Draner
Belgian, 1833-1926
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Draner, actually Jules Joseph Georges Renard, was a Belgian painter, Illustrator and cartoonist. Draner, who began working as an illustrator for renowned newspapers in 1861 and resided in Paris, created late costumes for a variety of renowned theaters and opera houses. He is also considered to be an early Belgian comics artist.
Jules Renard was born in 1833 in Liège, the son of a printer and bookseller who printed in 1850 the Almanac of Mathieu Lansberg. Later he formed his name "Draner" as an anagram of his surname Renard, a name that he used all his life in all his drawings, although he was also known as "Paf". After leaving school, he worked as secretary in the administration of the Société des Mines et de Zinc de la Vieille Fonderies-Montagne, an enterprise of the zinc industry in his home town. As an autodidact, he began drawing and creating his first caricatures on motives that he found in the everyday life of Liège and soon began working with local newspapers. Between 1852 and 1861, he worked for the Brussels paper Uylenspiegel, founded by Félicien Rops.
In 1861, he moved to Paris, where the Société des Mines et de Zinc de la Vieille Fonderies-Montagne had a branch. In the beginning of his Parisian years, he primarily caricatured military life in his drawings; between 1861 and 1864, he had already produced 136 colored lithographs on this topic, portraying himself as a military of different nationality in an ironic way. He published these images in albums such as Types militaires de toutes les nations, Nouvelle vie militaire, and Le colonel Ramollot. From 1866, he worked as an illustrator for the satirical magazine Le Charivari, where, in 1879, he succeeded Amédée de Noé, known as "Cham" (1818-1879), as a regular illustrator. In addition, his amusing drawings appeared in magazines such as La Caricature, L'Eclipse, Le Monde Classique, Paris-Comique, L'Illustration, Le Monde Illustré, Le journal amusant and Petit Journal.
From 1864 to 1893, Draner also designed costumes for theater and opera houses. His imaginative stage costumes were designed for performances at La Scala in Milan, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London, the Théâtre des Galeries Saint-Hubert in Brussels, the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, as well as the Parisian stages of the Théâtre du Châtelet, Théâtre de la Renaissance, Éden-Theatre or the Folies Bergère and including most of the works of Jacques Offenbach. Draner died in Paris in 1926, at the age of 93, and his drawings estate was then donated to the University of Liège.