Ridinger, Johann Elias (Ulm 1698 – Augsburg 1767). The Mindless Age becomes Contemptuous by Childish Expression. Elected for his large beard by the animals as their representative the billy-goat behaves himself so foppish over this that he “provokes partly guffaw, partly annoyance. This the artist shows excellently. The badger is rolling with laughter, the stag, the horse, the fox laugh scornful, the tiger, the striated hyena, and the lynx in earnest become aware of the foolishness of their choice and revoke it. The monkey though points at him” (Thienemann). Etching and engraving. (1744.) Inscribed: J. El. Ridinger inv. et fec. et exc., title in German-Latin-French as above. 33.3 x 24.7 cm.

Thienemann + Schwarz 773; Ridinger Cat. Darmstadt IV.8 with ills.; Metzner-Raabe, Illustr. Fabelbuch, 1998, vol. II (Bodemann), 123.I. – Sheet 9 of the intellectually as optically exceedingly charming “Instructive Fables from the Animals’ Kingdom for Improvement of the Manners and especially for Instruction of the Youth”

“ by which Ridinger pursued a typical purpose of his epoch. A ‘Correction of Manners’ by the morale efficacy of art  William  Hogarth , almost of the same age as Ridinger, had tried – though in a quite different way – by his paintings and prints … But while Hogarth and Chodowiecki tried to gain recognition of their (same) ideas by satirical sets as ‘A Rake’s Progress’, 1735, … Ridinger tied up to the tradition of the animal fable (that is, so he himself, ‘since the hoary times of the ancient ages’) as especially suitable to him ”

(Stefan Morét, Ridinger Catalogue Darmstadt, 1999, p. 96).

Beyond it at the same time, too, creating a new image type, leaving, once more, tradition and field behind himself. For, so Ulrike Bodemann in Metzner-Raabe,

“ No  similarity  to  fable  illustrations  known  hitherto .

Enormous image sizes filled almost entirely by the representation of a central factor of the fable tale. Surroundings mostly dense, natural wood .”

And Regine Timm, ibid., vol. I, p. 171 :

“ In his large plates Ridinger … sometimes has included vegetable growth or rocks, too, dominantly in his illustrations indeed, but without decorative intention. The plants and rocks mean the thicket, the deserted loneliness of the forest, in which the strange tales among the animals happen. ”

The great intellectual relationship with the already mentioned Hogarth by the way also unmistakably expressed in Garrick’s epitaph for this:

Chronologically interesting in this connection interesting that on the other side of the channel in 1726 John Gay, famous-notorious for his “Beggars Opera” (Brecht, Threepenny Opera!), by his “Fables” had laid before “the most important achieved hitherto by English poets in this kind” (Meyers Konvers.-Lex., 4^th ed., VI, 960/II).

The set consists of 20 plates, of which Johann Elias, however, has published only the first sixteen. Presumably by stylistic scruple. For with the four last, etched/engraved only by his eldest, Martin Elias, and published posthumously, he gives up the superabundance of the previous in favour of a sovereignly formulated large flat clearness with which to grapple with he obviously has shied at the end though. And where to follow him was impossible for Thienemann, too, still one hundred years later (“have less artistic value, but are nevertheless estimable, and their rarity is to be regretted”). What here, however, is seen as a remarkably further developed artistic expressiveness. Culminating in the fascination to have created not only a new fable image, but this, once more in itself, developed further to a new level.

Ridinger’s fable image then also a most highly important milestone within the “basic corpus of about 900 editions of illustrated fable books” up to Chagall’s Lafontaine folio with its 100 etchings worked 200 years later as downright a glaring light for the immortality of the fable illustration.

That Ridinger had created his set originally substantially more voluminously is proven by the preparatory drawing sold here to the 20^th fable inscribed by him with “Fab 31”, that inscribed with “Fabel 29” to the 19^th (Weigel, 1869, no. 384), and that further one numbered with “30” known to Thienemann, which has been unconsidered like other, unnumbered, ones, too.

Without the number upper right which is almost unknown but appears later on. – Fleur-de-lis watermark. – In the second half of the 19^th century mounted on blue-grey laid paper of the early 18^th century with watermark SICKTE (the von Veltheim paper-mill there) together with Jumping Horse Heawood 2790 (Germany 18^th Cent. Esp. in Doppelmayr, Sonnen-Uhren, Nuremberg 1719) on which it is laid on loosely now. – Trimmed on three sides on the edge of the wide white plate margin. – Wonderful early impression.
Offer no. 12,507 / EUR  588. / export price EUR  559. (c. US$ 778.) + shipping

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