The Ant and The Grasshopper - The Fable in Art

The Fable in Art

Because of the influence of La Fontaine's Fables, in which La cigale et la fourmi stands at the beginning, the cicada then became the proverbial example of improvidence in France: so much so that Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (1836–1911) could paint a picture of a female nude biting one of her nails among the falling leaves and be sure viewers would understand the point by giving it the title La Cigale. The painting was exhibited at the 1872 Salon with a quotation from La Fontaine, Quand la bise fut venue (When the north wind blew), and was seen as a critique of the lately deposed Napoleon III, who had led the nation into a disastrous war with Prussia. Another with the same title, alternatively known as "Girl with a Mandolin" (1890), was painted by Edouard Bisson (1856–1939) and depicts a gypsy musician in a sleeveless dress shivering in the falling snow. Also so-named is the painting by Henrietta Rae (a student of Lefebvre's) of a naked girl with a mandolin slung over her back who is cowering among the falling leaves at the root of a tree.

The grasshopper and the ant are generally depicted as women because both words for the insects are of the feminine gender in most Romance languages. Picturing the grasshopper as a musician, generally carrying a mandolin or guitar, was a convention that grew up when the insect was portrayed as a human being, since singers accompanied themselves on those instruments. The sculptor and painter Ignaz Stern (1679–1748) also has the grasshopper thinly clad and shivering in the paired statues he produced under the title of the fable, while the jovial ant is more warmly dressed. But the anticlerical painter Jehan Georges Vibert has male characters in his picture of "La cigale et la fourmi" from 1875. It is painted as a mediaeval scene in which a minstrel with a tall lute on his back encounters a monk on a snow-covered upland. The warmly shrouded monk has been out gathering alms and may be supposed to be giving the musician a lecture on his improvidence. By contrast, the Naturalist Victor-Gabriel Gilbert (1847–1933) pictures the fable as being enacted in the marketplace of a small town in Northern France. An elderly stall-keeper is frowning at a decrepit woman who has paused nearby, while her younger companion looks on in distress. In his lithograph from the Volpini Suite, “Les cigales et les fourmis” (1889), Paul Gauguin avoids making a judgment. Subtitled ‘a souvenir of Martinique', it pictures a group of women sitting or lying on the ground while in the background other women walk past with baskets on their heads. He is content that they exemplify the behaviour proverbially assigned to the insects without moral comment.

For a long time, the illustrators of fable books had tended to concentrate on picturing winter landscapes, with the encounter between the insects occupying only the lower foreground. In the 19th century the insects grew in size and began to take on human dress. It was this tendency that was reproduced in that curiosity of publishing, the 1894 Choix de Fables de La Fontaine, Illustrée par un Groupe des Meilleurs Artistes de Tokio, which was printed in Japan and illustrated by some of the foremost woodblock artists of the day. Kajita Hanko's treatment of the story takes place in a typical snowy landscape with the cricket approaching a thatched cottage, watched through a window by the robed ant. An earlier Chinese treatment, commissioned mid-century by Baron Félix-Sébastien Feuillet de Conches through his diplomatic contacts, uses human figures to depict the situation. An old woman in a ragged dress approaches the lady of the house, who is working at her spinning wheel on an open verandah.

Use of the insects to point a moral lesson extends into the 20th century. In Jean Vernon's bronze medal from the 1930s, the supplicant cicada is depicted as crouching on a branch while the ant rears up below with its legs about a beechnut. Engraved to one side is its sharp reply, Vous chantiez, j’en suis fort aise./ Eh bien, dansez maintenant. (You sang? I’m glad; now you can dance.) Jacob Lawrence depicts much the same scene in his 1969 ink drawing of the fable, but with a different moral intent. There a weeping grasshopper stands before a seated ant who reaches back to lock his storeroom door. It is notable that artistic sentiment has by now moved against the ant with the recognition that improvidence is not always the only cause of poverty. Nevertheless, Hungary used the fable to promote a savings campaign on a 60 forint stamp in 1958. The following year it appeared again in a series depicting fairy tales, as it did as one of many pendents on a 1.50 tögrög stamp from Mongolia. In this case the main stamp was commemorating the 1970 World's Fair in Japan with a picture of the Suwitomo fairy tale pavilion.