The Court of Flora: The Engraved Illustrations of J.J. Grandville

by Peter A. Wick (Editor), J.J. Grandville (Artist)

Introduction and notes by the editor. Fifty-two color plates after the original hand-colored steel engravings first published in 1847, with a self-portrait as frontispiece. Text by Taxile Delord, editor of Le Charivari from 1848 to 1858. This graceful fantasy of "flowers personified" has all the elements of Romantic ballet, with its highly conventionalized attitudes, magical settings and embellishments of costume, to which beetles, crickets, butterflies and caterpillars are added in variant aggressive or sycophantic roles. J.J. Grandville 1803-1847 lived most of his life in Paris, where he had considerable success as a lithographer, drawing many fantastically metamorphosized objects and animals that offered a 19th century preview of surrealism. unpaginated, but about 125 pages. cloth, dust jacket. large 8vo..

120 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1982