Articles

L'Illustration, a Weekly Newspaper

L'Illustration, a weekly newspaper

L’Illustration was a French weekly newspaper created just one year after the Illustrated London News, from which its publishers drew some of their inspiration. It met with great success throughout the remainder of the nineteenth... Read more

On George Cruikshank

On George Cruikshank

George Cruikshank's special merit (I leave aside all his other merits, such as subtlety of expression, intelligence of the fantastique, etc.) is an inexhaustible abundance in the grotesque. This verve is unbelievable and would be said to be... Read more

The Ingoldsby Legends

The Ingoldsby Legends

A work illustrated by Cruikshank, Leech, and Tenniel, even if it had no intrinsic merits of its own, would stand a very fair chance of immortality; but when the three great artists combine simply to embellish what would otherwise live as long as... Read more

Jean Gigoux on Gil Blas

Jean Gigoux on Gil Blas

Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane wasn't the first illustrated French book of the Romantic era. To name only two, Légendes, ballades et fabliaux by Bahour-Lormian (1829), Nodier's Histoire du roi de Bohême et de ses sept... Read more

Gustave Doré

It was at the Café de L’Horloge in Paris. Mr. Whistler sat leaning on his cane, looking off into space, dreamily and wearily. He aroused enough to answer the question:
“Doré—Gustave Doré—an artist? Why, the name sounds familiar! Oh, yes... Read more

Léon Job-Vernet

Léon Job-Vernet

Léon Job-Vernet was a painter, pastellist, and lithographer born in Paris May 11, 1830. He studied painting with Léon Cogniet (1764-1880) – who also taught Messonnier, Rosa Bonheur, Charbonnel…–and he was admitted to the Paris École des Beaux-Arts... Read more

Honoré Daumier

Honoré Daumier

As we attempt, at the present day, to write the history of everything, it would be strange if we had happened to neglect the annals of caricature; for the very essence of the art of Cruikshank and Gavarni, of Daumier and Leech, is to be historical... Read more

On L'Artiste

L'Artiste

When Jules Janin wrote in L'Artiste itself the history of L'Artiste, he gave a pompous account of magazine contributors with exclamations, enthusiasm, emotion, sighs and tears for each of them. He also insisted especially... Read more

Frederick Sandys

Frederick Sandys

Sandys, Antony Frederick, A.N., generally called Frederick Sandys, sometimes F. K. Sandys from his habit of signing the name Frederick thus, “Fk. Sandys.” This clever artist was bom at Norwich in 1832, and educated at the Norwich Grammar School... Read more

Frédéric de Courcy

Frédéric de Courcy

Frédéric de Courcy was a painter, born Alexandre-Frédéric Charlot de Courcy in Paris on March 28, 1832. His father, a writer of light comedies, was also known as Frédéric de Courcy. For the record, the cast of one of his plays, Le Courrier de la... Read more

Émile Marcelin

Émile Marcelin

Émile Marcelin, whose real name was Émile Planat, was born in 1825. From 1850 to 1870, he was the special cartoonist for humorous pages on stylish life in Le Journal Amusant and L’Illustration at first and later in La Vie... Read more

Aventures de Robert-Robert

Les Aventures de Robert-Robert

Aventures de Robert-Robert et de son fidèle compagnon Toussaint Lavenette (Adventures of Robert-Robert and of his faithful companion Toussaint Lavenette) was written by Louis Desnoyers (1802-1868) and first published, as it seems, in 1839... Read more

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