Félix Bracquemond

A knight in shining armor sits atop a white horse, surrounded by much smaller figures. The knight holds a fully grown tree—another clue that he and his horse are giants of legendary proportion. 

This drawing is an illustration for François Rabelais’s Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel, written in the 1500s. Rabelais’s tales are parodies of medieval romances, and often include lewd or grotesque details in place of the morality and gallantry found in medieval literature. In this scene, Gargantua’s horse aids him by drowning his enemies in a stream of urine.

–SM

Bracquemond began his career as a designer for ceramics. He later participated in the revival of etched illustration in France long after lithography had superceded the technique. He strove to align etching with painting and to etch his designs himself rather than employing a middleman etcher. This drawing depicts the giant, Gargantua, during a battle scene from the novel Gargantua et Pantagruel by the French Renaissance author François Rabelais. It illustrates an episode in which Gargantua pulls a large tree out of the ground to use as a staff; simultaneously, his mare relieves herself on the enemy below, causing the country to flood and the enemy to drown.