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  • Fables and Illustrations
  • Joan Bush (bio)

Dating back to the time of Caxton, most editions of Aesop's fables have been illustrated. When he was assistant curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, John J. McKendry chose various illustrations and translations of the tales and gathered them together in AESOP Five Centuries of Illustrated Fables. In his introduction, McKendry writes:

The fables of Aesop are the only text that has been illustrated so often, so diversely, and so continuously that the history of the printed illustrated book can be shown by them alone . . . The fable's combination of freedom of approach and constant appeal has kept them steadily popular as a subject for book illustration from the fifteenth century to the present.

And, truly, this book does show that history. The early illustrations are simple wood cuts, the last ones in the book very modern linoleum cuts by Joseph Lowe.

Because fables often use animals to represent human foibles, the illustrations feature many animals and few humans. Most of the artists avoided the impulse to [End Page 70] dress the animals in human clothing. But the wood engraving after J. J. Granville which illustrates "The Sick Stag" from The Fables de la Fontaine (Paris, 1838) shows the sick stag on his back with a rag wrapped around his head. Attending him is a doctor-stag wearing a curly wig and a traditional doctor's gown. Nearby, munching on a branch, is an elegantly dressed stag with hat and cape. Sitting next to the sick stag is what appears to be a nurse-doe wearing a hat and white apron and holding a bowl of water. This is one of the least effective illustrations in the book, probably because the dressed animals look so unnatural and the sick stag so uncomfortable lying on his back. Nevertheless, the illustration seems to suit the overwritten poetic rendition of the fable, which uses such phrases as "an irksome multitude," "from which the sick his pittance drew," and "Pray, let your kind attentions cease."

Even the modern line drawing of a knock-kneed camel drawn in 1931 by Alexander Calder looks more real than these elegant stags drawn by Grandville. Calder created his rudimentary camel for Eunice Clark's retelling of "The Camel and the Driftwood," in humorous verse which matches perfectly with Calder's humorous picture: the camel.

The first to discover the camelFought shy of the new-fangledmammalThe next was less scared,And the third fellow daredTo throw on a trammel.

Throughout the book, the style of the illustrations and the style of the adaptations match in the same way these do. The early woodcuts from Aesop's Life and Fable, printed in Ulm about 1476, are very simple. The fox attempting to reach the grapes and the grasshopper talking to the ant are as spare and without detail as are the translation by Caxton, who used fewer than 100 words to tell the story. And while the fifteenth century Italian woodcuts have elaborate borders, the illustrations within these complicated borders are simple. Crosshatching and other later techniques do not appear here. The translation, again by Caxton, is simple and to the point.

As printing techniques became more efficient and woodcuts gave way to etchings, the lines became more complicated and the picture tells more of the story. Bullokar, who translated many of the tales published in the sixteenth century, matches these more elaborate illustrations by using more descriptive words in his retellings than did Caxton. For instance, the illustration for "The Eagle and the Fox," which has crosshatchings and background details as well as some delicate foreground details, suits Bullokar's flowery language: the fox "was made very sorrowful." Caxton would probably have written, "was sad."

The trend to more flowery language and more detailed pictures continues with Marcus Geeaert's etching from DeWarachtighe Fabulen der Dieren (Bruges, 1567) depicting the story of "The Fox and the Goat." The illustration shows birds flying through the sky in the distance, chimneys puffing smoke, a human in a boat in the background, trees, buildings, plants and clutter; Bullokar's translation is equally elaborate:

But when she was accused...

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