The Illustrators of Montmartre

by Frank L. Emanuel

Just as it may be presumed that J. F. Millet’s popularity extends to all classes, so is it certain that the “Millet of the streets” will be equally widely and lastingly appreciated.

The pioneer work that Millet did in interpreting the toilsome life of the French peasantry has been extended by Steinlen to the denizens—reputable and disreputable—of the nearer suburbs of Paris.

Born in Lausanne, he was trained for the church; and we may feel sure that had he joined that profession he would have been a forcible advocate of the poor and the ill-favoured, and that his blunt honesty of diction would have dealt his congregation some rude shocks indeed.

This was not to be, however, for the art in the man would out. In 1882 he journeyed to Paris; there to undergo much privation and many hardships before getting a foothold in the form of a drawing accepted by the paper Le Chat Noir, which was to prove the first rung on his ladder to fame.

Rudolph Salis’ artistic cabaret of the “Black Cat” was the editorial office of this paper, and at the same time a centre of all that was Bohemian and daring and go-ahead, a forcing ground of impatient talent. These first notable studies by Steinlen were of cats and of children. It was here that our artist met the authors whose work he was later to illustrate; more particularly he struck up a friendship with that fierce poet cabaretier, Aristide Bruant, whose powerful and terror-striking poems dealt with the very world that interested Steinlen to the quick, and provided him with the stimulus for many of his finest drawings. They both show us the, to us, shabby joys of the faubouriens, and their terrible struggles with one another and with Dame Fortune.

Steinlen’s field of labour has been in the so-called eccentric quarters of Paris—that is to say, on that soiled fringe of nondescript outlying districts of the Ville Lumière, which is separated from the city proper by the circlet of shabby-genteel exterior boulevards. Many of these suburbs were at one time peaceful, outlying villages; but they have now been swallowed, and more or less thoroughly digested, by the metropolis. Thus it comes that many of them consist of a queer mixture of humble rustic abodes jostling against towering blocks of tenement buildings, or busy factories for ever being pressed outwards by the expanding city.

No less incongruous than these streets are their inhabitants,—chiefly composed of armies upon armies of toiling workers, while there is nevertheless an effervescing sediment or substratum of those who live by violence and crime. The less successful of those who trade on the weaknesses and follies of a vicious city are forced by circumstances to live in these cheaper suburbs, just as are the poorest of the honest classes; and this is so despite the fact that throughout Paris the upper stories of all flats are occupied by the lower, or at any rate the poorer, classes.

Curiosity, and a search for novel experiences wherewith to whet their jaded appetites, brought numbers of roysterers of a higher social grade to the places of amusement affected by this poverty-stricken and criminal population. These same humble places of amusement, more particularly round and about Montmartre rapidly flourished out of all recognition of their former selves, and until the recent waning of the craze others were frequently being added to the list. This influx added to the complex character of such neighbourhoods. Artists, authors, and other persons of more or less Bohemian tastes, many of them men of great renown and genius, have ever found their home on the commanding heights of the Montmartre cliff.