Art historians and critics have called him "the first star of French caricature's great age",[1] and described his illustrations as featuring "elements of the symbolic, dreamlike, and incongruous" while retaining a sense of social commentary,[2] and "the strangest and most pernicious transfigurement of the human shape ever produced by the Romantic imagination".

[3] The anthropomorphic vegetables and zoomorphic figures that populated his cartoons anticipated and influenced the work of generations of cartoonists and illustrators from John Tenniel, to Gustave Doré, to Félicien Rops, and Walt Disney.

During the July Revolution of 1830 and the turbulent years that followed, he worked with Honoré Daumier and others producing provocative political cartoons for periodicals that were highly critical of the new monarchy of Louis Philippe I.

He illustrated several classics such as La Fontaine's Fables, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Cervantes's Don Quixote.

In later years his books were increasingly centered around his illustrations, with the text written for his images e.g. Un autre monde (1844), Cent proverbes: têxte par trois Tetes dans un bonnet (1845), and Les fleurs animées (1846).

Lithography had only recently been invented in Germany in the 1790s and was rapidly gaining popularity in Paris as a fast and cheap alternative to engraving and etching, for mass-producing prints and illustrated publications.

Sources differ on the exact year and age, but after completing school, c. 1823[4]–1825,[5] Grandville moved to Paris and began pursuing a career in illustration and lithography.

[5][6][7] Grandville lived a bohemian life in the late 1820s and early 1830s, renting in a small room on the upper floor of a building which is said to have been crowded with pens and papers where he drew incessantly.

[1] Before La Silhouette closed, Charles Philipon and Auguste Audibert founded La Caricature in 1830, with Honoré de Balzac as a literary editor and Grandville, Achille Devéria, Honoré Daumier, Edme Jean Pigal, Auguste Raffet, and Charles-Joseph Traviès de Villers as cartoonist and lithographers.

Grandville endured persistent harassment from the police, including searches, and one incident described as a mugging in his own building by thuggish policemen, foiled by a neighbor who confronted them with pistols.

[7] Publishers and editors such as Edouard Charton of Le magasin pittoresque, as gave Grandville the freedom to choose his own subjects and create his images.

In July 1833 he married a cousin from Nancy, Marguerite Henriette Fischer and the couple maintained an apartment close to his studio, and rented a house near the outskirts of town.

[5] This was followed by several volumes of classic literature, including as La Fontaine's Fables, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Boccaccio's The Decameron, and Cervantes's Don Quixote.

[11] Grandville adapted and refined his style in switching from cartoons to book illustrations, which coincided with the evolving printing technology and a shift from lithography to wood engraving.

The first was Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux (Scenes of the Private and Public Life of Animals), a satirical compilation of articles and short stories, first published in serial form over a couple of years, then in a two volume set in 1842, with 320 wood engravings by Grandville.

[1] This was followed by Petites misères de la vie humaine (Little Miseries of Human Life) in 1843, with text by Paul-Émile Daurand-Forgues [fr], a contributor to Le Charivari who sometimes published under the pseudonym "Old Nick".

Taxile Delord [fr] provided the text for Un autre monde (Another World) in 1844, regarded by many as Grandville's masterpiece and ironically the least successful volume in his lifetime.

Traditional accounts asserted Grandville's bizarre imagery was symptomatic of a disturbed mind, and the death of his family left him gray-haired and hunchbacked by the time he was forty, ultimately sending him over the edge into madness, and he died in an insane asylum.

In the days and weeks before his death Grandville was still producing some of his finest drawings, such as Crime and Expiation, and his correspondence with publishers reflect a clear and rational mind anticipating future projects.

He was eventually taken to a private clinic, 8 Maison de Santé in Vanves, where Felix Voisin and Jean-Pierre Falret, two innovative psychiatrists worked.

The artist wrote his own epitaph, translations vary: "Here lies Grandville; he loved everything, made everything live, speak, and walk, but he could not make a way for himself.

"[1][7] Later work (1840s), wood engravings Though the designs of Grandville are occasionally unnatural and absurd, they usually display keen analysis of character and marvellous inventive ingenuity, and his humour is always tempered and refined by delicacy of sentiment and a vein of sober thoughtfulness.

One of Grandville's supreme achievements, at a time when French printing technology was ascendant, was Les Fleurs Animées, a series of images that are both poetic and satirical.

Perhaps his most original contribution to the illustrated book form was Un Autre Monde,[12] which approaches the status of pure surrealism, despite being conceived in a pre-Freudian age.

The full title of the book is, Un autre monde: Transformations, visions, incarnations, ascensions, locomotions, explorations, pérégrinations, excursions, stations, cosmogonies, fantasmagories, rêveries, folâtreries, facéties, lubies, métamorphoses, zoomorphoses, lithomorphoses, métempsycoses, apothéoses et autres choses (Another world: Transformations, visions, incarnations, ascents, locomotions, explorations, peregrinations, excursions, stations, cosmogonies, phantasmagoria, reveries, frolics, pranks, fads, metamorphoses, zoomorphoses, lithomorphoses, metempsychoses, apotheoses and other things).

It seems odd that the author of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), with poems such as Spleen, and the great admirer and translator of Edgar Allan Poe, felt frightened by the images of Grandville.

When I enter into Grandville's work, I feel a certain discomfort, like in an apartment where disorder is systematically organized, where bizarre cornices rest on the floor, where paintings seem distorted by an optic lens, where objects are deformed by being shoved together at odd angles, where furniture has its feet in the air, and where drawers push in instead of pulling out.

Janson asserted that Grandville's illustration The Finger of God, also from Un autre monde, must have been familiar to pop artists producing large scale sculptures such as César Baldaccini's Le pouce (The Thumb) in 1966.

[17] However, the art historian William Rubin pointed out the absence of any reference or recognition of Grandville by André Breton in his two manifestos of surrealism, or the other surrealists in the formative years of the movement in the 1920s.

It was apparently only in hindsight that André Breton, Georges Bataille, Max Ernst and others came to recognize Grandville as a significant precursor to the movement (but not an influence).