Marguerite Burnat-Provins
Le Criquet suivi de ses serviteurs portant des présents se rend au tombeau de ses ancêtres, Ma Ville (The Cricket, followed by his servants bearing gifts, approaches the tomb of his ancestors, My Town), March 1924

Marguerite Burnat-Provins was the eldest of eight children born to a cultivated family in the Pas-de-Calais. She began drawing at the age of four. She showed little interest in toys, dolls, jewellery or playing with other little girls, turning instead to books, especially tales of adventure, for companionship. She wrote her first stories at the age of nine. A family holiday in Normandy sparked a love of nature and animals, while a visit to Flanders introduced her to illuminated manuscripts. The Saint-Hilaire library in Grasse (France) holds seventeen of her notebooks, containing sketches of typographical ornaments, vignettes inspired by Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables, and a preparatory sketch for this funeral procession.

Alongside realist depictions of animals, Marguerite Burnat-Provins conjured up imaginary narratives featuring animals with human traits and vice versa. This hybridisation characterises many of the visionary creatures in the two sets of works that make up her series Ma Ville (My Town), featuring humans, and Ma Ville d’oiseaux. She worked on both corpus from 1914 to 1951, sometimes steadily, sometimes infrequently. Her personal bestiary includes grasshoppers, crickets and other insects she encountered on her travels in Egypt and Morocco.

Against a backdrop of oblique swathes of subtle hues, the funeral procession is led by an elegant, rather military-looking cricket making for an orientalizing mausoleum. The procession is watched by a sleepy, crouching, patriarchal, bearded monkey and a tortoise consumed with curiosity. The rustling autumn leaves, glints of light on the lake, and quivering antennae all lend the scene a naturalist note.