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9. GRANDVILLE, (Jean-Ignace-Everard Gérard). Nine Original ‘Cuivres’ for Les Fleurs Animées, par J. J. Grandville. Paris. Gabriel de Gonet. 1847.
Oblong 4to. (c.375 x 300 mm). Nine original engraving plates, each engraved recto only with two images and titles, blindstamp verso ‘MOREAU ET LEROY / A PARIS’.
A collection of original etching plates for the first edition of Grandville’s Les Fleurs Animées.
Les Fleurs Animées, one of Grandville’s last books and one of his own personal favourites, was published by Gabriel de Gonet in 1847 and illustrated with two colour frontispieces, 50 colour plates and two botanical plates in black and white. Each of the plates presented here features two of Grandville’s anthropomorphic flowers; a second edition of the work was printed in chromolitho- graphy rather than the colour engravings that were issued with the first edition.
The plates presented here, each with two images, consist of the following flowers: LAURIER / MYRTE, CAPUCINE / AUBEPINE, CAMELLIA / BELLE-DE-NUIT, FLEUR DE PECHER / CACTUS, EGLANTINE / SOLEIL, PERUENCHE DESSECHE / HORTEN- SIA COURONNE IMPERIALE, CHEVREFEUILLE / NENUPHAR, VERVEINE / LILAS and LIN / MYOSOTIS.
Though the images in the book are of Grandville’s time, his manner of proceeding is that of an artist of the modern movement, explor- ing the same subject through a sequence of slight but significant variations ... His first biographer wrote in the preface to Les étoiles (pp. viii - ix): ‘The Fleurs animées are the very thought of Grandville; they were his favourite work, the work into the execution of which he put all that was in him of poetic and gracious originality, of dexterity of mind and observation, of that prodigious perspicacity which made him divine affinities hitherto unperceived by anyone and discover new worlds’. (Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book, 1700 to 1914).
[Ray 198].