J.I.I.Gerard (known professionally as J.J.Grandville 1803-47) was a prolific illustrator and cartoonist who, like so many of his generation, cut his satirical teeth with Charles Philipon's magazines, La Caricature and La Charivari. He went on to illustrate the standard texts, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travel's and in the year after his death, Cervantes' Don Quixotte.

The Fleurs Animées were first published the year of his death and this edition, with fine coloured plates, ten years later. A second and improved edition appeared in 1867. The binding in the Brighton copy is a particularly fine cartonnage de l'editeur - a publisher's binding. Grandville's personifications are ingenious and slightly uneasy, as was much of his fusion work whereas other artists easily surrendered to the sentimentality of the Girl-Flower. This intensity of his graphic style made his work influential across subsequent generations of artists specialising in Fancy and Fantasy, be it Tenniel's illustrations to Lewis Carroll's Alice, or the later excursions of the Surrealists into uneasy metamorphoses and disturbing reveries.

Magasin Pittoresque 1850