the only difference
between them
and us
is the cage
we choose
to live in
Combines Gustave Doré's The Monkey House from London: A Pilgrimage (1872) with Georges Seurat's standing model from Les Poseuses (1887).
The story
Two printed things meet here, made fifteen years apart.
The cage is from Gustave Doré's wood engraving of the Monkey House at the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park, one of the illustrations for London: A Pilgrimage (1872), the book he made with the journalist Blanchard Jerrold.
The woman is the standing model from Georges Seurat's Les Poseuses (1886–88), shown at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1888. In that picture a single model is painted three times, seen from three angles, in the artist's studio, with part of his own A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte on the wall behind her. The larger version hangs in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.