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| 29 March 2024 |
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Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard (1803–1847) was a French illustrator and caricaturist who published under the pseudonym of Jean-Jacques Grandville or J. J. Grandville. He has been called "the first star of French caricature's great age", and Grandville's book illustrations described as featuring "elements of the symbolic, dreamlike, and incongruous, and they retain a sense of social commentary". The anthropomorphic vegetables and zoomorphic figures that populated his cartoons anticipated and influenced the work of generations of cartoonists and illustrators including John Tenniel, Gustave Doré, Félicien Rops, and Walt Disney. He has also been called a "proto-surrealist" and was greatly admired by André Breton and others in the Surrealist movement. This illustration by Grandville is plate 52 from a 1854 collection of hand-coloured lithographs titled Les métamorphoses du jour (The Metamorphoses of the Day), and depicts five anthropomorphic male dogs following a female dog, all dressed in human clothing. The print is captioned "Temps de canicule", meaning 'heatwave weather' but incorporating a pun in French; canicule literally translates to 'dog days of summer' and may also refer here to animals being 'in heat'.Illustration credit: Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard; restored by Adam Cuerden