The Dutch cartoonist LJ Jordaan seems to have enjoyed portraying Francisco Franco as a woman. Here he is receiving US aid from Eisenhower in parody of the Dutch tradition of Santa Claus being a Spanish bishop who arrives on a steamboat, and here Don Juan (de Borbón) seeks to win him (in German translation of “La ci darem la mano” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni) with “Reich mir die Hand, mein Leben”, “Give me your hand, my life.”
Here, in a Jordaan drawing from August 1936, another tarted-up Spaniard (who appears to have escaped from an earlier peninsula war) purchases arms from someone who may be Hermann Goering.
The drawings form part of an excellent digital archive called Het Geheugen van Nederland, Holland’s Memory, put together by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library.
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