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1852-1931 | French
French Impressionist Painter, Printmaker and Satirist
Jean-Louis Forain was born in Reims on 23 October 1852 and grew up in Paris, where he studied briefly under Jean-Léon Gérôme and the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and copied in the Louvre. A friend of Manet and above all of Degas, whose influence on him was lasting, he showed with the Impressionists at four of their exhibitions between 1879 and 1886.
His subjects were the Paris of the Belle Époque: the Opéra and its dancers, the racecourse, the café-concert, the law courts and the women of the demi-monde, drawn with a quick, sardonic eye.
Forain was one of the great satirical draughtsmen of his time, publishing thousands of drawings in Le Figaro, Le Courrier français and his own papers Le Fifre (1889) and, with Caran d’Ache, Psst…! (1898). He was a prolific etcher and lithographer; after 1900 his painting turned to religious subjects and to the courtroom, and during the First World War his drawings of the front were widely reproduced.
Elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1923, he died in Paris on 11 July 1931. His work is in the Musée d’Orsay, the Petit Palais and museums across Europe and America.
