I have at home a cheapo (not Naxos, but similar, you know) CD of some orchestra or another playing Saint-Saen’s Carnival of the Animals and other children-friendly pieces. I’d never noticed until the other day that it has a quite magnificent bit of cover art.
It is The Goose of the Republic by one Jean Veber. I won’t attempt to say anything about it – you can view its majesty for yourself.
Googling, however, I learn that Monsieur Veber was a nationalistic French political cartoonist, whose most celebrated work includes this 1897 depiction of Edward VII’s face ‘imposed on the posterior of a leering Britannia’.
Well I mean to say… Even at a distance of 113 years, I can’t help feeling that this is damnable Froggish impudence and it’s about time we got him back for it.
Better be careful or they won’t let us use the new aircraft carrier on Tuesdays.
George III?? Surely that’s Edward VII, whose face was remarkably arse-like now I think of it.
They won’t be laughing when we give ’em a taste of cold steel
Quite right Jonathan, I must have had George III on the brain…
(This condition, where the only Monarch’s name you can write, say or even think of is George III, is commonly known as ‘the madness of King George’).
I’d never heard of Veber before, but he’s clearly terrific — if a convinced Anglophobe, of a classically French sort. I was Googling about, as you do, and found this splendid thing: Edward as an ogre with the body of a beer barrel (note myriads huddling beneath his robe and obscene leakage pooling between his feet). There’s also a powerful, somewhat Goyaesque, sequence of prints depicting British atrocities in the Boer war.
Coming back to The Goose: it’s majestic indeed, but does anyone have the slightest idea what’s going on here? And what, if anything, it’s supposed to mean?
Re: goose, Jonathan, I suppose the first question we must address is this: Is it a very big goose in a normal-sized world, or is it a normal-sized goose in a wee Lilliputian world?