print
- Museum number
- 2010,7054.5
- Title
- Object: Gradation de la tete de grenouille jusqu'au profil d'Apollon d'après les idées du célébre Lavater
- Description
-
Broadside with twenty-four heads in profile to left, each in a separate numbered compartment; the heads changing gradually from that of a frog, at top left, to that of Apollo, at bottom right. A key below and; in the centre, a frog seen from above. c.1804/10
Etching, engraving and aquatint
- Production date
- 1804-1810 (c.)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 500 millimetres
-
Width: 585 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- This print published by David Bindman in Print Quarterly XVIII 2011, pp.392-5. It is not a satire, but an illustration of Lavater's theories. See David Bindman, 'Ape to Apollo', 2002, pp. 209-211, where the original drawings of these heads are reproduced. This sheet is linked with the French translation of the writings of Lavater, published in Paris between the 1780s and 1804. The last volume, in 1804, contains a version of this plate with the heads in outline. The Wellcome Institute has another version of this plate published by Mechel (reproduced by Bindman). It is not certain which of the two versions is the earlier, but probable that Mechel's is the first, and that this version was published somewhere in the period 1804-10. This dating could be refined with more accurate dates for the period that Joubert fils and Bance worked together.
This print does not appear in the index to the Journal général de l'Imprimerie (1810-1811) or the manuscript registers of legal deposit of prints, 1795-1811.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 2010
- Acquisition notes
- Acquired in an early XIXc frame (which has been preserved separately) which might quite possibly be the original. Andrew Edmunds acquired the print from a dealer in Paris in this frame, but the print had recently been removed and cleaned, and a new backboard supplied. This makes it impossible to know if the two had always been together.
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 2010,7054.5