Jean Louis Forain
(1852–)
(–1931)
Jean Louis Forain
1852–1931
Jean-Louis Forain (1852-1931) was a French Impressionist printmaker and painter. He worked mainly with oil and watercolour paints, pastels, lithography, and etching. The content of his artwork tended to focus on everyday life and modern leisure activities such as ballet, cafés, and the opera. His use of light, shadow, and colour was heavily influenced by contemporary Impressionist artists, such as Edgar Degas and Honoré Daumier.
After starting his career creating caricatures for Parisian journals, including Le Monde Parisien and Le rire satirique, Forain attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris to expand his artistic knowledge and skills. He continued to produce caricatures and prints for local journals throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Forain turned his attention to portraying scenes of patriotism and contemporary life during wartime.
His work was displayed in four Impressionist exhibitions of the late-nineteenth century (in 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886). After his death in 1931, Forain was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, England. Most recently, on January 22, 2020, two of his works were discovered in the Gurlitt stash in Munich, which was hidden by the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, Hitler’s art dealer. The works have since been restituted to Jewish art collector Armand Dorville’s heirs.
