Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen met the performers at the legendary Chat Noir cabaret soon after he came to Paris in the early 1880s, and soon became the star illustrator of its eponymous magazine. When the Chat Noir…

Eugène Grasset’s career in illustration took off in 1883 with the publication of Histoire des Quatre Fils Aymon, much admired by book collectors for its outstanding aesthetics. It was also unusually printed in chromotypography using…

Jean Clerc excelled at portraiture, and modelling proved the technique that suited him best. As the spiritual heir to Charles Despiau’s naturalism, but with a more emotive, excitable temperament all his own, Clerc truly captured…

The avant-garde Parisian Théâtre de l’Œuvre was established in 1893 by the actor Lugné-Poe, the writer Camille Mauclair and the artist Édouard Vuillard. All three were overtly critical of France’s government-backed theatres and the illusionism…

The June 1898 special issue of the avant-garde review La Plume was a homage to the sculptor Alexandre Falguière. The review held an exhibition of his work in the foyer of the Nouveau-Cirque, a popular…

This portrait is painted in the realist tradition of bourgeois portraiture initiated by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and his Portrait of Monsieur Bertin (1832, now in the Louvre). The sitter is the Vaud pastor Jean-Jacques Marquis (1799-1863),…

February 18, 1896, was the closing day of carnival, and the streets of Paris still rang with the noise of the riotous parade. To mark the occasion, L’Écho de Paris published on page three Théophile-Alexandre…

This portrait was acquired in 1994 to add to the set of seven Giacometti paintings bequeathed to the museum in the late 1930s by the local doctor Henri-Auguste Widmer (1853-1939). The earliest work in the…

Marius Borgeaud spent the months from spring to autumn in the Breton village of Rochefort-en-Terre every year from 1909 to 1919. In 1911 and 1912, he devoted a series of paintings to his friend Ernest…

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Félix Vallotton produced some four hundred portraits of well-known subjects, mostly his contemporaries. The small Indian ink sketches were commissioned by press publications like Le Mercure de France,…