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Jean Louis Forain

Artist Biography

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Jean Louis Forain

Jean Louis Forain was a painter of art, prints and posters and is frequently compared to Rembrandt for his emotional power as an etcher. After studying at the Ecole des Beaux Art in Paris under Jean Leon Gerome he became an illustrator for the periodicals Le Monde Parisien and Le rire satirique.

During this period he came into contact will all aspects of Parisian social life and started to paint art, prints and posters of the characters he encountered and at the salon of Nina de Callais. In the early 1870s he met, through his friend Degas, Claude Monet on whom he is widely considered to have had a remarkable influence. It has been suggested that his small gouache Cafe Scene was the inspiration for Manet's famous Bar at the Folies Bergere.

Forain exhibited with the Impressionists from 1884 to 1886 and again in 1888. The critic Gustave Geoffroy called him "a talent capable of expressing worldly elegance” and Octave Maus wrote in Art Moderne in 1886 "He is the poet of corruption in evening clothes, of dandyism in the boudoirs, of high life masking empty hearts”.

Jean Louis Forain Art, Prints and Posters Collection