Anonymous Ten-Card Photographic Series La Cigale et la Fourmi, 1900

File — Box: CFC Postcards Box 1

Identifier: CFC2021.0066.1-10

Staff Only

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

1900

Extent

10 Cards : Ten (of 12) photographic postcard presentations of "La Cigale et la Fourmi."

Language of Materials

French

Additional Description

Abstract

Various series of photographic postcard presentations of GA have flirted with the presentation of the grasshopper as a human pinup girl. This series may go furthest in the direction of conflating a set of fable cards with notorious French picture postcards of nude women. This series, rare and larger than the usual series of five or six cards, has an unusual feature of using a one-noun description of each of the phases of the story. Wanting to give a sense of the cards we have without giving scandal, I have slightly censored some of the cards. A trademark in the lower left corner of each photograph offers a clue – but a hard one to decipher – about the publisher of the cards. I show images of the two missing cards to help visitors to see the complete series, including the dire ending.