The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine

Notes on Illustrations

441 Notes on Illustrations David Schorr Fables are always evolving. La Fontaine retells Aesop, Ovid, Sendebar, and others, and all are translated and retranslated. The images that often enrich these tales also change through the centuries. For the first French fables I illustrated—Norman Shapiro’s The Fabulists French—I chose to do woodcuts, in order to recall traditions of early book illustration. I first painted the images in Japanese brush ink (sumie) on the wood before cutting. When the next projects came along—two of Shapiro’s early collections of La Fontaine—I did the illustrations directly as sumie drawings on paper. Because both volumes were bilingual, with French and English on facing pages, and because most fables involve two or more antagonists, I split the illustrations onto facing pages so opponents could confront each other across the gutter of the book, placing, for example, La Fontaine’s celebrated hare on the right and his tortoise on the left. This complete collection of the fables revives a number of my illustrations but, for reasons of design, they are each confined to one page. So, rather than wield a knife and gouge, or a bamboo-handled brush, I take my computer as my easel, and I evoke the magic of Photoshop to combine two or more characters into a single-page illustration. I was curious, of course, to see which of my more than one hundred La Fontaine illustrations would be chosen for this volume of the Complete Fables. Over the years, while working on these illustrations, the spirit of La Fontaine always inspired, but the shadow of his many illustrators often presented a weighty challenge. If I had to choose the work of a favorite predecessor, to which I thought I could never measure up, it would probably be Gustave Doré’s 1880 image for “The Rats in 442 Council Assembled.” So it was especially gratifying to have my version of that same subject singled out, much too extravagantly, by our editor, Dr. Willis Regier, as “a masterpiece.” My deep gratitude goes, as ever, to my collaborator, Norman Shapiro, without whom the utter fun of humanizing animals would never have come my way. title From “The Fox and the Bust” Like many of my illustrations I use this as an occasion to emulate a hero from the history of art and illustration. If I could be magically granted the chance to be one of my heroes, I might choose Tiepolo if asked for a painter, but if asked for a sculptor there would be no doubt I would choose to be Jean-Antoine Houdon, though I would have been about a hundred years too late to have La Fontaine sit for me. book vi From “The Sun and the Wind” This is the only one of these illustrations to have existed in woodcut form, done originally for The Fabulists French, an anthology translated by Norman Shapiro (University of Illinois Press: 1992). Though it might have been unconscious at the time, with fifteen years of hindsight, I can see that the figure stripping clearly remembers Egon Schiele’s many self-portraits with arms raised and armpit hair rampant. book viii From “The Rat and the Oysters” The characters in this fable allowed me to pay homage simultaneously not only to two of my favorite illustrators, John Tenniel and Ernest H. Shepard, but specifically to particularly loved images. The oysters (with feet!) are borrowed from Tenniel’s illustration for Tweedledee’s recitation of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” in Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll; the wayfarer, is based on the Sea Rat in chapter 9, “Wayfarers All,” of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (London: Methuen & Company, 1931). notes on illustrations . 443 book x From “The Fishes and the Cormorant” This nature morte of fish skeletons is an homage to the painter Hyman Bloom. book xi From “The Dream of the Man from the Mogol Land” After finishing this illustration, I found it troublingly familiar. Albeit unconsciously, the source must certainly be Aubrey Beardsley’s cover for Ali Baba. book xii From “The Treasure-hoarder and the Ape” My source for the image of the ape counting money is a shot at the end of the train-wreck sequence in the film The Greatest Show on Earth (Cecil B. DeMille: 1952). bibliography From “The Man Who Runs after Fortune and the Man Who Waits for...