GRANDVILLE, J. J. Cent Proverbes.Paris, H. Fournier, 1845

Small 4to; contemporary shagreen binding, gilt titles and ornaments on the spine; half title, title page, pp. 400; Frontispiece and 50 plates out text, vignette on title page, adorned initials, head pieces and culs de lampe. Some browned pages, good copy.

Original edition, first issue. Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard, best known as Grandville, is a singular French artist from the early nineteenth century who has devoted his brief as intense artistic career to caricature, lithography and above all to the illustration of books. It began the lithograph activity at the end of the twentieth century. His lithographs are characterized by a strong visionary nature: the characters, portrayed in common attitudes, however, have accentuated animalistic faces: a rich and varied bestiality, embracing the monkey and the fish, the grasshopper and parrot, the deer and the bull and other animals still. This "illogicomorous" daily returns insistently to become the artist's specificity, in collaboration with some of the most prestigious satirical periodicals of the time, such as "La Caricature" and "Charivari", revised by Honoré Daumier. The works he has shown, says Henri Beraldi, "remain a compulsory element of a collection of books." Carteret III, p. 282: "Livre estimé, un des meilleurs de Grandville; rare ... ".