The heron, La Fontaine’s Fables, Benjamin Rabier

On the list of artists who have illustrated La Fontaine's Fables, ranging from Jean-Baptiste Oudry and Fragonard to Marc Chagall, without forgetting Grandville and Gustave doré, as soon as Benjamin Rabier's version was published in 1906 it became quite clearly timeless. The freedom of drawing alongside a fantasy attached to a formal mastery prefigured graphic novels in the spirit of the kind of clear line practised by Hergé, but also the very first cartoon films which he was soon to produce with Emile Cohl.

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