De zwaluw en de vogeltjes 1876 - 1890

Gustave Fraipont created this print of ‘The Swallow and the Little Birds’ with an etching in the late 19th or early 20th century. It depicts a fable by the French writer Jean de la Fontaine. Images such as these were often commissioned to appear as magazine or book illustrations. We can see here a combination of a rural landscape with its labourer, a tree with birds, and a text box containing the poem. It would have been distributed widely in print and was aimed at a mass audience. Fraipont had a long career as an illustrator, which was a profession shaped by its institutional contexts such as publishing houses, print workshops and newspapers. In terms of social commentary, the integration of text and image suggests an effort to democratize knowledge and make it accessible to a wider audience. To understand this image better we need to look into the history of publishing, printing and popular culture of the period. This artwork then, encourages us to reflect on the social role of art and its relationship to its institutional context.