French illustrator Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, pseudonym J.J. Grandville, was born on 13 September 1803. Grandville was not only an inspired illustrator but also a great fantasist, known for his whimsical animal pictures in such books as The Public and Private Life of Animals and Les Metamorphoses du Jour, as well as for illustrating the works of Balzac, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, and the fables of Aesop and La Fontaine. His first work (which I can’t find a full copy of online) was called Voyage pour l’eternité, intended as a modern day update on Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death.

(Keri Yousif’s Balzac, Grandville, and the Rise of Book Illustration, which I’ve just been dipping into, talks about how Grandville and Balzac were erstwhile collaborators, and later rivals. Balzac whines about how Grandville could move 25,000 copies of Public and Private Life of Animals just with his illustrations, while Balzac keeps plunking away with his prose with diminishing sales.)

In this book Les Fleurs animées (The Flowers Personified in the English translations of 1847 and 1849), Grandville offers his take on one of the most common Victorian tropes, the woman-as-flower. (Though when the results are as spectacular as this, it’s easier to accept his working within a cliche.)