Pérégrinations D'une Cometé Glass Tray

"Wanderings of a comet" — A whimsical illustration of Saturn and the universe from J. J. Grandville's Un Autre Monde ("Another World"), published in 1844. A French caricaturist, whose real name was Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, was forced from his trade by official censorship, Grandville's art came to fruition in the books he illustrated. Best-known for his anthropomorphic plants and animals, his work often transcended mere satire, achieving humor alongside poetic beauty and wonder. Though Grandville's style lacked easy definition in his own time, later generations would credit him as the "grandfather of surrealism."
     "World exhibitions are places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish. "Europe is off to view the merchandise," says Thine in 1855. The world exhibitions were preceded by national exhibitions of industry, the first of which took place on the Champ de Mars in 1798. It arose from the wish "to entertain the working classes, and it becomes for them a festival of emancipation. [...] World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity. They create a framework in which its use value becomes secondary. The enthronement of the commodity, with its glitter of distraclions, is the secret theme of Grandville's art. World exhibitions construct a universe of spécialités.The fantasies of Grandville achieve the same thing. They modernize the universe. In this illustration, the ring of Saturn becomes a cast-iron balcony on which the inhabitants of Saturn take the evening air. By the same token, at world exhibitions, a balcony of cast-iron would represent the ring of Saturn, and people who venture out on it would find themselves carried away in a phantasmagoria where they seem to have been transformed into inhabitants of Saturn." - Walter Benjamin, 'Paris - Capital of the Nineteenth Century'

In the potichomania process, the glass acts as both a foundation and protective finish, saving the step of varnishing. The original intent was to recreate Greek and Etruscan vases by simulating rare and expensive Sevrés porcelain.

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