Jean-Louis Forain was a French Impressionist painter and designer. His work was mostly based on watercolor, oils, etching, pastels, and lithographs. He was more popular during his lifetime than many of his Impressionist contemporaries.

1. Jean-Louis Forain: Life, Artwork for Sale
and More
Jean-Louis Forain was a French Impressionist painter and designer. His work
was mostly based on watercolor, oils, etching, pastels, and lithographs. He was
more popular during his lifetime than many of his Impressionist
contemporaries.
Life and Work:
Jean Louis Forain, the son of an artist and decorator, began his career as an
apprentice to a visiting card printer. He briefly studied under Gérôme and
Carpeaux at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and attended the Louvre, where
he copied masterworks. It is claimed that he made a meager living for a time
by selling little paintings in the style of Grévin.
He worked as a draughtsman and writer for several magazines, first in 1876 for
La Cravache, then later for Le Figaro, Le Journal Amusant, and L’Écho de Paris.
This exposed him to the various realms of Parisian society—the worlds of the

2. theater, shows, and literature—where he ironically acknowledged the habits
and flaws of each.
This led him to take a path previously visible in the paintings of Steinlen,
Toulouse-Lautrec, and Caran d’Ache in journals like La Pléiade, La Revue
Blanche, and La Vogue.
More about the movement
Forain joined the Impressionist movement in time for the fourth independent
exhibition in 1879 and took part in four of the eight Impressionist Exhibitions
(1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886).
He drew images of ordinary life, influenced by Impressionist theories on light
and color. His pastels, watercolors, and paintings centered on popular Parisian
activities and themes of modernity—the racecourse, the ballet, the comic
opera, and crowded cafés.
Jean Louis Forain‘s art depicts the culture of the time, not in a completely
imitative manner but in the form of a ‘dessin-charge’ or mild parody.
In 1880, he illustrated J.-K. Huysmans’ Parisian Sketches (Croquis Parisiens).
The publications he worked with needed to provide him with more space to
express his skepticism. The political and financial scandal of the Compagnie
Universelle du Canal Interocéanique’s bankruptcy procedures in 1892 gave him
fertile ground from which he witnessed the political corruption of the legal
world.
After that, he opted to put his drawings into thematic albums
that together depicted the society of his time; they were La Comédie
Parisienne in 1892, L’Album Forain, Vous, Nous, Eux in 1893, and Doux Pays in
1897.
From 1914 until 1920, he created a long series of pictures for Le Figaro on
World War I, in which he compared the bravery of the men on the front line
with the evil of those in the rear.
Jean Forain created carvings and 99 lithographs, plus some posters, along with
his numerous collaborations in periodicals and journals. He published several

3. drawing albums, including Les Temps Difficulles, a series of 99 drawings, and La
Comédie Parisienne, a series of 250 paintings.
He also illustrated literary works such as Georges Courteline’s Les Tribunaux in
1931 and Gustave Coquiot’s Les Pantins de Paris in 1920.
He also worked on the illustrations for J. Oudot’s Chansons Fin de Siècle, 1891;
Paul Arène’s La Vraie Tentation du Grand Saint Antoine, 1880; and E. Bayard’s
Montmartre Immortel, 1922.
Conclusion:
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