While I’m on the subject of Honoré Daumier, let me just show a couple other items from the aforementioned whomping great volume. A pair of lithographs from the Caricatural Salon of 1840 (which I saved myself the trouble of scanning by finding here. Kind of interesting comparisons with some comics frames.)
Anyway, the first is “The Ascension of Christ. After the Original Painting By Brrdhkmann”:
And “Pilgrimage of Saint-Roch, After the Original Painting By Pétral Vilernomz”:
This is not the most super funny stuff ever, although it’s pretty damn good. (Read here if you are curious about how maybe the second one is a complex joke about developments in Dutch landscape painting in the 1830’s. Who’s to say?)
What strikes me, though is that both are total Edward Gorey material. The weird dying saints and fake artist names and meaningless desolate landscapes with little walls in them. The single dog. The odd framing. It’s funny to find such a total anticipation of the Gorey comic aesthetic from a different artist – who is, of course, a genius, so why not? It’s also interesting because it answers the question of how soon after the introduction of photography, in 1839, artists started making jokes about snapshot aesthetic gone sort of wrong.
No time at all. Sounds about right.
I’m wracking my brain for an Edward Gorey image that is exactly like the second one. The “Saint-Roch”. Perhaps a commenter will obligingly remind me which Gorey frames these two are exactly like.
{ 9 comments }
William Berry 01.20.15 at 9:39 am
Very Goreyesque, absolutely (for some strange reason, Gorey always makes me think of Edward Lear. Cold are the crabs, etc.).
And the spelling: “Brrdhkmann”? No shit?
Daniel Wolf 01.20.15 at 12:40 pm
Gorey, a French major at Harvard and a lifelong collector of everything (beyond the graphic, literary, and musical, his collections included odd pieces of china, graveyard stonework, potato stampers, and the odd mumified hand), would likely have known these, although the actual drafting and compositional style here seems to me to be closer to that of Chas. Addams. Gorey’s influences were astonishingly diverse, from Edward Lear to Max Ernst (see Gorey’s Figbash, a central figure in Gorey’s masterpiece The Raging Tide, or The Black Doll’s Imbroglio.)
One of the fascinating aspects of Gorey’s work was an absolute disinterest in the conventional divisions into high and low genres or art forms. I was fortunate to have Mr Gorey as librettist for a hand puppet opera I composed, based on a notoriously awful Thomas Moore ballad, apparently cemented into the memory of thousands of school children of his generation. Given the fine lines of his drawings, many are astonished to find that the heads of his hand puppets were rough lumps of paper mache with pairs of eyeholes, maybe something approximating a nose or hair in a bun for the female figures, usually painted plain white.
For the most important source of Gorey’s narrative imagery style, however, see the films of Louis Feuillade, whom he considered (and reasonably so, AFAIC) the greatest filmmaker of all time.
Adam Roberts 01.20.15 at 2:22 pm
The second one reminds me, more, of Krazy Kat. Of course that could just be me.
mattski 01.20.15 at 4:24 pm
Not Gorey so much as ascension that draws me forth.
Colin Danby 01.20.15 at 5:51 pm
Absolutely Krazy Kat: those vast, bleak landscapes.
See also Jacob van Ruisdael’s “Der grosse Wald.” What’s the history of emptiness?
Ian 01.20.15 at 9:55 pm
I see Glen Baxter more than Krazy Kat. The Saint Roch would be a perfect Glen Baxter cartoon with a caption from a 1930s Boys Annual rather than something in French, which is so pretentious.
Jeremy 01.21.15 at 1:06 am
Here are a few that came to mind for various reasons:
The Martyrdom of Saint Egfroth
The Awdrey-Gore Legacy 1
The Awdrey-Gore Legacy 2
The Awdrey-Gore Legacy 3
Cycling Cards
John Holbo 01.21.15 at 3:47 am
Thanks Jeremy. Sorry you got stuck in moderation for several hours for your research troubles. Those are all good answers.
maidhc 01.21.15 at 5:56 am
The dog reminds me of Picasso’s dog in “Three Musicians”.
St. Roch is a patron saint of dogs. A Wikipedia has it, after tending the sick during a plague in Italy, “He was expelled from the town; and withdrew into the forest, where he made himself a hut of boughs and leaves, which was miraculously supplied with water by a spring that arose in the place; he would have perished had not a dog belonging to a nobleman named Gothard Palastrelli supplied him with bread and licked his wounds, healing them. Count Gothard, following his hunting dog that carried the bread, discovered Saint Roch and became his acolyte.”
The saint is behind the wall, all we can see of him it a tuft of hair and his staff with some kind of travel gear tied to it. (St. Roch was generally depicted as a pilgrim with a staff accompanied by a dog.) Funny stuff. A pun with Roch and Pétral?
Christ having ascended almost all the way out of the picture frame is funny too.
For me Krazy Kat‘s backgrounds generally had a bit more going on in them. Usually at least some kind of prominent mountain or tree.
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