Picture of the day

Plate LII from Les Métamorphoses du jour ("The Metamorphoses of the Day") by Grandville. The caption literally translates as "A Heatwave", but there's a pun in the original French, which uses an expression similar to "The Dog Days of Summer" that means a heatwave. A "Heat Wave", perhaps?

Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard was a 19th century French illustrator and caricaturist who published under the pseudonym of Grandville. He has been called "the first star of French caricature's great age", and Grandville’s book illustrations described as featuring "elements of the symbolic, dreamlike, and incongruous, and they retain a sense of social commentary." "His perverse vision sought the monster in everyone and took delight in the strangest and most pernicious transfigurement of the human shape ever produced by the Romantic imagination." 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. He has also been called a "proto-surrealist" and was greatly admired by André Breton and others in the movement.Illustration credit: Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville; restored by Adam Cuerden