Biography

French caricaturist and illustrator (originally Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard). He was the son of the miniaturist Jean-Baptiste Gérard (1766-1854), and his paternal grandparents were actors known as 'Gérard de Grandville', the source of his pseudonym. He began to draw when very young and published his first lithograph, the Cherry Seller, in Nancy in 1825. From the start he copied the style of the little satirical scenes that had been popularized by the English and French satirical magazines of the period such as the Nain jaune.

He went to Paris in 1825 and worked initially for the lithographer Mansion (pseud. of Léon-André Larue) and with Hippolyte Lecomte on Costumes (1826). He published further series of Theatre colour lithographs in the English manner, Sundays of a Paris Bourgeois (1826) and Every Age Has its Pleasures (1827), for Langlumé. He had considerable success in 1829 with his album Today's Metamorphoses for the publisher Bulla, in which animals appeared dressed as humans: his penchant for fantasy was already obvious. A new series for Bulla in 1830, Journey for Eternity, was not as successful and was cut short after nine plates had been published. Among his illustrations are those for Lafontaine's Fables.