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Femina Fox and Bust, 1903

 File — Box: CFC Postcards Box 5
Identifier: CFC2021.0121.1-7

Scope and Contents

From the Collection:

The Carlson Fable Collection is a gathering of primary fable materials at Reinert Alumni Memorial Library at Creighton University. It grew out of the personal collection of fable materials gathered by Rev. Gregory Carlson, S.J. and was given to the Creighton Libraries in 1996. There are more than 10,000 books and approximately 8,000 artifacts in the collection.

From plates to stamps, from cards to whiskey decanters, from toys to posters, you'll find just about anything you can imagine here. Please explore all that is to offer here in my fables Catalogue of Objects.

This is the largest online catalog of fable related objects on the internet. Many are from Aesop's Fables but you will find La Fontaine, Velazquez and Krylov also represented in this collection.

Dates

  • 1903

Extent

7 Cards : Complete set of seven photographic postcards presenting Jean de La Fontaine's "Le Renard et le Buste." Femina.

Language of Materials

French

Abstract

The human representation of this fable shows a fascinating way of taking the story. As I walk through these photographic human representations of animal stories, I have the sense that the "director" and the audience both know their animal fables so well that the director is at pains to find something new and creative in the human representation. La Fontaine tells us that most people in high places are no more than theater masks that impress asses. The fox by contrast examines them slowly and from various directions and is led to say what he once said about the hollow bust of a hero: "Nice head but no brains!" The human story here has a gentleman (the ass perhaps?) admiring a bust, while a cleaning woman with feather-duster in hand (the fox, no doubt) examines the bust more closely, tips and turns it, and – apparently -- finishes unsatisfied with what she finds. What does this woman hold in her right hand in Card 6? In La Fontaine's fable, a fox seeing a bust remembers the earlier experience (the experience portrayed in earlier traditional Aesopic fables) of encountering an empty mask, which led the fox back then to say something like "Nice face but no brains!"

Immediate Source of Acquisition

$70 from Bertrand Cocq, Calonne Ricouart, France, Sept., '18.

Repository Details

Part of the Creighton University Libraries, Archives & Special Collections Repository

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