21 manuscript silhouette "Theatre d'Ombres" scenes, or early comic strips

NA. Very Good. N.d., circa 1880s or 90s. 27 panels with comical silhouette pen-and-ink illustrations, representing 21 different comic story lines, with all the panels about 49 cm wide, and almost all 16.5 cm tall (a few are narrower). All the panels are titled, with the illustrations sometimes, but not always, being captioned. Generally the captions, which are rendered in French, are not essential to the enjoyment of the drawings nor to an understanding of what is going on. Most artwork done directly onto the paper, with a few strips with the artwork mounted onto the underlying paper. Titles to the panels include: Etude sur le Divorce (2 panels); Le Chant (truncated) du Chat (4 panels); La Chanson de la Cocotte (3 panels); La Poète a la Campagne; L'amiral Courbet / Les Chinois; En Algere: Conférence Interrompue; L'Inégalité Conduit a l'Egalité; Les Mendiants, Avant les Elections; Le Voleur Volé; Un farce. En Bordée; Mesaventure de Pandore; Camelots; Au Cirque; D'Apres Nature; Un Polisson; La Victoire du Sapeur; Créancier; Entre l'Arbre et l'Encore. We have been unable to find out anything about the artist, who we assume was using a pseudonym with these strips. Indisputably his work was at a most professional level; equally of merit are both the imagination evident in the conception and the execution. Captured often is a sense of movement in the silhouetted figures; one can look at these as an early prototype of motion pictures. In this vein, the individual parts of the panels, the equivalent of comic strip cells, at times deliberately blend into one another very artfully. With the silhouetting details are necessarily sacrificed while others are more sharply in focus, and the artist masterfully conveys the personality and character of the figures with just their outlines. Grams-Grock satiric sensibility and muscle were formidable. The figures are all quite distinctly French and of the period, and yet, the satire holds up exceedingly well because the topics generally relate to truisms about human, and animal, nature. As to the latter, cats are the subject of two of the strips. Finally, the artwork has an elegance and beauty that separates it from the zestful yet decidedly vulgar artwork of the newspaper comic strip that was just coming into its own around the time these were made. Condition: all panels are folded down their center. The paper used is thin, heavily toned and somewhat brittle, resulting in a few tears and slender edge chips here and there, never getting close to the actual illustration. Sometimes the paper has a blistered surface. Stains along a few edges probably from paste -- some of the panels, if not all, were probably mounted into albums or on boards in the past. Scattered offsetting effect and also scattered light soiling. (Inventory #: 006474)