a table drinking a bowl of milk, under the jealous eyes of three great cats. The child is Steinlen’s little daughter, and the drawing of child and cats is as skilful and clever as it well can be.

There are several charming affiches especially designed for Sarah Bernhardt—others for Yvette Guilbert. Chiefest of these is the famous CafÉ des Ambassadeurs. Steinlen made in this a striking portrait of the original cafÉ chanteuse; and Yvette,—slender, lithe, enchanting, as Paris and the world has found her,—boasts no more characteristic portrait of herself than the Steinlen poster.

Advertisements for Vernet les Bains, Trouville, the posters Mothu, Doria, and lastly Le RÊve—may be mentioned as important. They are all difficult to obtain.

These studies, for a purpose of necessity transient, destined to be transmitted to paper and pasted along street walls by a bill-poster’s brush, constructed to catch the crowd’s attention in order that their mission should be fulfilled—are neither vulgar nor sensational. Vigorous, strong, they are worthy the word Steinlen applies to his other work—“Serious.” They are done with his characteristic splendid stroke. Their colouring is brilliant, crude and boldly frank the drawing. Steinlen’s stroke is celebrated: eminently fearless, rapid, trenchant. It has been cleverly said that in each of his creations the trait marquant is so deeply emphasised, the one idea is so imposed, that it is as though when his work were done he drew below it one dark black line. In his studio may be seen a wall-decoration destined rather for a cafÉ than for a poster—a study of the streets, a bit of the passing crowd, taken out, as it were, and held before us. Steinlen has renounced this branch of popular decoration. His posters are already rare, and are becoming yearly more valuable.

Steinlen has done an immense amount of illustrating. Many volumes of FranÇois CoppÉe, Anatole France, and Guy de Maupassant are made doubly attractive by his collaboration. He has illustrated the songs of Bruant and Jouy, of Montmartre and student fame. Among some of the publications valuable chiefly because Steinlen has collaborated with the writers may be mentioned “Chanson d’AÏeules” (Tellier, Paris); “Chanson des Cabots” (Guetville); and “Chanson Rouge” (Boukay).

These illustrations number, amongst other subjects, “The Chief of the Claque,” “The Cabotins of Paris,”

“The Souffleurs of the Theatre,” “The Director of the Theatre Himself.” Each little picture is gay, familiar, intelligent, finely conceived and finely drawn. For a song dedicated to Alphonse Daudet he has a strong study of symbolic misery: a nude creature kneeling in the middle of a deserted street, arms out-spread ready to clutch her prey, who is the passer-by. In the same book we have “The Knifegrinder,” “The Needlewoman,” “The Wine-seller.” Paris seems to have given up her hetacomb of human souls and human bodies for his observation and portrayal. In the drawing for a book of CoppÉe’s is “The Gamin of Paris,” a little half elf creature, half human child. This ghoul, seated on a mass of refuse, is red-eyed and horrible in his misery. He typifies Belleville, the Whitechapel of Paris. He is the accrued poverty, squalor, and criminal tendencies of generations combined with the frailty of childhood, the slenderness of youth. The subject is powerful, the workmanship excellent.

The best of his illustrations have been made for Edouard Pelletan, the publisher in the Boulevard St. Germain. M. Pelletan has conceived the idea of bringing out a yearly publication called L’Almanach du Bibliophile. Jules Claretie, Anatole France, Gustave Larroumet, and Sully Prud’homme, have collaborated to write a series of articles. But Steinlen is the feature of the publication. Monsieur Pelletan asked him to make a dozen drawings whose headings should be the twelve months of the year, the general subject to be the glorification of Labour. But Steinlen grew enthusiastic over his task, and drew many more than the twelve studies. A collection of the designs was on exhibition in Monsieur Pelletan’s library during 1901.

These pictures—for they are not studies, but admirably finished creations—represent the working man and the working woman in the pursuit of their various occupations. We see the blanchisseuse stagger home through the drizzling mist, bowed under her huge burden of linen. On the skeleton scaffolding the builder becomes a speck, infinitely far from his fellows; the apprentice goes chattering gaily along with her companions,—again we have the attractive girl of the people, whose class in France is distinct, and whose personality is so agreeable. Steinlen touches with his happiest, lightest stroke the gay figure of youth and charm.

Another drawing portrays the family again around

the humble board. But the finest of the suite are four pictures drawn at Monsieur Pelletan’s suggestion that Steinlen should show the public what his skill was in careful, minute technique; for the critics have accused him of too great facility and too rapid production. He has called the first picture “Le Bois,” where a carpenter, a strong, well-drawn figure, nude to the waist, bends over the rough planks of wood, yielding in long curling shavings to his plane. In the second, “La Pierre,” the stone-polisher crouches over his well-nigh implacable mass of stone, until he may almost distinguish his image in the smooth surface. In the third, “Le Fer,” a like half-nude labourer struggles with his contortion of the mighty mineral. Lastly, Steinlen has depicted the miner, deep in his cavern’s interior.

These studies demand a first place in the catalogue of modern drawing, and lack in the perfected workmanship none of Steinlen’s distinctive, free, untrammelled handling of his subject and expression of his art. They would not lose, placed side by side with the drawings of Puvis, and indeed possess the primitive purity of line and reveal the serious conception which mark the work of masters.

Pelletan has just published Anatole France’s new book “L’Affaire Crainquebille,” a satire on French law and modes of justice, done in Anatole France’s most delightful manner, and illustrated by Steinlen.

Crainquebille, a seller of turnips, which he pushes through the streets in a little hand-cart, is accused of having called out to a policeman “Mort aux Vaches!”—a slang opprobium of the streets. The poor innocent, unconscious of offending, is haled to the courts, where he becomes the victim of a most amusing and witty procÈs, withal tragically pathetic. He is condemned to prison, and when once more at liberty attempts to resume his ancient, respectable calling. He finds himself a pariah, shunned because of the stigma of “jail-bird!” Crainquebille falls into abject poverty and inebriation. In his starving misery he reflects, “Prison isn’t half a bad place, after all!” and to partake once more of its peace he sins deliberately. Bearding the policeman in his den—that is, the street lamp’s shadow—he cries out to him, “Mort aux Vaches!” But the amiable officer, “un bon pÈre de famille,” laughs at the old man and bids him go about his business. The poor old Crainquebille finds the justice of the world too intricate to comprehend. Imprisoned for a fault which when repeated evokes

mirth! He disappears in the fogs of a winter street.

This collaboration of Anatole France and Steinlen is spirituel and successful. “Once more Steinlen was quite carried away” (Monsieur Pelletan says); “I suggested twenty drawings. He has given me fifty-five!” And each illustration is a little masterpiece, admirable in execution and full of sympathy with the class the downtrodden Crainquebille represents.

It is false to suppose that Steinlen does not give to each of his creations the greatest pains. For the little volume called “Le Chien de Brisquet”[A] he made eighty drawings for Anatole France before he got one to his satisfaction, and it was for “Le Chien de Brisquet,” which volume of drawings it will be difficult to surpass, that Steinlen drew and re-drew his canine sketches. “Although,” said Monsieur Pelletan, “I assure you I was quite satisfied with the first drawings!”

A word must be said regarding his feline studies. Cats have been favourite animals with poets and painters: witness Baudelaire, Poe, CoppÉe, Manet; and Steinlen, too, has found these slender, graceful felines interesting. There is in his representation of this animal a subtle perceiving of the link and of the difference between the brute and the human. It suggests the masters whose paintings of animals have made them famous, Landseer above all. When his book “Le Chat” came out, it was bought at first for children, but could not long be kept in the nurseries. Copies were pilfered for drawing-rooms and studios, where elders claimed these treasures of clever design. Steinlen’s host of drawings are undoubted indications of a power not to be confined in the sphere of the illustration for books. Admirers of Steinlen’s look for great things of him during the next years, claiming that his future is more brilliant in promise than any of his colleagues, Jean Veber excepted.

Steinlen himself is a delightful personality, and distinctly a force. The grasp of his hand, the fire of his eye, his courtesy, charm, and the pleasure it is to hear him speak, render him an unusual companion. His friends, naturally, are legion—he is much beloved; but, as they say in France, he is trÈs sauvage—preferring to let the world go its ways, and to shut himself away with his work in his remote studio.

His intimate contact with the very poor, the very

suffering, has formed his points of view and left its mark on his nature. He is a Bohemian, and values slightly luxuries and ways of modern worldly life. He is familiar with the haunts of the thieves in the dangerous parts of Paris: he may well take his life in his hands—he is beloved and known, he is safe. He knows the interiors where starvation and cold and crime are side by side. He has helped generously, who can say how many? directly from his own purse and indirectly through the wide sympathy he has aroused.

No peculiarities of the fluctuating mass which is the very life of the city, which is the agglomerate expression of pleasure, pain, vice, crime, good, evil, sadness, joy, are lost upon Steinlen. He seems to be en rapport with those people whom we call our brothers and treat as our inferiors and our enemies. The tricks, the attitudes, the expressions, the behaviour of the passers-by are familiar to him. With a few clever strokes of brush or pencil he has given us the piquante ouvriÈre, the modest apprentice, in a graceful, unconscious pose as she poises on her hip the hat-box she is carrying to a customer. In this jeune fille representative, in the toss of her head, the curve of her arm, the swish of her neat skirts high above her well-shod feet, in this jaunty creature, scrupulous as to tidiness, is a certain phase of Paris drawn with crystalline distinctness. This girl of the people is dangerous, charming, and to her the boulevardier is an enemy. Paris is epitomised by this one flaring street-wall decoration. So much for the jeunesse, gay, laborious, and generally self-respecting. We do not often see Steinlen so gay.

In his studio in the Rue Caulaincourt, walking to and fro, he converses delightfully with his friends. He is a workman, his muscular hands are full of force, his build powerful, although he is compact and small. He suggests endurance, and the patience that is the result of hand-to-hand tussle with existence, and tender understanding of the needs of one’s neighbour. His eyes are keen, penetrating, and kind, his features strong. He has a golden voice, as the French say, caressing and indolent. Its measured cadence, its slow, agreeable flow contrasts strongly with the man himself. He wears the coarse velveteens of the labourer, cuffs close around his muscular wrists. His trousers are voluminous, and on his feet flap loose Indian slippers. His appearance, and the fact that his studio is in one of the poorest quarters of Paris, his whole attitude and life, suggest, not a

scorn of material things, but a perfect ability to forego them.

The studio is a workshop first of all; it is free from would-be artistic decorations, full of canvases and folios of drawings. He has his own lithographic stones, and does his own printing, holding this as an art important, as do many of the moderns; and he, as well as many another modern, insists on the expediency of making his own colours.

Steinlen thinks unfavourably of academies and salons, “where,” he says, “in order to exhibit at stated periods the artists paint anything and everything under rush and stress.” He sends to no public collections. When a goodly number of studies have accumulated in his studio, he organises a little exposition of his own, and the admirers of his work have an opportunity to visit a Steinlen exhibition in the autumn, when he will delight, charm, and touch the public as he has never hitherto failed to do.

At this period of his life—and he is still young—he finds the insistent needs of daily existence are met; and he draws, as it were, a sigh of relief, and turns toward what is his recreation, because a beloved labour, and the goal of his career, painting in oil. Steinlen bemoans the fact that he lacks the prescribed technicalities an academic education would have given to him; but this fact has left him a freedom from rules which, in spite of their immense importance, are often trammels to individuality. At all events the daring boldness of his stroke, and his perfect originality, have been developed with no hindrance. Need has been his spur, talent the response to the goad.

Possibly Steinlen is nowhere better displayed than in a certain canvas at present in his studio in the Rue Caulaincourt. It is a life-size oil painting, a study of a man and woman in the working class. It is evidently the end of the day, and the scene a nook or corner in some room so distant from the rooms we all know that it is hard even to imagine where it may be. The workman has taken the young creature in his arms for a long embrace. His head is bent over her, and she looks out from the picture above the man’s arm. Her face is exquisite, and in thorough keeping with the type of her class.

The sombre note predominates throughout Steinlen’s work. That inevitable penalty of sadness which must be paid when the eye dares to look, and the soul dares to consider how our fellow beings struggle for existence.

The work of this man, who is not a caricaturist, but a student and faithful representer, bears a strong likeness to things in literature rather than to things in art. He suggests Dickens, Zola, Tolstoi. Throughout his work is apparent the broad sympathy of a man of the people who has espoused their cause and made himself their prophet.

Part of the crowd, elbow to elbow with humanity in the very vortex of the mass, he has felt the multitude, blood and sinew, around him, until it has become amalgamated fairly with his inspiration. Then withdrawn to a fortification, possibly, of his city, in semi-retirement, he lets the turbulent suggestions take form that he may present them to the world. Thus Steinlen, so closely of the people, is in reality separated from mankind by virtue of his talent. And if to the eye demanding agreeable form, beauty seems sometimes lacking in this artist’s strong, original, profoundly human creations, it may be said that Æsthetics do not abound in the walks of life which this student of humanity portrays.

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
London & Edinburgh

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