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This medal has been minted in France in 1974 to commemorate Draner, actually Jules Joseph Georges Renard, a Belgian painter, illustrator and cartoonist, 1833 - 1955.
It is signed by the prominent French medalist, Daniel OCTOBRE.
Draner, actually Jules Joseph Georges Renard (12 November 1833 in Liège – 1926 in Paris), was a Belgian painter, Illustrator and cartoonist. Living from 1861 in Paris, Draner worked as an illustrator for numerous famous newspapers and sketched late costumes for different famous theatrical houses and opera-houses. He is also considered to be an early Belgian comics artist.
av.
The portrait of Draner; the signature of the medalist; Daniel Octobre
rv. The motives from his painting
diameter
– 68 mm, (2¾“)
weight
– 141.60 gr, (4.99 oz)
metal – bronze, mint patina
Biography
Life
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, 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.