Jean Veber – an impudent Frenchman

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.

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7 thoughts on “Jean Veber – an impudent Frenchman

  1. russellworks@gmail.com'
    ian russell
    November 11, 2010 at 08:52

    Better be careful or they won’t let us use the new aircraft carrier on Tuesdays.

  2. law@mhbref.com'
    jonathan law
    November 11, 2010 at 09:14

    George III?? Surely that’s Edward VII, whose face was remarkably arse-like now I think of it.

  3. Worm
    November 11, 2010 at 09:18

    They won’t be laughing when we give ’em a taste of cold steel

  4. Brit
    November 11, 2010 at 09:22

    Quite right Jonathan, I must have had George III on the brain…

  5. Brit
    November 11, 2010 at 09:28

    (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’).

  6. law@mhbref.com'
    jonathan law
    November 11, 2010 at 13:42

    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?

  7. andrewnixon@blueyonder.co.uk'
    November 11, 2010 at 13:58

    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?

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