Feeding her pets: A peasant girl Brittany, or, The Piggies Breakfast
French born Émile-Antoine Bayard was a pupil of Léon Cogniet for five years, publishing his first cartoons at the age of fifteen, often using the anagrammatic pseudonym, Abel De Miray.
Between 1857 and 1864, he worked in the mediums of charcoal drawings, paintings, watercolors, woodcuts, engravings, and lithographs. In 1864, he began to work primarily for magazines, and illustrated current events. At the end of the 19th century, with a growing interest in photography displacing documentary drawing, Bayard moved to illustrating novels. Bayard’s artwork for the sequel to Jules Verne’s De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865) is considered among the first Space art of a scientific nature.
Bayard is best identified with a single sketch that he did for the original edition of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1865), depicting the unfortunate Cosette, sweeping out a room with her broom. The illustration, or a detail from it, was used for the posters, playbills, and media art for both the American and French productions of Les Miserables.
