. Previously, illustrations were typically printed on separate pages that were inserted into the text. With end-cut wood engravings, fine detail could be achieved on the hard end grain of wooden blocks, that could then be placed with the typographical blocks and printed on the same page with the text, lowering cost, and increasing the speed and quality of illustrated texts. Wood engravings also deteriorate less quickly than metal plates used for
intaglio printing. Grandville did not engrave the wooden blocks himself. Typical of 19th century illustrators, he provided his original drawings to his publishers which were then carved by professional engravers for his book illustrations.
Book illustrations (after 1836) wood engravings File:"The Good Pope" from The Complete Works of Béranger Met DP887593 (cropped).jpg|
The Good Pope, Complete Works of Béranger (1836) File:"The Good God" from The Complete Works of Béranger Met DP887573 (cropped).jpg|
The Good God, Complete Works of Béranger (1836) File:Podroze Gulliwera w nieznajome kraje. T. 1 1851 (107562506) (cropped).jpg|
Giants look at Gulliver, Gulliver's Travels (1838) File:Podroze Gulliwera w nieznajome kraje. T. 1 1851 (107562020) (cropped).jpg|
Gulliver pulling the fleet, Gulliver's Travels (1838) File:Przypadki Robinsona Kruzoe. T. 1 1844 (113599495) (cropped).jpg|
My journey began, Robinson Crusoe (1840) File:Przypadki Robinsona Kruzoe. T. 1 1844 (113599569) (cropped).jpg|
At the foot of the hill, Robinson Crusoe (1840) File:Fables de Florian 1845 (8323176) (cropped).jpg|
The Carp and the Carpillons, Fables de Florian (1842) File:Fables de Florian 1845 (8323896) (cropped).jpg|
The Viper and the Leech, Fables de Florian (1842) File:Grandville (1848), woodcut, illustration for Don Quixote.jpg|''Don Quixote's fight with the red wine skins'' (1847) By the early 1840s, Grandville was increasingly illustrating books that were centered around his images. Working in collaboration with publishers and contemporary Parisian writers, he was at times given free regain of his imagination and the images. He produced about one book a year, his name often appearing before the authors on the title page, in which his illustrations were equally as important as the text, if not the main focus of the book. Not surprisingly some of his finest work and that for which he is best remembered today appeared in this period. Most of the authors he worked with had some past connections or background with the radical press of the early 1830s. The first was
Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux (
Scenes of the Private and Public Life of Animals), a satirical compilation of articles and short stories, first published in serial form over a couple of years, then in a two volume set in 1842, with 320 wood engravings by Grandville. Multiple authors contributed to the books including
Honoré de Balzac,
Louis-François L'Héritier,
Alfred de Musset,
Paul de Musset,
Charles Nodier, and
Louis Viardot. This was followed by
Petites misères de la vie humaine (
Little Miseries of Human Life) in 1843, with text by , a contributor to
Le Charivari who sometimes published under the pseudonym "Old Nick". Old Nick also coauthored
Cent proverbes: têxte par trois Tetes dans un bonnet (
One Hundred Proverbs: Text by Three Heads in a Bonnet) with Taxile Delord and
Louis Amédée Achard in 1845. provided the text for
Un autre monde (
Another World) in 1844, regarded by many as Grandville's masterpiece and ironically the least successful volume in his lifetime. Delord, a writer and critic who was editor-in-chief of Le Charivari and later entered French politics, also wrote
Les fleurs animées (
Animated Flowers or
Flowers Personified), completed in 1846 and published posthumously. ''Jérôme Paturot à la recherche d'une position sociale
(Jérôme Paturot in Search of a Social Position''), a social satire by
Marie Roch Louis Reybaud published in 1846 and a great success, was the last book completed and published in his lifetime. A romanticized myth emerged around Grandville's death that persisted for 150 years or more. Traditional accounts asserted Grandville's bizarre imagery was symptomatic of a disturbed mind, and the death of his family left him gray-haired and hunchbacked by the time he was forty, ultimately sending him over the edge into madness, and he died in an insane asylum. However, recent scholarship does not support this tale. In the days and weeks before his death Grandville was still producing some of his finest drawings, such as
Crime and Expiation, and his correspondence with publishers reflect a clear and rational mind anticipating future projects. By all accounts the sudden illness and death of his third son George affected him deeply, some saying this occurred "around late 1846 or early 1847", others place it only three days before his own death. On March 1, 1847, Grandville begin suffering from a sore throat and his condition progressively deteriorated over the following weeks. It has been speculated he had
diphtheria. He was eventually taken to a private clinic, 8 Maison de Santé in Vanves, where
Felix Voisin and
Jean-Pierre Falret, two innovative
psychiatrists worked. He died there on March 17, 1847 and was buried in the Cimetière Nord of
Saint-Mandé of Paris next to his first wife and three sons. The artist wrote his own epitaph, translations vary: "Here lies Grandville; he loved everything, made everything live, speak, and walk, but he could not make a way for himself." or "Here lies J. J. Grandville. He could bring anything to life and, like God, he made it live, talk and walk. Only one thing eluded him: how to live a life of his own."
Later work (1840s), wood engravings File:Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, tome 2 0400.jpg|
The Garden of Beast: from
Scènes de la vie des animaux (1842) File:Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, tome 2 0514 (cropped).jpg|
He spins his cocoon and buries in a book:
Scènes de la vie des animaux File:Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, tome 2 0286 (cropped).jpg|
Follow me! said a voice, my bad side no doubt:
Scènes de la vie des animaux File:Die kleinen Leiden des menschlichen Lebens 1842 (115794637) (cropped).jpg|Frontispiece: from
Petites misères de la vie humaine (1843) File:Die kleinen Leiden des menschlichen Lebens 1842 (115796912) (cropped).jpg|
Gallery of Horrors: from
Petites misères de la vie humaine File:Die kleinen Leiden des menschlichen Lebens 1842 (115795938) (cropped) (cropped).jpg|
The Nightmare: from
Petites misères de la vie humaine File:Grandville - Cent Proverbes, 1845 (page 400 crop).jpg|
Fools invent fashions, and the wise follow: from
Cent Proverbes (1845) File:Grandville Cent Proverbes page141 (cropped 2).png|
For the money the dogs dance: from
Cent Proverbes File:Grandville - Cent Proverbes, 1845 (page 290 crop).jpg|
All that glitters is not gold: from
Cent Proverbes ==Art==