Artist:
Theophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859–1923)
Steinlen began his artistic career as a designer of printed fabrics. In 1881, he moved to Paris, settling in Montmartre, and began to frequent the literary cabaret known as Le Chat Noir, founded by a fellow Swiss expatriate Louis Rodolphe Salis. It was there Steinlen met and befriended writers, such as Paul Verlaine, and artists Jean-Louis Forain, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Louis Anquetin, Henry Somm, Adolphe Willette, Félix Vallotton, and Caran d’Ache. The artists of Le Chat Noir established something of a private club or society of aesthetes. Steinlen was soon contributing illustrations to the associated journal Le Chat Noir, and this success led him to become one of the foremost illustrators in Paris at the turn of the century.
His fondness for animals, and, in particular, cats, was noted even as early as his schooldays, when he drew sketches of cats in the margins of his notebooks. Cats seem to have appealed to Steinlen for their charm, movement, and character, as well as for their symbolic properties. His house on the rue Caulaincourt in Paris was, according to contemporary accounts, a meeting place for all the cats of the quarter. In his early years as an artist, he would sell drawings of cats in exchange for food, and, in later years, a cat would usually appear in most of his drawings, magazine illustrations, lithographs, and posters.
