L’homme, son esprit, ses goûts et ses habitudes
Paris: Aubert & Cie., 1843. Item #06699
Grandville's Paris: A Scarce Collected Album of Physiognomy, Fashion, Character, and Social Satire
GRANDVILLE, J.J. L’homme, Son esprit, ses goûts et ses habitudes. Jugés par son Physique. Paris: Aubert & Cie., 1843.
First collected edition.
Oblong quarto (8 3/4 x 11 5/16 inches; 222 x 287 mm.). Complete with 24 numbered lithographic plates printed in black and the terminal eight-page Aubert publisher’s catalogue at end.
Publishers pictorial blue boards lettered in gold. Remains of bookplate on front paste-down. Expertly rebacked with original spine laid down, some light wear to corners and extremities. An excellent example from the golden age of illustrated caricature in France.
The volume comprises the following celebrated Grandville series:
Plates 1–10: Qui se ressemble s’assemble
Plates 11–12 and 15–16: L’homme jugé par sa canne
Plate 13: Rencontres des boulevards
Plate 14: Rencontres parisiennes, le dimanche
Plates 17–24: L’esprit et le caractère jugés par l’extérieur
A remarkable and highly characteristic Grandville satire album, bringing together several of the artist’s most penetrating visual studies of Parisian manners, physiognomy, vanity, and bourgeois self-fashioning during the July Monarchy.
Few artists of nineteenth-century France equaled Grandville in his ability to transform everyday urban observation into fantastical psychological caricature. In these lithographs, canes, clothing, posture, gesture, and facial expression become extensions of inner character. A promenade along the boulevards becomes social theater; accessories become moral indicators; human resemblance becomes both comic and unsettling.
The opening suite, Qui se ressemble s’assemble, explores the old proverb “birds of a feather flock together,” pairing individuals whose appearance and behavior reveal shared vanities and absurdities. Particularly memorable is L’homme jugé par sa canne, in which walking sticks become instruments of social diagnosis - revealing pretension, profession, temperament, or class aspiration through their form and manner of use.
The concluding sequence, L’esprit et le caractère jugés par l’extérieur, stands among Grandville’s finest physiognomic inventions, reflecting the nineteenth century fascination with Lavater, phrenology, and the supposed readability of human character through external appearance. These plates anticipate both Daumier’s social observation and later modern caricature.
Published by Aubert, the great Parisian house associated with Grandville, Daumier, Gavarni, and the flourishing culture of lithographic satire, the present work belongs to the golden age of illustrated caricature in France. Albums surviving complete with the terminal Aubert catalogue are increasingly difficult to locate, as advertising leaves were frequently discarded.
An unusually desirable example of one of Grandville's scarcer collected caricature albums, preserving in a single volume several of the artist's finest physiognomic and social satires originally issued separately by Aubert and vividly capturing the wit, elegance, and social anxieties of 1840s Paris.
Price: $2,850.00