When we went to France a few years ago, one of the treasures we brought home was a set of three prints. We knew nothing about them except that we loved them. They’re a little hard to describe: each appeared to be illustrating the properties of a plant, depicting a woman who somehow personified the plant.
One, titled “Cigue,” shows a woman with a mortar and pestle; a strange rabbit-like creature is drinking something while a mouse-like creature vomits in the background and a frog lies on its side below the table.
The other two were equally weird and wonderful.
Rita got ’em framed, and they all hang in various rooms of our house.
Last night I came across the “Cigue” image in NATURAL HISTORY Magazine (my favorite!), illustrating a review of a book called The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison. I googled the artist’s name, J. J. Grandville, and found a world of wonders:
Flowers Personified
Philadelphia Print Shop
Stars personified
Caricatures
From what little I can gather from the French texts on various pages, Grandville’s work was an important precursor to the Surrealists, and an inspiration for John Tenniel’s illustrationws of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
The prints we bought are from the “Flowers Personified” series. The philaprintshop URL describes them:
A series of delightful prints illustrating flowers personified in the form of lovely maidens and their animal retinues. Each early 19th-century female figure is richly costumed in the leaves, blossoms and garlands that designate her flower. She presides in an appropriate ‘natural’ setting, often surrounded by anthropomorphised insects and birds that pay her hommage. These poetic interpretations of nature are a fetching example of early 19th-century literary and artistic invention. Their charm, as well as their mischievousness, bespeak the Victorian fascination with an animated and psychologically fertile natural world, the world made familiar by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
They’re all just delightful. Take a look!