Abstract
Genevan author, teacher, and artist Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846) completed Histoire de Mr. Vieux Bois, a picture story that many consider to be the first comic strip or graphic novel, in 1827.1 From that time until his death, he sketched pictorial narratives that he called ‘histoires en estampes’ or stories in prints, completing seven long albums as well as unpublished fragments. While he was experimenting with comics, Töpffer was composing a large corpus of published prose: travel writing and essays exploring aesthetic theory and describing the genre he invented, much of it influenced by picturesque treks in the Alps that he led for his students, the mixed text-and-image travelogues Voyages en Zigzag in which he recorded those trips, and the mixed-media art and literature prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Specifically, I will argue that he drew his primary inspiration for his first two comic strips from William Gilpin’s picturesque landscape viewing and drawing techniques and that with his early comics he entered into a joust, so to speak, with Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and Charles Marie Bouton, who made the aesthetics of high-tech theatrical narrative art popular in their dioramas.2
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Leuner, K. (2015). Rodolphe Töpffer’s Earliest Comic Strips and the Tools of the Picturesque. In: Esterhammer, A., Piccitto, D., Vincent, P. (eds) Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137475862_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137475862_13
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