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Gustave DORE

La ménagerie parisienne

Au bureau du journal pour rire, Paris s.d. [1854], 34,5x26,5cm, broché sous étui.

La Ménagerie parisienne

Very rare first edition and first issue of this album comprising a title sheet and 24 lithographs in black and white, the first print, engraved by Vayron and all captioned.
Copy with the publisher's green cover. Very skilled colour restoration on a small section of the cover's first board. Some folding on the cover, otherwise a beautiful copy as published.
Our copy is presented in a slipcase recovered in paste paper with a title label in black morocco.
Provenance: R. & B. L. library with its ex-libris on the recto of the first white endpaper.
A superb satirical album by Gustave Doré, then twenty-two years old. One of the extremely rare and first works published by the artist just before he found fame thanks to his illustration of Rabelais' complete works.
This publication, one of the most successful of his youth, gives Doré the opportunity to pay tribute to the man who had inspired him since his early sketches, Grandville. Indeed, this collection of 24 engravings, presented without any text other than a laconic caption is a true appropriation of one of Grandville's first works, carried out at the same age: Les Métamorphoses du jour, and then repeated in Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux.
Gustave Doré is inspired by the zoomorphic view taken by Grandville to depict in turn Parisian society. However, only retaining the animal allegory throughout the caption of the engravings, the young caricaturist manages the amazing feat of offering very realistic drawings that nevertheless unquestionably evoke the bestiary to which they are associated. All the capital's social types rub shoulders, highlighting the relationships between the different classes embodied by more or less noble animals: aristocratic lions and lionesses, sewer rats, talkative snakes, venal panthers...
The artistic quality and the relevance of each board, as well as the rarity of this early work in confidential print, will unfortunately contribute to the dismemberment of this rare and fragile album, whose boards were generally then offered individually.
A beautiful and rare complete copy of this satirical work with its original cover, which marks the passing of the baton between the two greatest illustrators of the 19th century, Grandville and Doré.
 

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