Clive Getty’s scholarship has long held a central place within the secondary literature on the French caricaturist and illustrator Grandville (Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard, 1803–1847). Alongside important studies in French by Annie Renonciat and Philippe Kaenel, Getty’s work has served as a necessary corrective to the ahistorical, Surrealistic, and Freudian interpretations of Grandville’s art that dominated study of the artist for much of the twentieth century. While the art historian and painter Laure Garcin together with the artist Max Ernst revived interest in Grandville, whose reputation was neglected for nearly a century after his death, they also perpetuated the myth (originating with Charles Baudelaire) that the artist was an insane creator of fantastic absurdities. In such interpretations, Grandville functions as a precursor whose strange images merely prefigured what would much later become the full-fledged Surrealist movement. In contrast, Getty adopts a measured, academic approach to emphasize Grandville as a product of his historical, geographical, and social context. His book is meticulously researched and convincingly argued. The many illustrations of Grandville’s work and comparative images generally support Getty’s claims, though the quality of the reproductions does not always do justice to the artist’s supremely precise and detailed drawing technique.

The wealth of information about the social-historical context and the extensive, even exhaustive footnotes that Getty presents place Grandville in the midst of French Romanticism and the July Monarchy. The book is comprised of a biography of the artist, followed by an illustrated catalogue describing one of the few remaining archival sources by Grandville, the so-called Missouri Album (named after its current home in the Special Collections Library of the University of Missouri–Columbia). This intriguing and rather odd source contains scraps of paper, some no larger than a postage stamp, cut from the artist’s diary and sketchbooks; these were later pasted with no apparent order into the pages of an album. Getty proposes a chronology for the entries, transcribes and translates their contents, and, whenever possible, provides background details or proposes interpretations of the drawings and texts. He understands the materials in the Missouri Album as Grandville’s “private commentary” (55) on social conditions in Paris during the 1830s and 1840s, and, as such, these sketches and scribbles constitute revealing glimpses into the artist’s mind.

Given the nature of his project, much of Getty’s text remains speculative. Yet, thanks to his careful documentary approach, the interpretive leaps he takes are largely convincing. (To complicate matters, Grandville himself seems to have redacted some names and other details for fear of police recrimination during the period of 1830 to 1835, a particularly tense time for political caricaturists and their associates). Whenever possible, Getty presents plausible identifications for the figures and locations represented in the drawings. The cast of characters appearing on the album’s pages ranges from Grandville’s professional associates—printers, publishers, artists, and writers—to family members, servants, and even coy references to prostitutes during his bachelor days. These figures are carefully catalogued and cross-referenced with comparative images and texts. What results is an impressively thorough “who’s who” of Parisian artistic circles during the July Monarchy.

Nearly every slip of paper pasted in the Missouri Album receives an entry in Getty’s catalogue, although it is not always clear that the scraps warrant equal treatment. Some pieces are merely ghost images from other entries (e.g., cat. 34), or, in the case of the diary fragments from 1846, in which Grandville recorded his daily expenses, lists of numbers without context (e.g., cat. 45 verso). In other instances, Grandville’s nearly illegible handwriting forces Getty to admit that such excerpts “[elude] any meaningful commentary” (143). When he writes that, “The only annotation on the verso” of a particular entry “is an incomplete and incorrectly spelled reference to a launderer” (230), one begins to question the limits of this particular archive. What art-historical or cultural knowledge has been augmented through Getty’s inference that at some point during the year 1834 Grandville or his wife had dealings with a launderer? While such completeness is largely admirable, it creates the danger that one might miss the most important of Getty’s findings, hidden as they are between entries about laundry and accounts of the weather. Two of these revelations deserve brief mention here. First is Getty’s analysis of Grandville’s discomfort in his role as a political caricaturist, and second is his emphasis upon the theatrical context that constituted a formative part of Grandville’s life in Paris.

Since persecuted caricaturists still appear in today’s headlines, Getty’s analysis of Grandville as a threatened political artist is particularly resonant. After strict censorship laws governing the publishing of images were lessened following the July Revolution of 1830, political caricature blossomed—albeit briefly—in Paris. While Grandville avoided criminal charges and imprisonment (unlike his younger colleague Honoré Daumier and his publisher Charles Philipon), Getty’s research shows that Grandville was persecuted by the police for the content of his caricatures (151–64). Deeply shaken by this harassment, which came at a time when Grandville was contemplating marriage, the artist gradually migrated from the fraught and dangerous realm of political caricature to the relatively safer field of book illustration. Getty’s analysis of Grandville’s diary fragments lends credence to the scholar’s earlier assertions that the fear of police action, criminal charges, and/or imprisonment prompted Grandville’s career shifts (see Getty’s previous essay on the subject, “Opposition Caricature and Political Harassment,” Print Collector’s Newsletter 14, no. 6 [Jan.–Feb. 1984]: 197–201).

Ultimately, and perhaps somewhat problematically, Getty interprets Grandville’s political caricature phase as an interruption within the longer trajectory of his career, in which Grandville’s primary interest was allegedly the “[production of] works for and about children” (171). While the documentary evidence presented, especially the series of drawings for Perrault’s fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” that appears in the Missouri Album (236–44), generally supports this claim, the question of whether his art was “for and about children” remains debatable. Some of the books Grandville was commissioned to illustrate, like the famous Fables de La Fontaine (1838), were indeed intended for a youthful and morally impressionable audience. However, the same cannot be said for the books that constituted that artist’s greatest successes, works in which original texts were appended to fit Grandville’s drawings. The anthropomorphic creatures in the lithographic series Les Métamorphoses du jour (1828–29) and designs for the engravings in Scènes de la vie privée et public des animaux (1841–42) and Un Autre monde (1843–44) may appeal to children, but these illustrations confront fundamentally adult themes ranging from famine and murder to sex and adultery. Although Grandville abandoned political caricature for book illustration, he did not retreat from the representation of subjects designed to appeal to worldly adults.

Finally, Getty’s presentation of Grandville’s diary fragments emphasizes a previously under-appreciated aspect of the artist’s Parisian context: his connections to the world of the vaudeville theater. Upon Grandville’s arrival in Paris in 1825, his relative Frédéric Lemétheyer took the young artist under his wing. As Getty notes in his biography of Grandville, Lemétheyer was stage manager of the Théâtre Royal de l’Opéra-Comique and also had contacts in the art world that may have helped Grandville to establish himself in the capital (29). Grandville, who adopted as his pen name the stage name of his grandparents, actors in the court of Duke Stanislas Leszczyński in Nancy, included sketches in his diary that indicate his attendance at many theatrical performances in Paris. These drawings even appear to suggest his presence at the infamous premier of Victor Hugo’s Hernani at the Comédie-Française on 25 February 1830 (108–11).

Like so much of his research in general and this book in particular, Getty’s presentation of Grandville’s theatrical context paves the way for further analysis of the artist’s rich oeuvre. For example, might there be ways in which Grandville’s interest in the theater appears in his compositions? Especially the lithographs of Les Métamorphoses du jour, with their human figures masked as animals, pushed close to the picture plane, or gesturing dramatically as if before the stage lights, seem to suggest such a connection. While Getty does not consistently make these interpretive leaps himself, nor can he within the scope of this project, his meticulously researched book will facilitate further study of this prolific illustrator and his diverse body of work.