Exposition: Bestiaires pour l’enfance, des Voyages extraordinaires aux albums du Père castor

Animals have been a familiar presence in children’s books from the earliest primers to the present day. The exhibition invites visitors to discover a series of illustrations ranging from the engravings in *Voyages extraordinaires*—the series of novels that Jules Verne began publishing in the 1860s— to the illustrations in the *Père Castor* picture books, the Flammarion collection launched in 1931 and notable for its early contributors, who applied the principles of the artistic avant-garde movements of Soviet Russia to children’s books. The animal was then, all at once, a subject in school textbooks and scientific narratives, a wild beast in adventure novels, a motif in fables interpreted by the artists of the time, and a domestic animal in picture books depicting everyday life that served as a mirror for their young readers.