A collection in book form of his political and topical illustrations, which had appeared in Le Figaro were republished under the title “Doux Pays.”
The number of L’Album devoted to Forain contains able sketches, done in wash and chalk, which are stronger in effect, although incomplete looking; and bear the impress of having been dashed off at great speed while the inspiration lasted. A very subtle drawing of the nude, entitled, The Tub, however, is included in the number, as well as some strongly indicated work in colour.
Forain’s work has been widely published; we have seen it in Nous, Vous, Eux, in Le Figaro, in Les Femmes, il n’y a qu’ça, Le Courrier Français, L’Indiscret, Le Rire, in L’Assiette au Beurre, in The Studio, and elsewhere.
He has done bold poster work, Le Salon du Cycle, La Parisienne du Siècle, &c.; and he did a series of splendid up-to-date designs for a mosaic frieze, which was inserted in the front of a boulevard restaurant some few years back.
To Le Rire he has been a pillar of strength; and this journal has called forth some of his best efforts, generally drawn in with crayon or brush, and completed with a wash of two or three such faint colours as grey-green and pale brick-colour, being treated frankly as sketches and nothing more. Yet how amply complete is such a drawing as that of the little powdered cocotte in the black hat receiving the last touches to her toilette from her maid, while her vicious, bony, mother waits impatiently to hurry her off to the evening’s rendezvous. Another fine drawing culled from the same source introduces us to a squat lady sculptor, modelling from a beautiful nude female model. The shapeless sculptor cries out, “There! you’re posing so badly that I shall have to finish it from myself—before the glass.”
An exhibition of Forain’s work, which was held on the Eiffel Tower in 1890 or 1891, under the auspices of the Courrier Français, achieved for the artist a great success; although he had a terrible struggle at the outset of his career, even at one time appealing to Renouard to get him a job to draw anything,—“anything, fashion plates, or never mind whatsoever.”
Forain is yet another past habitué of the Montmartre “Café des Hydropathes” (which later developed into the “Chat Noir”) who has achieved fame and riches. He now lives in a splendid mansion in one of the most fashionable quarters of Paris, immersed as ever in his studies, and taking up sculpture as a relaxation. He works in a vast, untidy studio amidst an astounding litter of studies and papers, from which he but occasionally tears himself for a rapid spin in his beloved motor-car.
XI
CHARLES LÉANDRE
Léandre must be a terror to the members of the official classes in Paris, for they must live from day to day in mortal fear lest they shall have fallen a prey to his deft pencil. He must ever persuade them of their own irresistible comicality, and thereafter they must always feel more like Léandre’s caricatures than like themselves, and must inevitably act likewise.