EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 29 © 2019 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

64 At first inspired by the caricatures which appeared in the satirical journal Le Nain Jaune ( The Yellow Dwarf ), Grandville would soon become known for his liberal, anti-clerical point of view. By 1820 he began his first drawings of hybrid creatures: half-man, half-animal, which would prove a great success for the budding artist in later years. Although the Romantic Movement flowering in the art world at the time also caught the attention of the young artist, it was lithography, once it became widely available in the printing world that made the greatest change in Grandville’s artistic career. Now pictures could be printed within books for everyone to see. At the age of twenty-one, Grandville moved to Paris, where all the main editors and publishers lived. There he met and married his cousin Marguerite Henriette Fischer in 1833. This first marriage would turn out to be quite problematic and the source of many tragedies: their first son died at the age of four, the second choked to death while eating a piece of bread at the age of three and in front of all the family, and the third would also succumb at the age of four. Not surprisingly, all these events led to Grandville’s wife growing frail, and she eventually died of peritonitis one month after giving birth to her third child. Outside his married life Grandville was having a great success with his art, first with a series of lithographic prints entitled ‘Les Tribulations de la Petite Propriété’ (‘The Vicissitudes of a Small Property’), but it was especially with