Merchant Monkeys

Merchant Monkeys is an original lithograph on ivory-colored paper realized by J.J. Grandville from Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, 1852. Published by Manesq & Harvard, Paris. 

Good Conditions.

With the note in French on the rear and lower.

The artwork illustrated animal fable by delicate and precise strokes, through wonderful imagination and sensibility, featuring animals that behave and speak as human beings to highlight human follies and weaknesses. A moral and amusing lesson for behavior is woven into the story. Wonders and mysterious animal life are expressed through the amazing human mind of Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard (J.J. Grandville) and the potential of illusion and conception of the world admirably. 

Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard (13 September 1803, Nancy, Meurthe-et-Moselle – 17 March 1847, Vanves), generally known by the pseudonym of Jean-Jacques or J. J. Grandville, was a French caricaturist. Grandville received his first instruction in drawing from his father, a painter of miniatures. At the age of twenty-one he moved to Paris, and soon afterwards published a collection of lithographs entitled Les Tribulations de la petite proprieté. He followed this with Les Plaisirs de tout âge and La Sibylle des salons (1827); but the work which first established his fame was Les Métamorphoses du jour (1828–29), a series of seventy scenes in which individuals with the bodies of men and faces of animals are made to play a human comedy. These drawings are remarkable for the extraordinary skill with which human characteristics are represented in animal facial features.
After the reinstitution of prior censorship of caricature in 1835, Grandville turned almost exclusively to book illustration, supplying illustrations for various standard works, such as the songs of Béranger, the fables of La Fontaine, Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe. He also continued to issue various lithographic collections, among which may be mentioned La Vie privée et publique des animaux, Les Cent Proverbes, Un Autre Monde and Les Fleurs animées.
Though the designs of Grandville are occasionally unnatural and absurd, they usually display keen analysis of character and marvellous inventive ingenuity, and his humour is always tempered and refined by delicacy of sentiment and a vein of sober thoughtfulness. He died on 17 March 1847 and is buried in the Cimetière Nord of Saint-Mandé just outside Paris. A short notice of Grandville appears in Théophile Gautier's Portraits contemporains.
See also Charles Blanc, Grandville (Paris, 1855)-