Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard was a prolific 19th century French illustrator and caricaturist who

published under the pseudonym of Grandville. He has been called "the first star of French
caricature's great age",[1] and Grandville's book illustrations described as featuring "elements of the
symbolic, dreamlike, and incongruous, and they retain a sense of social commentary."[2] "His
perverse vision sought the monster in everyone and took delight in the strangest and most
pernicious transfigurement of the human shape ever produced by
the Romantic imagination."[3] The anthropomorphic vegetables and zoomorphic figures that
populated his cartoons anticipated and influenced the work of generations of cartoonists and
illustrators from John Tenniel, to Gustave Doré, to Félicien Rops, and Walt Disney. He has also
been called a "proto-surrealist"[2] and was greatly admired by André Breton and others in the
movement.

Grandville was born in 1803, in Nancy, France into a family of artist and actors and received his
earliest instruction in drawing from his father. He moved to Paris about 1823-1825 and began
designing illustrations. His reputation was established in 1829 when he published a set of 70
lithographs titled Les Métamorphoses du jour. During the July Revolution of 1830 and the turbulent
years that followed, he worked with Honoré Daumier and others producing provocative political
cartoons for periodicals that were highly critical of the new monarchy of Louis Philippe I. After strict
censorship laws were passed and threats from the police in 1835, Grandville turned to book
illustration. He illustrated several classics such as La Fontaine's Fables, Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Cervantes's Don Quixote. In later years his books where
increasingly centered around his illustrations, with the text written for his images e.g. Un autre
monde (1844), Cent proverbes: têxte par trois Tetes dans un bonnet (1845), and Les fleurs
animées (1846).
He married his cousin Marguerite Henriette Fischer in 1833 and they had three sons, but tragically
Marguerite and all three sons died on separate occasions before him. He remarried in 1843 to
Catherine Marceline “Céline” Lhuillier and they had one son, Armand in 1845. Traditional accounts
say that he went mad and died in an insane asylum, however recent authors say that although the
hospital where he died in Paris, Maison de Santé in Vanves, did treat the mentally ill among other
illnesses, he was not "mad" and likely died of a throat infection, possibly diphtheria.